Beyond Protest Events and the Protest Paradigm: Challengers’ Sustained News and What Drives Its Quality

• In Event: Political and Other External Consequences of Social Movements

Abstract

Scholars agree that the news coverage of social movements is critical to their impacts on policy, public opinion, their organizations, and constituents. Here we seek to shift the scholarly paradigm surrounding the study of social movements and the news media. Scholarship has focused on one-day news coverage of protest events and typically expects this news to be damaging through the “protest paradigm.” However, we find that the news of movement organizations, analyzed across a century, comes mainly in extensive and sustained coverage, is not mainly about protest, and varies dramatically in quality. We argue that the characteristics of organizations, their relationships to news organizations and political actors, and, especially, the actions animating their sustained news shape its quality. To appraise these claims, we employ a comparative analysis of the 100 most-covered U.S. movement organizations in the twentieth century across two aspects of news quality—substance and stance. We also analyze the news of the Congress of Racial Equality in its biggest news year. Employing a series of novel approaches to collecting and coding data, we employ regression analyses that support our claims. The results suggest that scholars need to go beyond protest event news and the protest paradigm and instead focus on sustained news attention, the actions animating it, and how it is treated

Authors

• Edwin Amenta, University of California-Irvine

• Neal Caren, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

• Weijun Yuan, The University of Chicago

• Maxwell James Roberts, University of California-Irvine