Cascades of Coverage: Dynamics of Media Attention to Social Movement Organizations

Gaining attention in the mass media is a key goal of many social movement organizations (SMOs). The dominant explanation of media attention to SMOs is that the media act like a filter, selecting some types of SMOs and events for attention, and ignoring others based on characteristics of these SMOs, events, and their political environment. In contrast to this “bias model,” I argue that some media attention to SMOs is characterized by positive feedback, or rich-get-richer processes: past media attention increases the likelihood of future media attention through its effect on the SMO and on other media outlets. Like other positive feedback systems, media attention can be path dependent, is routinely punctuated by large cascades of attention to previously obscure SMOs, and can be contingent on “accidents” of history: at critical junctures, individuals, organizations, and events have the potential to radically impact the extent of media attention to their movements and organizations. Media attention to SMOs can also become decoupled from the types of events that initially sparked their media attention, becoming spokes-organizations for their movements and receiving media attention for events and stories that they themselves are not involved. In support of this theory, I first show that media attention is, similar to other positive feedback processes, power-law distributed across SMOs using two national (US) data sets. I then illustrate the process of positive feedback in media attention through a case study of the Black Panther Party's rise to prominence in media attention

The blogosphere as an excitable social medium: Richter's and Omori's Law in media coverage

We study the dynamics of public media attention by monitoring the content of online blogs. Social and media events can be traced by the propagation of word frequencies of related keywords. Media events are classified as exogenous - where blogging activity is triggered by an external news item - or endogenous where word frequencies build up within a blogging community without external influences. We show that word occurrences show statistical similarities to earthquakes. The size distribution of media events follows a Gutenberg-Richter law, the dynamics of media attention before and after the media event follows Omori's law. We present further empirical evidence that for media events of endogenous origin the overall public reception of the event is correlated with the behavior of word frequencies at the beginning of the event, and is to a certain degree predictable. These results may imply that the process of opinion formation in a human society might be related to effects known from excitable media.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

How COVID-19 displaced climate change: mediated climate change activism and issue attention in the Swiss media and online sphere

Issues continuously compete for attention in the news media and on social media. Climate change is one of the most urgent problems for society and (re)gained wide public attention in 2019 through the global climate strike protest movement. However, we hypothesize that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 challenged the role of climate change as a routine issue. We use extensive news media and Twitter data to explore if and how the pandemic as a so-called killer issue has shifted public attention away from the issue of climate change in Switzerland. Results show that the climate debate fell victim to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the news media and the Twitter-sphere. Given the vast dominance of the pandemic, there is a strong indication this finding applies similarly to various other issues. Additional hashtag co-occurrence analysis shows that some climate activists react to this development and try to connect the issue of climate change to the pandemic. We argue that suppression of climate change by the pandemic is a problem for its long-term resolution, as it seems to have turned climate change back into a struggling issue

Agenda-Setting Dynamics during COVID-19 : Who Leads and Who Follows?

The outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) has altered the way news media and social media set their agendas. The growth of social media raises questions about its potential power to set the media agenda. We gathered social media posts and online news site articles to examine agenda-setting dynamics, aiming to explore causal relationship between news media and social media. We used a computer-assisted text analysis to discover the main topics of discussion at the first wave of the pandemic in Latvia. The results revealed that (1) statistics about the pandemic, as well as pre-vention and control measures were the main topics on social media and in online news sites, and that (2) vector autoregression models provide more empirical support for the influence of online news sites on social media than reverse.publishersversionPeer reviewe

Newspaper attention and policy activities in Spain

Spain"s newspapers are characterised by strong partisan identities. We demonstrate that the two leading newspapers nonetheless show powerful similarities in the topics of their coverage over time. The media system is strongly related to the policy process and it shows similar levels of skew (attention focuses on just a few topics) and friction (attention lurches rapidly from topic to topic) as others have shown for policy processes more generally. Further, media attention is significantly related to parliamentary activities. Oral questions in parliament track closely with media attention over time. Our assessment is based on a comprehensive database of all front-page stories (over 95,000 stories) in El Paı´s and El Mundo, Spain"s largest daily newspapers, and all 7,446 oral questions from 1996 to 2009. The paper shows that explanations of friction and skew in governmental activities should incorporate media dynamics as well. Political leaders are clearly sensitive to media salience

In/visible conflicts: NGOs and the visual politics of humanitarian photography

This article examines the diverse factors shaping NGO involvement with humanitarian photography, paying particular attention to co-operative relationships with photojournalists intended to facilitate the generation of visual coverage of crises otherwise marginalised, or ignored altogether, in mainstream news media. The analysis is primarily based on a case study drawing upon 26 semi-structured interviews with NGO personnel (International Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement, Oxfam and Save the Children) and photojournalists conducted over 2014 to 2016, securing original insights into the epistemic terms upon which NGOs have sought to produce, frame and distribute imagery from recurrently disregarded crisis zones. In this way, the article pinpoints how the uses of digital imagery being negotiated by NGOs elucidate the changing, stratified geo-politics of visibility demarcating the visual boundaries of newsworthiness

A Hyperlink Analysis on the Food Safety Issue in Germany

This article focuses on the constellations of actors engaged in the food safety debate in Germany and the potential of civil society organizations for mobilization and politicization of the issue. In an exploratory case study we assess the structure of communication between these organizations by applying hyperlink analysis. Our study sheds light on the nature of the issue network and in particular on their linkages with media and political actors. We interpret communication network patterns with respect to civil society actors' opportunities to make food safety salient on the agenda and to mobilize around it and politicize it. In fact, our empirical study shows that the structure of linkages between civil society actors, media organizations and political actors in Germany offers favourable opportunities for making the food safety issue salient and for politicizing it in the offline world

In/visible conflicts: NGOs and the visual politics of humanitarian photography

This article examines the diverse factors shaping NGO involvement with humanitarian photography, paying particular attention to co-operative relationships with photojournalists intended to facilitate the generation of visual coverage of crises otherwise marginalised, or ignored altogether, in mainstream news media. The analysis is primarily based on a case study drawing upon 26 semi-structured interviews with NGO personnel (International Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement, Oxfam and Save the Children) and photojournalists conducted over 2014 to 2016, securing original insights into the epistemic terms upon which NGOs have sought to produce, frame and distribute imagery from recurrently disregarded crisis zones. In this way, the article pinpoints how the uses of digital imagery being negotiated by NGOs elucidate the changing, stratified geo-politics of visibility demarcating the visual boundaries of newsworthiness