Claims-Making and the Construction of Legitimacy: Press Coverage of the 1981 Northern Irish Hunger Strike

Abstract

This paper examines the media's role in the claims-making process, specifically as this relates to the construction of legitimacy. The 1981 Northern Irish hunger strike was a claims-making activity in which paramilitary prisoners sought to construct themselves as legitimate political actors rather than “terrorists.” To challenge the assumptions of the criminalization policy that characterized paramilitary organizations as terrorists who lacked popular support, the prisoners contested parliamentary elections and ultimately starved themselves to death. A qualitative content analysis of coverage of their claims in the Irish Times , the London Times, and the New York Times shows that, while the three papers offered criticisms of the criminalization policy, they did not present the prisoners' claims as legitimate. The paper concludes that local media and cultural understandings of such events may provide sufficient support to sustain these understandings, even in the presence of negative coverage in national media.