Introduction
In the previous chapters I have examined social movement theory and demonstrated the
limitations of the existing literature around leadership in social movements. My research has shown that there is a deficit of literature concerning leadership which reduces the capacity of scholars and theorists to understand the way in which social movements operate, and the means by which they shape their campaigns in order to achieve their goals.
Engagement with the media is one area where the strategies and tactics of social movement leaders are made readily apparent and where the complexities of such leadership can be made relatively stark. The media have long played a critical role in the success and failure of social
movements (Gitlin, 1980; Lester, 2007), and the media has depended on individuals who operate as ‘primary definers’ (Lester, 2007) as sources for their stories. This has resulted in the need for
leaders, either real or constructed, to run their stories. As I will demonstrate in this chapter, the media in Australia have strong cultural power which makes them critical to movements who wish to achieve campaign successes, and the framing which they employ to tell their stories is a critical site of conflict for movements.
Leaders are important in this context because they participate in a complex interaction with journalists to propagate and contest discourses and frames in the media. This is not something which can be achieved on a collective level, as journalists employ a variety of normative hegemonic frames to prefer the views of authoritative individuals over a varied and sometimes conflicting multiplicity of spokespeople and movement leaders (and additionally face a multitude of personal barriers around deadlines and making stories understandable which reduce their capacity to engage directly with the ‘mass’ of a movement). Movements and scholars who ignore leadership are likely to struggle to assess media engagement because of these factors, particularly when movements face problems around celebrity-leaders taking on pseudo-leadership roles which can divide or co-opt movements.
Understanding leadership is also critical to assess the capacities and potential of social media, and vice versa. As Poell, Abdulla, Rieder, Woltering & Zack (2016) note, leadership which engages with
traditional news media looks distinctly different to leadership which originates through social media. But existing leadership also deploys social media for particular ends, and assessing the extent to which social media might be used to leverage campaigns depends largely on leadership around these new media forms.
In reviewing the literature around the media and social movements in this chapter, I will
demonstrate some of the contributions that leader-centred research into social movements might achieve.
News Media, Framing, and Social Movements.
Critical writing on the ‘fourth estate’ in Australia sometimes appears to border on cynicism. As Davis (1999), Salter (2007) and Dunlop (2013) contend, the Australian media are collectively lazy in their attempts to understand and tell stories, they shun ethical practice and refuse to police
themselves, and they are beholden to corporate interests and the interests of political elites. They cheer the virtues and value of journalism in the public good, yet are dismissive and contemptuous of the same public they claim to serve, and dismissive of any critical engagement with their work, particularly from ‘non-journalists’ (that is, someone not working for an institutional media
organisation). In addition a generational bloc of ‘boomer’ cultural elites, many in significant and esteemed positions in media organisations around the nation, play a ‘disproportionate’ role in public life and contribute to the marginalisation of younger generations, and subsequently the marginalisation of new ideas, voices and politics (Davis, M.R., 2007).
These problems are not unique to Australia by any means. Consider the historical critiques of the media by Bourdieu (1998), Entman (1993) or even Boorstin (1961) and it becomes clear that the promise of the media perpetuated by popular culture, socio-cultural and political elites and journalists themselves is one perpetually bound to be broken, a standard set largely by the media which it is unable or unwilling to reach. As Salter (2007: 39) writes: “Journalism is a perfectly reputable craft. The problem is the disreputable things journalists do.” He also writes as part of a critique of framing practices that “it always requires far more application to be a considered sceptic than an automatic cynic. Consumers… have… grown to accept that [cynical] tone as a substitute for genuine analysis” (Salter, 2007: 3). It would then be wrong to replicate this sin: it is not enough to
simply adopt a posture of cynicism in response to the similarly cynical stance taken by both the Australian media and their critics. These media institutions might not operate in a manner
consistent with their rhetoric, but they still strongly influence public debate and operate to include and exclude particular ideas, values and discourses.
Boorstin (1961) and Bourdieu (1998) both criticise the particular economic configurations required to produce mass-distributed media, and the particular agendas and frames that this imposes on media reports. Traditional media – radio, television and print media – are dependent on regular schedules of news production – monthly, daily, hourly – which requires a particular
conceptualisation of news. Perhaps unsurprisingly, news is created, extracted, wrung from the happenings of the everyday rather than ‘newsworthy’ events simply being allowed to emerge. Boorstin (1961) calls the products of this news creation process ‘pseudo-events’. The pressure to produce a certain amount of ‘news’ on tight deadlines means journalists are forced to compromise the depth of research and the critical engagement that would otherwise be possible in any given story, forcing them to fall back upon familiar frameworks of understanding the unexpected,
complex, illogical or even “disappointingly mundane” (Salter, 2007: 2), frameworks which are often socially dominant or hegemonic in nature (Gitlin, 1980). With the rise of social media and the internet, these demands have changed slightly; the number of stories a newspaper can print are no longer dictated by how many pages of advertising had been sold for a particular day – instead every story is an opportunity for page views and click-through rates, which means that difficult stories are less likely to be cut, but journalists under more pressure to tell stories which are ‘click-bait’ over and above stories with social importance. Public interest is redefined under such institutional structures to no longer be ‘what the public needs to know’ but rather ‘what the public wants to know’ where ‘wants’ are a list of options preselected by editors and business managers (Dunlop, 2013).
Such a view, particularly championed by Gitlin (1980), tends to be fairly sympathetic to journalists as mere ‘cogs’ in the institutional machinery, producing copy in order to fill space between the ads or otherwise induce a reader to look at more advertising. However Salter (2007: 2-3), himself a journalist and television producer, suggests that journalists are as much at fault for this intellectual ‘laziness’ as the organisations in which they work. He charges that journalists, editors and
don’t “fit these templates of violence, novelty, shock, drama, conflict, celebrity or spectacle” (Salter, 2007: 7-8). This concurs with findings from Bartholomé, Lecheler & de Vreese (2015) which suggest that individual journalists and media organisations are equally culpable in the deployment of ‘conflict’ frames. In doing so journalists ‘rob’ the agenda of stories that are difficult or complex. Salter (2007: 65) additionally charges that a disdain for traditional beat-work and a growth in opinion and desktop reportage are also to blame, although he later admits that media bosses interest in saving money may also be behind this trend.
The consequences of this tendency towards the familiar when framing stories is highlighted by Gitlin (1980) in his examination of the relationship between social movements and the media. Gitlin’s (1980) analysis of the Students for a Democratic Society and their interactions with the media were central in conceptualising the role that the media had on social movements and is subsequently useful for understanding the nature of interactions between environmentalists and the media in Australia. For Gitlin the media are central to social movement activities: “the media specialise in orchestrating everyday consciousness – by virtue of their pervasiveness, their
accessibility, their centralised symbolic capacity. They name the world’s parts, they certify reality as reality –and when their certifications are doubted and opposed… limit the terms of effective
opposition. [They are] core systems for the distribution of ideology” (1980: 1-2). For the SDS and the early environment movement, the media were the only feasible option to make their voices heard. But Gitlin argues that the media don’t just report, they translate the symbolic actions of protesters for the consumption of a wider audience, which in the case of the SDS meant framing the novel, unexpected and complex activities of the movement in negative ways, which included:
Trivialising: making fun of the language, dress, age, style and goals of the movement, at the expense of the substance of the movement (pp. 27, 58).
Polarisation: placing an emphasis on counter-demonstrations and extremists at the numerical and ideological margins over the mainstream movement (pp. 27, 48-49, 94-95). Marginalisation: suggesting demonstrators were deviant or unrepresentative, which included the creation of a ‘generational’ sub-frame that suggested the claims of the
movement were unique to young people who were ‘out of control’ or insufficiently controlled by their elders (pp. 27, 56-58).
The result of these framing strategies was that the media effectively ‘alienated’ the producers of meanings from their products – the process of media framing mediates all meanings, and the social meanings of intentional action are “deformed beyond recognition” (Gitlin, 1980: 3). Central to Gitlin’s frame analysis is the dominance of ‘hegemonic frames’ which include particular normative discourses and ideologies underlying the behaviour and perspectives of reporters; he argues that trivialising or casting the movement as menacing meant that the public did not have to deal with the substantive ideas behind the movement, for example, by emphasising the presence of
communists (1980: 69-70). Hegemonic frames were also informed the kinds of questions asked and stances taken by reporters: Gitlin suggests they did not so much fail to understand the
organisational structure of the movement so much as deliberately misunderstood in order to frame it in ways which were understandable to both themselves and the public (1980: 96-97). More than this, the kinds of traditional assumptions about what constitutes ‘news’ reinforced this hegemonic view: that news is about the event, not the underlying condition; the person and not the group; conflict, not consensus; the fact that ‘advances the story’ not the one that explains it (1980: 28).
It is important to recognise that Gitlin is writing as a participant in the movement when he ultimately lays blame for the failure of the SDS at the feet of the American media and the way in which they framed the story. In particular he singles out the destructive effect the media had on the leadership of the SDS by promoting both individuals and a model of leader-as-celebrity which distorted and ultimately undermined the purpose and aims of the movement; framing strategies employed by the media which reduced the salience and efficacy of the movement amongst the general public. This isn’t to say that that his position is not without merit, merely that he is writing as an insider with a particular perspective.
Broader scholarly literature does largely support Gitlin’s thesis about framing – Altheide (1997) suggests that the political economy of news, particularly demands about entertainment value and commercial viability, puts an impetus on reporters to deploy ‘problem frames.’ This framing strategy simplifies issues down into understandable and ‘interesting’ forms: that something
undesirable exists, that it affects many people, it is generally unambiguous, and ultimately it can be fixed through ‘known’ means. Altheide suggests that this simplifies problems and transforms ambiguous and problematic stories into morality plays. This ultimately places pressure on those responsible for dealing with the problem to undertake counter-productive options. Similarly,
Entman & Rojecki’s (1993) analysis of media responses to the anti-nuclear movement also suggest that negative framings prevent the public from joining movements with which they are
ideologically aligned; that social movements are framed critically and have fewer ‘legitimate’ options for communication compared with political elites; and most significantly, that the media doesn’t reflect public opinion: they do not have ‘autonomy of official discourse’ but instead reflect the symbolic politics, and thus framing choices, of the state.
However Cottle (2008) suggests that media framing choices are more diverse than either Altheide or Entman & Rojecki are willing to concede. His conception of ‘mediatised conflict’ offers some substantial critique, particularly around the ‘media ecosystem’ in which this framing occurs. He suggests that there are broader dynamics and complexities which need to be recognised, and that the media aren’t inherently against the goals and values of social movements in favour of dominant interests. Taking Cottle’s perspective into account, the view of framing espoused by Altheide et al accounts a great deal of influence – potentially far to much – on the role of the media,
marginalising the role that individuals and groups play in engaging with the media. Cottle argues that the media cannot and should not be treated as distinct from other institutions like politics or social movements: the media has critically informed movement practices and logic, and perhaps even formed. Media, mainstream politics, movements and the public all interact with each other in ways which can influence change. This does not necessarily undermine the central points made by Altheide or Entman & Rojecki, but it does place limitations on how much of a role the media play. Cottle suggests that it is necessary for analysis of the media to adopt “less media-centric and more sociologically refined and politically contingent understandings of media-source interactions” (2008: 125).
What makes framing more relevant in contemporary analysis of media interactions is the growing recognition and deployment of frames by both social movement activists and what Hall et al (1999) refer to as ‘primary definers’: that is, ostensibly ‘accredited’ sources from major social institutions – MPs, business leaders, trade-union representatives, ‘experts.’ For example, cognitive linguist George Lakoff (2004) suggests that the political right in the US have actively worked to frame political and social issues and events in ways which play to their strengths; Lakoff advocates that the political left do the same. Indeed much of the interaction between the Tasmanian
(see Lester, 2007). Even if this kind of framing is not precisely the same as media framing – the power and social relations involved in frame production are potentially different for both primary definers and social movement activists – it reinforces the usefulness of frames in exploring
interactions with the media as groups and individuals are likely to think about their interactions in a similar way. However, it is also worth noting Schlesinger’s (1990) and Miller’s (1993) critique that understanding the way in which organisations use information cannot be media centric or focus on the creators and authors of frames (‘primary definers’) but needs to include the various actors and audiences which make up the economy and ecosystem of mass communication. While framing is helpful for analysis it is also a limited perspective.
For social movements the media – and the political economy within which the media operates – presents a problem fraught with internal contradictions; on one hand they are dependent on the media to both grow their movement and gain public legitimacy, on the other, the media require increasingly more elaborate spectacles and celebrity-leadership in order to maintain their attention as ‘newsworthy,’ and even then are likely to frame movements in ways which may actively contest the agendas of movements. This “increasing need for novel” (Gitlin, 1980: 233-235) creates a kind of ‘event-time’ where time is distorted to focus on the importance of events rather than the organisation and consolidation occurring around them, while the adversarial framing can counter- productively, both alienating the public and encourages individual to join a movement for the wrong reasons: Gitlin (1980: 190-204) found that in the case of the SDS, adversarial framings of the movement led to new members who were increasingly drawn to violence and militancy rather than grass-roots community organising. As such
Gitlin suggests that news stories need to be unambiguous and culturally familiar in order to get coverage (1980: 45) and that journalists had to deliberately misunderstand the organisational structure and goals of the movement in order to make a framing that was understandable to themselves and to the general public (ibid: 96-97) which meant that the journalists and the general public did not have to deal with the political challenges and substantive ideas behind the
movement; it was reduced to a novelty (ibid: 69-70). Lester (2006a) sees similar issues in her coverage of the environmental movement in Tasmania, particularly around the problems of the movement in maintaining their ‘newsworthiness’ and having their positions presented through antagonistic frames by the local media.
Hall (1988) understands these broad criticisms of the media as a consequence of their ideological functions within society. The media are part of what Hall calls ‘the ideological model of power’ which suggests that dominant interests and ways of viewing the world are presented as natural and universal while those of the dominated are excluded or presented as deviant (Downey, Titley & Toynbee, 2014). In this view, capital is central to the accrual of power.
However the media is in some ways as negative regarding entrenched interests and power structures as it can be for social movements. Thompson (2005: 38) writes that “ever since the advent of print political rulers have found it impossible to control completely the new kind of visibility made possible by the media and to shape it entirely to their liking; now, with the rise of the internet and other digital technologies, it is more difficult than ever.” Some argue that the inverse is true for social movements; freed of the hegemonic frames and power structures of mass media, they now have the ability to propagate their own messages on their own terms (see Dunlop, 2013). Despite these changes, Rojecki (2011: 95) suggests that the historical relationships the movement has had with the media are still important. Despite the rise of new media, mass media remains a critical if ‘transformed’ source, particularly relevant for their ability to lend legitimacy to certain movement activities. Despite the ability for movements to present their own positions via the internet and social media, journalists are perhaps justifiably sceptical of media content created by ‘self-interested protestors’ (Rojecki, 2011: 95) and ‘stage managed media events.’
Indeed there remain particular limitations to what the media can achieve: Thompson (1995: 125)