Racialized Schemas Within Movement Media Relations

• In Event: Media Ecosystems and the Diffusion of Contested Ideas

Abstract

From navigating journalistic routines to optimizing organizational strategy, social movements must maneuver a variety of structures and barriers to successfully gain the positive media attention they desire. Sociological scholarship has been attentive to the racialized ways in which media report on social movements, yet this largely representational approach ignores racialization processes happening at the relational level. Drawing on 35 in-depth qualitative interviews with leftist social movements and media personnel spanning eight states in the U.S. South, this paper asks whether and how race, racialization and ethnicity affect the relationship between how social movements and media interact with one another. I find that situating movement-media relations within a broader context of a racialized social system uncovers racialized schemas and ideologies that, in part, explain social movement and media dispositions to one another.

Author

• Braxton Brewington, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill