The public nuisance paradigm: Changes in mass media coverage of political protest since the 1960s

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 87, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 135-153

  Di Cicco, Damon T ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77954496402     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769901008700108     Document Type: Article

References (108)

1. For example, protests were a tactic used by the Women's Suffrage, Labor, and Civil Rights movements, and by activists seeking to end the war in Vietnam. All of these had significant degrees of success, and all used public demonstrations to raise awareness and apply pressure to leaders.
2. In 2008, for example, the Federal Election Committee reported that campaign spending by Democratic and Republican presidential candidates totaled over $1.3 billion, about three times the amount spent in 1996, and almost fifteen times that spent in 1980.
3. Joseph M. Chan and Chi-Chuan Lee, "The Journalistic Paradigm of Civil Protests: A Case Study of Hong Kong," in The News Media in National and International Conflict, ed. Andrew Arno and Wimal Dissanayake (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984), 183-202;
4. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in The Making & Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980).
5. Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching, 3 and 71.
6. See, for example, Laura Ashley and Beth Olson, "Constructing Reality: Print Media's Framing of the Women's Movement 1966 to 1986, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 75 (summer 1998): 263-77;
7. Monica Brasted, "Framing Protest: The Chicago Tribune and the New York Times During the 1968 Democratic Convention," Atlantic Journal of Communication 13 (March 2005): 1-25;
8. Ginna Husting, "When a War Is Not a War: Abortion, Desert Storm, and Representations of Protest in American TV News," The Sociological Quarterly 40 (winter 1999): 159-76;
9. Peter Simonson, "Social Noise and Segmented Rhythms: News, Entertainment, and Celebrity in the Crusade for Animal Rights," The Communication Review 4 (October 2001): 399-420.
10. Ashley and Olson, "Constructing Reality";
11. Frank E. Dardis, "Marginalization Devices in U.S. Press Coverage of Iraq War Protest: A Content Analysis," Mass Communication & Society 9 (May 2006): 117-35;
12. Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching;
13. Jennifer Rauch, Sunitha Chitrapu, Susan T. Eastman, John C. Evans, Christopher Paine, and Peter Mwesige, "From Seattle 1999 to New York 2004: A Longitudinal Analysis of Journalistic Framing of the Movement for Democratic Globalization," Social Movement Studies 6 (September 2007): 131-45.
14. Simonson, "Social Noise and Segmented Rhythms."
15. Ashley and Olson, "Constructing Reality";
16. Brasted, "Framing Protest";
17. Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching;
18. Jackie Smith, John D. McCarty, Clark McPhail, and Boguslaw Augustyn, "From Protest to Agenda Building: Description Bias in Media Coverage of Protest Events in Washington, D.C., Social Forces 79 (June 2001): 1397-1423.
19. Brasted, "Framing Protest";
20. James K. Hertog and Douglas M. McLeod, "A Multiperspectival Approach to Framing Analysis: A Field Guide," in Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and Our Understanding of the Social World, ed. Steven D. Reese, Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., and August E. Grant (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2001), 139-62;
21. Douglas M. McLeod and James K. Hertog, "The Manufacture of 'Public Opinion' by Reporters: Informal Cues for Public Perceptions of Protest Groups," Discourse & Society 3 (July 1992): 259-75.
22. See also Dardis, "Marginalization Devices in U.S. Press Coverage of Iraq War Protest";
23. Smith et al., "From Protest to Agenda Building."
24. Clarice N. Olien, Phillip J. Tichenor, and George A. Donohue, "Media Coverage of Social Movements," in Information Campaigns: Balancing Social Values and Social Change, ed. Charles T. Salmon (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989), 139-63.
25. Dardis, "Marginalization Devices in U.S. Press Coverage of the Iraq War Protest";
26. Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching;
27. Sonora Jha, "Exploring Internet Influence on the Coverage of Social Protest: Content Analysis Comparing Protest Coverage in 1967 and 1999," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 84 (spring 2007): 40-57.
28. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004);
29. James B. McPherson, The Conservative Resurgence and the Press: The Media's Role in the Rise of the Right (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008);
30. Mark A. Smith, The Right Talk: How Conservatives Transformed the Great Society into the Economic Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
31. The shift to the right can be seen in the presidency of Democrat Bill Clinton. Clinton drastically curtailed the welfare program in the United States, and is seen by many as the embodiment of a powerful "centrist" contingent within the Democratic Party that has rejected many positions historically taken by liberals. See Shaila Dewan and Anne E. Kornblut, "In Key House Races, Democrats Run to the Right," the New York Times (October 30, 2006), http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/30/us/politics/30dems.html (accessed August 17, 2009).
32. See also Micklethwait and Wooldridge, The Right Nation;
33. Smith, The Right Talk.
34. McPherson, The Conservative Resurgence and the Press.
35. George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Conservatives and Liberals Think, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
36. Pamela J. Shoemaker and Stephen D. Reese, Mediating the Message: Theories of Influence on Mass Media Content (White Plains, NY: Longman Publishing, 1991).
37. Robert M. Entman, "Framing Bias: Media in the Distribution of Power," Journal of Communication 57 (March 2007): 163-73.
38. W. Lance Bennett, "Toward a Theory of Press-State Relations in the United States," Journal of Communication 40 (June 1990): 103-27;
39. W. Lance Bennett, News: The Politics of Illusion, 6th ed. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2005);
40. Jane D. Brown, Carl R. Bybee, Stanley T. Wearden, and Dulcie M. Straughan, "Invisible Power: Newspaper Sources and the Limits of Diversity," Journalism Quarterly 64 (spring 1987): 45-54;
41. Steven Livingston and W. Lance Bennett, "Gatekeeping, Indexing, and Live Event News: Is Technology Altering the Construction of News?" Political Communication 20 (October-December 2003): 363-80;
42. Shoemaker and Reese, Mediating the Message.
43. Smith, The Right Talk.
44. Lawrence C. Soley, "Pundits in Print: 'Experts' and their Use in Newspaper Stories," Newspaper Research Journal 15 (spring 1994): 65-75.
45. McPherson, The Conservative Resurgence and the Press;
46. Anna Williams, "Conservative Media Activism: The Free Congress Foundation and National Empowerment Television" in Media, Culture, and the Religious Right, ed. Linda Kintz and Julia Lesage (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 275-94.
47. Robert W McChesney, The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century (New York: The Monthly Review Press, 2004).
48. Bennett, News;
49. Sylvia N. Chan-Olmsted and Jiyoung Cha, "Branding Television News in a Multichannel Environment: An Exploratory Study of Network News Brand Personality," International Journal on Media Management 9 (November 2007): 135-50;
50. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, The Right Nation;
51. Jonathan S. Morris, "The Fox News Factor," The International Journal of Press/Politics 10 (summer 2005): 56-79.
52. Stefano Della Vigna and Ethan Kaplan, The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting (Cambridge, MA: The National Bureau of Economics, 2006).
53. McPherson, The Conservative Resurgence and the Press;
54. Morris, "The Fox News Factor";
55. Deborah Potter, "His Way: How Roger Ailes' Game Plan Created Fox's Cable Domination," American Journalism Review 28 (December 2006): 78.
56. McChesney, The Problem of the Media;
57. McPherson, The Conservative Resurgence and the Press.
58. Constantine Angelos, Paula Bock, and Eric Pryne, "30 Arrested in 2nd Night of Seattle Strife- Disturbances on Capitol Hill Shift Down-town," Seattle Times, May 2, 1992.
59. Dardis, "Marginalization Devices in U.S. Press Coverage of the Iraq War Protest."
60. Thomas W. Lippman, "Seabrook Plant Licensed After a 17-Year Struggle," Washington Post, March 2, 1990.
61. Brasted, "Framing Protest";
62. Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching.
63. Tom Gorman, "750 Protest Immigration Policies of United States," Los Angeles Times (July 5, 1986).
64. Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching.
65. McPherson, The Conservative Resurgence and the Press;
66. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, The Right Nation;
67. Smith, The Right Talk.
68. Bennett, News.
69. David Domke, God Willing? Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the "War on Terror," and the Echoing Press (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004).
70. Michael P. Boyle, Michael R. McCluskey, Douglas M. McLeod, and Sue E. Stein, "Newspapers and Protest: An Examination of Protest Coverage from 1960 to 1999," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 82 (autumn 2005): 638-53;
71. Linda J. Kensicki, "Deaf President Now! Positive Media Framing of a Social Movement within a Hegemonic Political Environment," Journal of Communication Inquiry 25 (April 2001): 147-66.
72. Audit Bureau of Circulations, 2007 Top newspapers>blogs>consumer magazines (Schaumburg, IL: Audit Bureau of Circulations, 2007).
73. Lakoff, Moral Politics.
74. Drawing a sample from electronic databases such as these may have excluded some relevant articles-those written by freelance journalists. In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Tasini v. New York Times that the Times had to either pay freelance writers additional royalties for articles published between 1980 and 1995 that were made available on the Internet or remove these articles from their electronic archives and from databases such as Nexis. The Times removed 115,000 articles from Nexis, and most other newspapers followed suit. This represented approximately 8% of the articles the Times had archived from the years affected. It is unlikely, however, that the absence of these articles affected this study. Most freelance articles that appear in large circulation newspapers tend to be reviews (i.e., critical discussions of books, plays, or films), human interest stories, and other "soft" news, not news about protests. Indeed, most of the content the Times removed from Nexis was travel articles, book reviews, or articles that appeared in the Times Sunday magazine, which is made up of mostly reviews, comics, and "lifestyle" articles. None of this content would have been likely to appear in the sample.
75. For details, see Nancy S. Burgess, "Not Your Father's Daily News," The Writer's Digest 78 (April 1998): 29-34;
76. Giussepina D'Agosrino, "Should Freelancers Keep Their Copyrights in the Digital Era?" Copyright & New Media Law Newsletter 8 (2004): 6;
77. Todd Shields, "Supremes Back Freelancers," Editor & Publisher, July 2001, 5-6.
78. For example, Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching;
79. Jha, "Exploring Internet Influence on the Coverage of Social Protest."
80. An alternative sampling approach might have been to randomly select twelve months within each of the five-year clusters, and then perhaps to select articles within each month. There are several drawbacks to such an approach. First, there were almost certainly some months in which no notable protest events took place, whereas it is unlikely that there are any years in which this is the case. Second, the approach employed in this study allowed for the capture of richer data about large protest events. Many large protests that were included in this event were discussed in numerous articles, some of which preceded the protest itself and some of which were published several months afterwards. Sampling of years rather than months allowed for a sample that was more representative of coverage of these large events. Third, sampling by months might have excluded important news content about events that happened at the very end of a given month. For example, the WTO protests of 1999 occurred from November 30 through December 2. In such cases, the tone of coverage could change across the days of the event and in the weeks that follow. Using the example above, had only November of 1999 been included in the sample, only coverage that reflected the lead up to the protest and the first day would have been included. Had only December been selected, the sample would only have included the latter two days and the aftermath of the event. Thus, while this was not a purposive sample, it did allow for the capture of content that was representative of all coverage of several large protest events in the newspapers examined as a purposive sample would, while also providing data about coverage of a wide variety of other protest events.
81. Boyle et al., "Newspapers and Protest";
82. Pamela E. Oliver and Gregory M. Maney, "Political Processes and Local Newspaper Coverage of Protest Events: From Selection Bias to Triadic Interactions," The American Journal of Sociology 106 (September 2000): 463-505;
83. Pamela E. Oliver and Daniel J. Myers, "How Events Enter the Public Sphere: Conflict, Location, and Sponsorship in Local Newspaper Coverage of Public Events, The American Journal of Sociology 105 (May 1999): 38-87;
84. Ralph H. Turner, "The Public Perception of Protest," American Sociological Review 6 (December 1969): 815-29.
85. The topic variable included the following categories: war, abortion, environment, civil rights, social programs, anti-globalization, labor issues, education and tuition issues, protest against a political figure, and other.
86. Following Lakoff's definition of the conservative mindset, conservative protests were, generally speaking, those that supported established authority or the traditional moral order, or those that opposed the expansion of government. Articles placed in the conservative category focused on protests highlighting the following issue categories: anti-abortion, anti-environment, anti-civil rights, anti-social programs, liberal political figure, and pro-war effort. Following Lakoff's definition of the liberal worldview, liberal protests were, generally speaking, those that challenged authority or sought to increase the scope of government programs. Articles placed in the liberal category focused on protests highlighting the following issue categories: pro-abortion rights, pro-environment, pro-civil rights, pro-social programs, anti-globalization, labor issues, education/tuition issues, conservative political figure, and antiwar effort. Articles about protests focusing on issues that were coded as "other topic" were placed in the other ideological category, along with events featuring both conservative and liberal protests that were given roughly equal coverage and thus did not allow the article to be clearly classified as dealing with one or the other.
87. The sampling method employed in this study makes it possible that some of the across-time findings described here could be influenced by the presence of an anomalous year, but additional data analysis suggests this is not so. The across-time correlations for both measures of nuisance coverage and both measures of critical characterizations were calculated eight more times, with each year individually removed from the sample-1967 was removed for one set of correlations, then it was put back into the sample and 1975 was removed, and the correlations were calculated again, and so on. The results continued to point to the growth of the nuisance paradigm over time: using all four nuisance paradigm indicators, there continued to be significant, positive correlations, ranging from .77 to .97. The sole exception was in the percentage of articles containing nuisance coverage, when the year 1967 was removed from the sample. In this case, the correlation dropped slightly below the threshold of statistical significance (r = .62, p = .07). Correlations using the other three indicators continued to be significant. No single outlier year, therefore, affected the results in a substantial way.
88. One might suggest that these changes in news coverage parallel actual changes in protests rather than changes in journalistic emphasis. Perhaps protests simply are more bothersome now than they were in the 1960s, and maybe liberal protests are more bothersome than conservative ones. No data exist to test these claims, but neither possibility seems likely. The popular conception of protests of the 1960s is that they tended to be very large and very disruptive. It seems highly improbable that the protests of that period were less likely to block traffic or irritate people. Previous research has found that both the number of protests categorized "medium to large" and the frequency with which protests damaged property or resulted in violence actually appears to have decreased considerably from 1960s levels during the 1970s, the period in which critical characterizations increased the most-for details,
89. see Jennifer Earle and Sarah A. Soule, "A Movement Society Evaluated: Collective Protest in the United States, 1960-1986," Mobilization: An International Journal 10 (October 2005): 345-64.
90. What of the possibility that conservative protests are less bothersome than liberal ones? Many anti-abortion protests aggressively block traffic on streets and access to abortion clinics while displaying graphic images, leaving at least one stranded commuter who wrote a letter to the editor of the Wisconsin State Journal feeling "queasy and indignant."
91. Opposition to these demonstrations rose to 75% by 1970. For more information, see Rita J. Simon, Public Opinion in America: 1936-1970 (Chicago: Rand McNally College Publishing Company, 1974).
92. David S. Domke and Kevin M. Coe, The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008);
93. John T. Jost, "The End of Ideology," American Psychologist 7 (October 2006): 651-70;
94. James Patterson, "Conservative Movements" in Encyclopedia of American Social Movements v. 4, ed. Immanuel Ness (Armonk, NY: Sharpe Reference, 2004), 1385-1410.
95. See also Robert D. Woodberry and Christian Smith, "Fundamentalism et al: Conservative Protestants in America," Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 25-56.
96. Pew Research Center for People and the Press, Fewer Voters Identify as Republicans: Democrats Now Have the Advantage in Swing States (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2008).
97. Laura M. Arpan, Kaysee Baker, Youngwon Lee, Taejin Jung, Lori Lorusso, and Jason Smith, "News Coverage of Social Protests and the Effects of Photographs and Prior Attitudes," Mass Communication & Society 9 (winter 2006): 1-20;
98. Benjamin H. Detenber, Melissa R. Gotlieb, Douglas M. McLeod, and Olga Malinkina, "Frame Intensity Effects of Television News Stories about a High-Visibility Protest Issue," Mass Communication & Society 10 (fall 2007): 439-60;
99. Douglas M. McLeod, "Communicating Deviance: The Effects of Television News Coverage of Social Protest," Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 39 (winter 1995): 4-21;
100. Douglas M. McLeod and Benjamin H. Detenber, "Framing Effects of Television News Coverage of Social Protest," Journal of Communication 49 (December 1999): 3-23;
101. McLeod and Hertog, "The Manufacture of 'Public Opinion' by Reporters";
102. Douglas M. McLeod and James K. Hertog, "Social Control, Social Change and the Mass Media's Role in the Regulation of Protest Groups," in Mass Media, Social Control, and Social Change: A Macrosocial Perspective, ed. David Demers and K. Viswanath (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1999), 305-30.
103. The author would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
104. E.g., Dardis, "Marginalization Devices in U.S. Press Coverage of the Iraq War Protest";
105. Kensicki, "Deaf President Now!";
106. Rauch et al., "From Seattle 1999 to New York 2004";
107. Andrew Rojecki, "Modernism, State Sovereignty, and Dissent: Media and the New Post-Cold War Movements," Critical Studies in Media Communication 2 (June 2002): 152-71.
108. Jha, "Exploring Internet Influence on the Coverage of Social Protest."