Bearing Witness: How Controversial Organizations Get the Media Coverage They Want

Abstract

Activists need mass media to reach the largest audience possible, but getting media attention is difficult. Although disruptive protests are more likely to get covered by journalists, scholars claim that the resulting coverage is usually undesirable. Getting beneficial coverage presents a tactical dilemma for activists, and an analytical one for scholars. How do activists get the quality of media coverage they want when the tactics getting them attention result in negative coverage? This project contributes to the literature on movements and media in two ways: (1) I offer a new measure of desirable coverage that will be useful to media scholars: graphic description of grievances; (2) I use this measure to show that disruptive and controversial protest tactics may not always result in negative media attention. The new measure of ‘good’ media coverage helped determine conditions under which newspapers provide activists with the coverage they want. I used the Dynamics of Collective Action dataset to analyze all animal advocacy protests covered in the New York Times from 1960 to 1995, and found that the reputation of the involved organization may be associated with ‘good’ coverage. Organizations that have established a controversial identity may garner coverage that activists want, even if controversial actions do not. Put simply, it is less what activists do than who activists are that determines the quality of coverage they receive.