Author : Teresa Gil López
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781392654637
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (546 download)
Book Synopsis Communicating Dissent, Manufacturing Deviance by : Teresa Gil López
Download or read book Communicating Dissent, Manufacturing Deviance written by Teresa Gil López and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The advent of digital communication technologies has revolutionized how social movements organize and directly mobilize support from the wider public. Still, activists and movements are aware that pursuing media attention remains crucial to get their message across. Scholarly work on media and social movements has identified a pattern of coverage in mainstream media, coined as the ‘protest paradigm’, that delegitimizes and marginalizes protest movements. While such work has been key to identifying the archetypal devices of representation that characterize the paradigm, no systematic assessment of the prevalence of such devices exists across different causes and contexts. Yet, given the complexity of the current media environment, it is unclear to what extent mainstream media’s treatment of protest groups is invariably negative. Furthermore, along with the evolution of the media environment came many changes in the journalistic practices which underlie the logic of the paradigm, and thus mainstream media discourses around protest are also likely to have diversified. To date, the evolution of mainstream portrayals has not been explored for a broad range of causes but only for specific movements. The same scholarly work has also tended to conclude that adherence to the protest paradigm in protest coverage carries deleterious effects for public support and mobilization. However, much of the work produced under the umbrella of the protest paradigm has relied on early critical theorizations and limited empirical observations to deduce that mainstream portrayals of protest generally depressed public support for protesters and intentions to mobilize. To refine these theorizations, certain boundary conditions should be considered that are likely to shape people’s responses to media portrayals. Among them, prior favorable attitudes have been hypothesized to act as attenuators of the negative effects of the paradigm, while other variables may exacerbate ingroup- and ideology-consistent responses. Finally, the theoretical mechanisms explaining how such effects occur are also unknown. This dissertation addresses the previous research gaps in the literature through a systematic exploration of the relative prevalence and evolution, in mainstream coverage, of representation devices ascribed to the protest paradigm across a broad range of protest types. It also investigates systematic differences between domestic and foreign coverage, as well as variations in coverage across geopolitical contexts. The dissertation also explores how portrayals with high adherence to the paradigm impact protest-related attitudes and evaluations when participants hold prior attitudes on a divisive issue. In doing so, it also adds important theoretical contributions towards understanding the mechanisms explaining negative attitudinal outcomes of exposure by, first empirically testing potential cognitive and affective mediators; and second, by exploring how new information consumption patterns may moderate effects by bringing interpersonal considerations and political affinities to the foreground when people process and interpret media messages. Study 1 explores the evolution of mainstream protest coverage by 5 top US newspapers over the past 2 decades. The study seeks to understand how representations of collective action have evolved with the advent of digital media, particularly social media, and how adherence to protest paradigm varies across multiple protest types and contexts. Study 2 then investigates the effects of higher relative to lower degrees of adherence to the protest paradigm on various outcomes of exposure, namely, protester evaluations, identification with protesters, protest intention, and perceptions of polarization. It also tests the indirect effects of protest paradigm adherence through story credibility judgments and positive and negative emotions, as well as the role of prior attitudes and social sharing in moderating those effects. Together, the studies found that protest paradigm standards of representation were stable over time, that certain protest types are systematically more negatively represented than others, just like foreign conflicts are systematically given worse treatment than domestic protests. Higher adherence to the paradigm causes more negative evaluations of protesters, less identification and lower protest intentions than lower adherence, and, importantly, these effects remain for the most part independent of prior attitudes. The studies highlight the need for a coherent theoretical framework that includes both the media- and citizen- related processes and structures.
