There Is No Alternative: Daily Newspapers’ Construction of Contemporary Social Movements

• In Event: Transformative Dynamics: Reimagining Evidence, Organizational Agency and Societal Change

Abstract

Although most individuals are well informed about the climate crisis (Stoddard et al. 2021; Blühdorn 2020) we are not able, collectively, to believe that another world is possible. In general, we can hardly imagine alternative institutional arrangements (Fisher 2022; Stengers and Pignarre 2011). According to Bill Moyer’s seminal model which identifies eight stages of successful social movements, (Moyer 1987), the current situation resembles stage five and six: We are aware that our current exploitative mode of living is not sustainable (Brand and Wissen 2017), but the alternatives are even more frightening.
Our study investigates how daily newspapers’ reporting about three social movements - climate justice, rights for immigrants and anti-vaccination – fuels fear of alternative institutional arrangements in public discourse. We make use of the increased digitization of life to build a corpus of 300K newspaper articles from a five-year period (2016 to 2021). Our methodology draws on corpus linguistics (Mautner 2016; Baker 2012) and combines it with dictionary approaches. The corpus comprises all articles from the resort domestic politics, as published in nine major newspapers from Austria, which together reach more than 50% of the population.
Preliminary findings show a high density of emotionally and morally charged vocabulary around social movements. Comparatively, articles with only highly institutionalized actors are written in a more neutral tone. These polarized reports creates a sense of irritation and fear around issues, as Pörksen (2018) has argued. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that social movements dwell at the margins and are barely visible in the public arena. Established actors from the political and economic sphere are much more present in the media, corroborating evidence that the media system represents actors according to their economic strength and position in society (Boykoff and Boykoff 2007; Boykoff 2011).
Civil society actors, if not involved in protests or other forms of nonviolent direct action (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011), are barely depicted (McAdam et al. 2005; Krlev and Lund 2020). Protests and direct actions, on the other hand, are reported, but in predominantly negative fashion, as has already been documented within the ‘protest paradigm’ literature (Boyle et al. 2005; Gil-Lopez 2021; Benford and Snow 2000). Overall, civil society actors regularly appear with referencing to the authority of the status quo, suggesting that deviance from the established order might lead to chaos and anarchy (similarly in Ashley and Olson, 1998). As long as viable alternatives to this status-quo are not imaginable, people cannot stay committed to creating a better society in the long run (Moyer 1987). Thus, and against the backdrop of our findings, it is unlikely to gather the majorities needed for a fundamental social change (Happer and Philo 2013).

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Authors

• Julia Litofcenko, Vienna University of Economics and Business

• Michael Meyer, WU Vienna University of Economics and Business