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Mainstream Media Coverage

Political Content

Studies have found that mainstream media prefer referring to blog agendas before covering political issues. Kevin Wallsten has used the example of Lott to explain this close relationship. On December 5th, 2002, the Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott made a racist speech at former “Dixiecrat” Strom Thurmond’s (R-SC) 100th birthday party. While none of the mainstream media including some major national newspapers who attended the event covered this story in the following days, a few popular blogs such as Escahton, Talking Points Memo, and Instapundit immediately started their discussion in the blogosphere. Some of them even provided related links to the previous racist statements made by both Thurmond and Lott. After a few days, some mainstream media finally took notice about the blogging activities online and The New York Times became the first mainstream medium that covered this story through its three nightly network news shows on December 10th. According to Wallsten, while there is a bidirectional relationship between the media coverage and political blogs when addressing a political affair, “the blog agenda is becoming a more important influence on the media agenda than vice versa”. Most media journalists including the famous Paul Krugman and Fareed Zakaria have admitted that the blogs are crucial for them to gather information before covering certain political events.

In addition, researches have also discovered the inseparable relationship between the viewing number of political videos and its news coverage. Based on the media agenda-setting hypothesis, "when mainstream media cover an online political video, the number of people who watch the video will rapidly increase". The political video in 2008 campaign “Yes We Can” was first debuted on ABCNewsNow ‘s “What’s the buzz” before its official release on YouTube. It was then viewed over 20 million times through different kinds of websites after Obama secured the nomination in the American Presidential Election. Wallsten suggests that the media coverage has successfully generated some interests which attract many technologically sophisticated members among the audience and lead them to search out those videos. As a result, the viewing number start to grow rapidly. Since mainstream media usually influence a large number of people and shape certain thoughts, people who exposed to the mention of journalists about the video in the discussion of political events will more likely to watch the video online.

Social Movements and Protests

Since the late 1960s, the relationship between social movements and its representation through mainstream media has attracted a lot of academic attention. Multiple theories have been built based on a series of research.

The Protest Paradigm

Scholars in this domain argue that when covering social protests, media tend to emphasize the negative characteristics of those protesters. McLeod and Hertog have identified 5 characteristics of this paradigm. The first is the use of news frames. Usually, the mainstream media prefer to use the word “crime story”, “riot” or “carnival” rather than the “debate” when framing those movements. The second is the leading role of official sources to spin the news. The official sources that come from the government or other giant institutions will easily lead to a biased perspective from the powerful. The third is the invocation of public opinions, which means that the media always try to emphasize the differences between protesters and society without addressing their proper appeals. The fourth is the delegitimization, which means that media often fail to point out the cause, and context of those protest actions. The last one is demonization. This suggests that media sometimes only exaggerate some possible threats and negative consequences of the movements in order to shape these protesters as social oddballs and folk devils.

As a result, protest groups often think they are in a double bind. On one hand, their appeal is ignored by the media in most cases. On the other hand, the drama and risk shown when they are reported will delegalize the group and lead the conflicts “away from healthy discourse toward more dysfunctional outcomes”.

Policing Folk Devils

Stanley Cohen and Donson et al. suggest that when media try to construct those protesters as “folk devils”, they have the potential ability to influence how police will perceive a social movement and how the use of policing tactics will be justified. Cohen also states that with the use of exaggeration, prediction, and symbolization in the media context, the mainstream media often successfully “play a key role in establishing a group as devils”. When those folk devils are represented as dangerous, criminal, with possible threats to social order and social interests, the society will try to prevent them from keeping engaging in those social movements or protests. As a result, strict legislation and policing tactics will be used under the impacts of mainstream media.

Gender and Race

Studies show that the coverage of race and gender in mainstream media reflects their stereotyped understanding of racial and sexual inequality. For example, in the 2008 Democratic primary nomination, the representation of the race and gender between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama reveals the white supremacy and the hegemonic masculinity.

Walsh states that the mainstream media are good at reinforcing the patriarchy by covering Hillary Clinton as a "mythical man". The media successfully vest some characteristics of hegemonic masculinity to her. When she voted in favor of the Iraq war, some media covered this vote as a way to “soften the criticism against her weakness as a woman”. Through this kind of representation, the media have expressed their views that Hilary Clinton’s candidacy makes sense as she will not challenge the white supremacy when she is essentially a mythical man.

In addition, Walsh also suggests that the mainstream media are trying to camouflage the blackness of Obama by attacking his gender. While mainstream media know the stereotype of the black man is involved with the impression of ignorant and brutish, they try to shape a concept that Obama is not black enough by stating his lack of masculinity. The New York Times noted: “If Hillary is in touch with her masculine side, Barry [Obama] is in touch with his feminine side”. Other media also describe him as “Obambi” or “the different debutante”. As Walsh states, the white supremacy is still remained and will keep strengthened through the coverage of mainstream media, because the reason for mainstream media to recast Obama as less than black and less than manly is that they think it will be “less threatened than the social order would be if stereotypical Black masculinity had won the election”.