CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Koptleuov, Dauren |
|---|---|
| Title | Moving Past the Ideology: How Do Violence and Popularity of Social Movements Affect the US Liberal News Coverage? |
| Summary | News media coverage is commonly regarded as one of the key means for success for any social movement (Gamson and Wolfsfeld, 2013). However, the relationship between these two political actors is rather complicated. Scholars observed a trend in which the US news media outlets tend to delegitimize a movement through framing, sourcing, and other journalistic practices (Gitlin, 1980; McLeod and Hertog, 1999, Kilgo and Harlow, 2019). This tendency is referred to as the protest paradigm in communication studies. More recently, the growing polarization within the US media circle challenged the paradigm: the matching ideology of media and social movements was observed to reduce the negative bias in the coverage (Weaver and Scacco, 2013; Kim and Shahin, 2020). Up to date, the scholars of media and social movements seemed to be focusing on how news cover protests, but not why. This study analyzes the New York Times (NYT) coverage of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) in the first two weeks of the George Floyd protests. According to the ACLED US Crisis Monitor, the first week of the protests was reported to have much more incidents of violence than the second (17.23 percent versus 1.64). This coincided with the growing popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement in the same time frame. This thesis addresses how violence and popularity affect the tone of the news coverage, namely its negativity, and aims to contribute to the theories that challenge the protest paradigm phenomena. The negativity of the coverage is analyzed through framing and sourcing. The first refers to the number of delegitimizing frames, while the second refers to the number of quotations of authority-related public officials on the topic of protest. Due to the skewed distribution of response variable values, this thesis employs logit models and OLS regression models. Logit models aim to predict the odds of the NYT to be negative or not in their coverage. OLS regression models seek to test the possible linear relationship between the violence and popularity and the degree of negativity of NYT coverage of George Floyd protests. The findings reveal that the time passed since the first day of protests has a more profound effect on the odds of NYT being negative in their coverage than expected. Violence shows a modest positive effect on the degree of negativity through framing, while the support for Black Lives Matter slightly diminishes the chances of NYT to quote an official. |
| Supervisor | Angelova Mariyana |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/koptleuov_dauren.pdf |
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