LONG VIOLENT HISTORY: THE NEWS VALUES OF THE BLACKJEWEL COAL MINER
PROTEST
______
A Thesis
presented to
the Faculty of the Graduate School
at the University of Missouri-Columbia
______
In Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
______
By
MARLEE BALDRIDGE
Dr. Amanda Hinnant, Thesis Supervisor
DECEMBER, 2020
The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the thesis entitled
LONG VIOLENT HISTORY: NEWS VALUES IN THE BLACKJEWEL COAL MINER PROTEST
Presented by Marlee Baldridge, a candidate for the degree of master of journalism, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, is worthy of acceptance.
______
Professor Amanda Hinnant
______
Professor Rebecca Scott
______
Professor Sungkyoung Lee
______
Professor Ryan Thomas ii
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my committee for their efforts on this thesis. Dr. Hinnant, Dr. Thomas, Dr.
Scott, and Dr. Lee took the time to give me their insight despite the many hiccups this project faced. I would also like to thank Dr. Hinnant for permission to pursue a mixed-methods study, which was enormously rewarding. I encourage anyone who does not find graduate student life as stressful as they’d like to do the same.
I would also like to thank the invisible committee whose names do not appear on the paperwork. My family always had advice, which included suggesting I bribe the IRB office to speed up my approval process. Beatriz Costa Lima, Jon Stemmle, and Katy Cawdrey-Culp were friendly advisors and on more than one occasion had the opportunity to say, "I told you so," but were gracious enough not to over-do it. Gabe Schneider influenced how I thought about diversity in newsrooms, and had seemingly endless patience for my complaints. James Lewis, my best friend, made sure I was eating, even 600 miles away. My gratitude for this group of people is fierce and profound.
My biggest advocate in j-school (many students’ biggest advocate) isn’t here, and can’t see the journalists he helped succeed. Simply put: Without Mark Hinojosa, I wouldn’t have ever worked in media, or gone on to grad school. Wherever he is, I hope the martinis are well-chilled and well-mixed. He is terribly missed. iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ...... vi
LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 3
RQ1: How do journalists perceive what the news values of the protest are? ...... 4
RQ2: What news values appear in protest coverage of the Blackjewel miners? ...... 10
Why Mixed Methods...... 16
METHODOLOGY ...... 17
In-Depth Interviews...... 17
Content Analysis...... 20
FINDINGS ...... 23
In-Depth Interviews ...... 23
Reporting Background ...... 24
News Values Themes ...... 26
Protest Coverage Content ...... 29
Perceptions of Audience ...... 36
Content Analysis ...... 38
General Findings ...... 38
Themes Identified with Reporters Interviewed ...... 40
DISCUSSION ...... 47
The Research Questions ...... 47
iv
Importance of Understanding Context in News Values ...... 47
The Subjectivity and Complexity of News Values ...... 50
Implications...... 52
Importance of Mixed Methods...... 53
Future Research on News Values ...... 55
Limitations ...... 58
CONCLUSION ...... 60
REFERENCES ...... 62
APPENDIX A ...... 72
Coding Scheme ...... 72
APPENDIX B ...... 73
Interview Questions ...... 73
v
TABLE OF FIGURES
REGIONAL REPORTER 1 ...... 40
REGIONAL REPORTER 2 ...... 41
REGIONAL REPORTERS 3 & 4 ...... 43
NATIONAL REPORTER 1 ...... 45
NATIONAL REPORTER 2 ...... 46
vi
Abstract
How do journalists cover those outside of their own experience? As researchers study newsroom diversity, this has been one of the most pressing issues on editors and publishers as they try to improve trust with marginalized communities and diversity in their own newsroom. This led me to a very simple question: How well do journalists understand their own coverage? I used the explanatory structure suggested by Creswell and Plano Clark (2011) to develop in-depth interviews, which were then contextualized by content analysis. I compared the analysis of what the journalists thought they portrayed in their writing, and what actually appeared. Ultimately, I found that while the reporters I interviewed had fine-tuned control over depicting the conflict and impact value of a news story, they struggled with other elements. I also found in the interviews there are implications about how newsrooms think of news values, and more research is needed to understand how descriptive news values influence coverage.
NEWS VALUES OF THE BLACKJEWEL COAL MINER PROTEST 1
Introduction
In 1931, the family of union leader Sam Reece was terrorized by local Harlan County police forces in retaliation for Reece’s organized labor activities against local mine bosses. Some members of the police illegally entered the home to search for Reece, while others waited outside for his return. When Reece failed to appear, the men left. That night, wife Florence Reece recounts that she tore a page from a calendar on the wall and wrote the song “Which Side Are
You On?” which has since been covered most famously by Peter Seeger and referenced by Bob
Dylan (Serrin, 1984). Reece would say later, “There's no such thing as neutral. You have to be on one side or the other. Some people say, 'I don't take sides – I'm neutral.' There's no such thing.
In your mind you're on one side or the other.” (Labor Heritage Foundation, 2009)
Harlan County, Kentucky, has a long and violent history within the coal industry that started in the 1920s. This incident of local terrorism was one of many of the Harlan County War in which union leaders and coal firms would attempt to intimidate each other over working conditions and pay. More than once people on both sides of the skirmish would die, and more than once the national guard would be called to bring some semblance of peace to the area.
This bit of history illustrates a cultural heritage of protest, coal, and worker’s pride that is deeply embedded in Appalachian coal country. Harlan County, Kentucky, is also where this case study takes place. While the researcher’s analysis of the Blackjewel coal miner protest is not intended to be extrapolated to a general population, we can be assured that this protest will be far from the last protest in Harlan County and the results found here can be used in future coverage of this complicated community as well as others who experience similar protest patterns.
The song “Which Side Are You On?” also encapsulates a larger, broader question to journalists. American journalism is once again wrestling with itself over what “objectivity” 2 means in the context of protests and riots against police brutality and a white supremacist system
(Schneider, 2020). Black journalists have spoken out about the unjust actions taken against them for behavior that has been perceived as bias (Lowrey, 2020). Citizens have taken direct, and occasionally physically violent, action against journalists that they have viewed as threats to civil rights activists and their work (Snowbeck, 2020). These actions speak to a larger mistrust of the media and its ability to represent the protest movement fairly, a mistrust that has been earned over decades of protest coverage (Bray, 2012). Protestors insist that the media cannot remain neutral; it is impossible, and that silence itself is picking a side. Which side are you on?
It has been argued that diversity in journalism depends on reporting corps representative of the community to participate in community coverage. This argument has mixed support in the literature and among newsroom managers, who might argue that reporters should allow their background to inform—but not influence—their reporting, however contradictory that might seem to media sociology scholars (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2001). What is supported by the literature is that marginalized communities feel consistently misrepresented in news (Bui, 2018).
Gitlin would argue that this is simply the status quo being perpetuated, to keep those already in power in power (Gitlin, 1978). Media sociology asks us to consider how news works, and in whose interest (Shoemaker & Reese, 2014). My thesis does not deal directly with stereotypes, but rather takes a closer look at how those stereotypes might manifest in news by examining the most low-level of the Hierarchy of Influences on journalism (Shoemaker & Reese, 2014) by focusing on individual choices of what appears in news coverage. I seek to contribute to the literature surrounding coverage of marginalized communities, and ask the question: How well do journalists understand their own news values? I found the only effective way to answer this was
3 by doing a mixed-method study involving content analysis and in-depth interviews, using the qualitative nature of the interviews to explicate the data drawn from content analysis.
I will review the protest and move on to literature surrounding news routines and values, coverage of marginalized communities, and finally how class and labor issues have been discussed in previous literature.
Literature Review
Overview of the Blackjewel coal miner protest. In June of 2019, the Blackjewel coal mining company declared bankruptcy. In late July, miners arrived to work to find the mine locked and barred to entry: This is how workers found out they’d been laid off. Checks written by miners suddenly bounced as funds that had been pending in bank accounts were “clawed back” (Adams, 2019). While Blackjewel violated Kentucky law in doing this, it was not guaranteed that the miners could be paid, which depended wholly on Blackjewel’s ability to cover debts from different creditors and still have money left over. This is how miners found out they would not be receiving the last of their paychecks. On July 29th, a text was sent to the former workers by a woman who had seen a coal train prepped for departure from a neighboring processing plant. In retaliation, miners blocked a train with $1.4 million worth of coal with pick- up trucks, keeping it from departing Harlan County, Kentucky (Boyle, 2019a). The blockade lasted 59 days, before the train was ordered to remain there by a federal judge until the miner’s dispute was resolved. Most miners had already taken up new jobs or moved on, forced to find new sources for a paycheck they’d thought they’d never see (Boyle, 2019b). One mining family was quoted as having to leave the protest before the bank foreclosed on their home (Boyle,
2019b). In October, the Blackjewel mining company was forced by a West Virginia bankruptcy judge to pay $5.1 million back to the miners.
4
This protest was peaceful, and saw somewhat of a happy ending with miners legally promised some of what they were due. While not large, and perhaps only a dozen families at its peak, the protest captured national and local headlines. Local politicians and activists glommed onto the protest to try and boost their given agendas. Bernie Sanders sent the miners a pizza at one point. “There were other people who tried to sort of … get some publicity for themselves out of their talks with the miners,” noted one regional reporter. The story was ripe for intersecting beats: There was ample room for an environmentalism angle, a business angle, a political angle, and a labor angle. The coverage of this protest also had the potential to also fall into well-worn tropes about coal country and poverty-stricken communities in rural America.
News values are the decision-making tool that newsrooms use to determine coverage
(Parks, 2019). They can help reporters decide what should and should not be covered as pressures of news production schedules try to keep up with audience demand, and are a part of the news routines that help get news out the door and to the public (Gans, 2003). However, the connection between one of the most basic routines and how it influences framing in news product is not completely understood (and cannot explain everything, as Harcup and O’Neill point out in both their 2017 and 2001 study), which means we do not completely understand how unconscious bias around communities like Appalachia work.
RQ1: How do journalists perceive what the news values of the protest are?
News routines. We write our personal values into every story, even when we believe we are being fully objective (Scammell, Semetko, & Tuchman, 1972). Gaye Tuchman, a sociologist, broke ground with two works addressing the biases of newsrooms that stem from the sociological makeup of the staff. Objective in journalism doesn’t necessarily mean “unbiased”
(Shoemaker & Reese, 2014).
5
How our lived experiences influence our news values, and therefore, news product, is a small but important link to create between the literature that has shown that diversity is lacking in newsrooms and why diversity is important, which is a subject that my thesis addresses much more broadly by asking what news values journalists pay attention to. Without the “so what” of diversity, diversifying simply for the sake of equity isn’t going to convince problematic newsrooms (Lawrence, 1991). Some studies and media criticism have suggested the effective coverage of minority community issues is correlated with minorities in newsroom leadership
(Bui, 2018; Heider, 1996). This is seemingly contradicted in a more recent study that examined correlations between community trust and newsroom diversity (Adams & Cleary, 2006). The study found that, actually, community trust went down over time as the newsrooms gained more
Black reporters (Adams & Cleary, 2006). On its face, this seems to undermine the entire premise of the importance of newsroom diversity. However, it brings up an important issue:
Representation does not translate to inclusion. Representation can’t move the needle on coverage if the newsroom’s values remain the same. This is reflected most recently in the Longform
Podcast interview with executive editor of The New York Times Dean Baquet (Baquet, 2020). On this podcast, he speaks about the recent spat of hiring the Times went through, and admits, “We expected them to come in and be just like us.” Later, he admits that this has caused a rift in company culture, as younger journalists feel their voices are not heard nor represented in company leadership.
To better understand how values (both in news and in newsroom culture) are created and defined, it helps to revisit Shoemaker and Reese’s Hierarchy of Influences model (Shoemaker &
Reese, 2014). Social systems, social institutions, media organizations, routine practices, and individuals all have some degree of influence on what content newsrooms produce. For this
6 research, I am focusing on the more micro-levels of production, on the individual and the routine. However, my findings, as Shoemaker and Reese would agree, will none-the-less be affected by the more macro-level influences to some degree.
The seminal study published by Herbert Gans furthered the study of objectivity rituals (a routine-level influence) and underlined that “objectivity” does not actually mean unbiased, but rather acts as a shield from professional criticism (2004). His study, originally conducted in the
1970s, echoed the findings of the Kerner Report (Kerner Commission, 1968). Minority communities were covered differently, even as news values were supposedly “objective” for all
(Kerner Commission, 1968). The source of this defensive strategy seems to stem from news
“process” building, that is, putting news on an assembly line (Gitlin, 1980). This assembly line in the newsroom helps meet the high demands of news consumers. It also seems to introduce problematic coverage habits, which include falling back on discriminatory coverage habits if this is the “culture” of the newsroom, or how the newsroom “has always covered these things”
(Breed, 1955).
Fishman theorized that the very nature of reporting, of interacting with the environment, influences the event and therefore the news product itself (Fishman, 1980). By inserting themselves into the dialogue, by simply interpreting events, they are creating a narrative that cannot be unbiased. This is manifested in the “routine.” How do we actually report the news, as a process? Innumerable studies have drawn lines between a reporter’s background and what manifests in their journalism (Correa & Harp, 2011; Armstrong, 2004). The question remains of how this news is selected. The prevailing thought is that no matter where journalists come from, they are going to be able to identify the same stories as important through an indoctrination of what “news values” are (Fedler, Smith, Marzolf, & Jeter, 1996).
7
News values and their place in routines. News values have shifted and changed over time, reflecting what newsrooms have considered news (Parks, 2019). It’s also worth it to note that there are different ways of thinking about news values. There are what Jackie Harrison would call “normative” news values, or what journalists should do. This Harrison defines as a general disposition towards “truthfulness,” and an interest in understanding contemporary events
(Harrison, 2009). Then, there is the descriptive use of “news values.” Parks has outlined how even the definitions of what stories are “newsworthy” have shifted over the years, with values moving from the narratively exciting to the impactful (2019). Harrison argues that “normative” values guides journalists on which “descriptive” values to pay attention to in any given story
(2009). Values have shifted as the function of news has, which includes from a business perspective. Allern found that an intended audience significantly effects the news values, that they are a business-based decision as much as an editorial one, which echoes Hamilton and
Morgan’s findings as they studied news ecosystems in poorer neighborhoods (2017; 2018).
Harcup and O’Neill have updated their study of Galtung and Ruge’s classic study of news values to include how social media influences our definition of news values, though there is little consensus (2017). Fedler et. al found that news values were largely the same across gender and racial lines among college sophomores in journalism classes, but saw a significant difference between those who’d participated in high school journalism classes and those who hadn’t (1996).
This might be an anomaly attributable to the experience of the journalist. Clearly, journalists with more experience will have more finely-tuned news values than those with little experience.
However, Callahan (1998) found that racial minorities were far less likely to participate in high school media largely due to underfunding. Fedler’s findings might also be an indication of haves and have-nots, of news values shifting according to socio-economic status and life experiences.
8
This would agree with Donsbach’s study, which found social environments have a large effect on how journalists make news decisions and decide what is “newsworthy” (2004).
It is these experiences that translates into the “gut instinct” of a journalist’s news values, as articulated in Friedman’s and Laurison’s interview with an upper-level manager at the BBC.
In the interview, the manager admits that much of his success is knowing how to navigate the culture of television. He even wears the “right” shoes, and admits he doesn’t really know why.
This is one example of unspoken rules within newsrooms, otherwise known as news routines, that can help determine who is and is not successful. Gitlin would argue that the administrative view determines that those that function best within a given institution are less likely to change it, and we can easily apply this to newsrooms on the individual level (Gitlin, 1978). This upper- level manager, from an elite background and extensive industry experience, functions best within this system, and might not view it as a thing to be changed. This becomes a real problem when the institution is tasked with covering communities outside of this elite experience, including communities like Harlan (Gitlin, 1978).
The Problems Covering Marginalized Communities Today. While American studies are thin, the United Kingdom has made a point of tracking the socioeconomic backgrounds of those entering the journalism workforce. Studies within the UK have found that journalism is consistently one of the most class-restrictive industries (Spilsbury, 2013). A recent study that examined demographics within The New York Times and The Washington Post have found that the nation’s top newspapers cultivate an “elite” culture, where the likelihood of a journalist having a private or ivy-league education is significantly higher than in the average population
(Wai & Perina, 2018).
9
This is potentially reflecting in the lack of comprehensive coverage of labor issues
(Martin, 2019). Working class audiences feel this neglect, and articulate dissatisfaction with both the inferior coverage and news quality they see in their communities (Greenhouse, 2019;
Hamilton & Morgan, 2018; Bryant, 2017). Hamilton and Morgan have connected this information gap with the phenomenon of newspapers retreating up-market as they vie for financial stability (2018). However, this can also mean that a news organization’s content shifts to reflect the values of more affluent audiences (Backlund, 2019). This alienation doesn’t just belong to poor and working-class audiences. A study from the American Press Institute has suggested Black and brown people do not trust mainstream news sources because they don't see their communities represented accurately (2014). A case study of the dissatisfaction in coverage in Madison in 2015 revealed ethnic community’s distaste for “white-wing media” (Robinson &
Culver, 2019). Even journalists who identify with marginalized communities think their own papers could be doing better at coverage (Bernt & Greenwald, 1992).
The first research questions seeks to explore how accurately journalists understand their coverage through content analysis. My second research question wants to test how aware journalists are of their own biases that they bring to the table, which can be answered through in- depth interviews. Understanding how they view their audience, their experience, and the news value of their story is a key part of this. If journalists cannot accurately describe what made the story newsworthy to them, and have this translated through their coverage, then we can then better learn where unintentional bias is introduced and also how problematic coverage areas, like marginalized communities, can have their coverage improved. This is the history and the theories we have about how journalists approach stories, but there isn’t a lot of scholarly connective tissue between what the journalists perceived and what appeared.
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RQ2: What news values appear in protest coverage of the Blackjewel miners?
Previous Depictions of Coal Country in Media. Before we can get to the point of asking the question of what news values appeared in the Blackjewel miner protest, it is helpful to understand how “coal country,” and to a little extent Appalachia itself, has been depicted in modern news media. The area is broadly defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission as spanning 13 states and includes 420 counties, from just south of New York to just north of
Mississippi (Meit, Heffernan, Tanenbaum, & Hoffman, 2017). In a 2017 study prepared by the
Walsh Center for Rural Public Health, data indicated that overall mortality was greater in the
Appalachian region, and among people 25 to 34 the “disease of despair” mortality rate was more than 50% higher than in non-Appalachian counties. Diseases of despair in this report were categorized as alcoholic liver disease/cirrhosis, suicide, and perhaps most infamously for this region, overdose. Previous analysis conducted on media framing of the opioid epidemic in
Appalachia indicates that this problem is often “othered” in national media discourse and systemic issues underlying the problem rarely discussed (Schrader, 2018). This has been echoed by local journalists and writers (NeCamp, 2020; Young & Resource, 2020). The wealth from natural resources, often called the “paradox of plenty,” has suppressed its growth and economic diversification as a region and contributed to generational poverty, poor infrastructure, and low political participation, which local journalist Jeff Young has written about and political theorists
Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita have outlined extensively as a phenomenon
(Young & Resource, 2020; Smith & de Mesquita, 2011). The “low political participation” in the traditional way, voting, is especially notable and present in Appalachia, which is often cast as
“Trump Country” even as studies have shown us that greater income inequality is directly linked to less electoral participation (Solt, 2010). In fact, Appalachia had some of the lowest voter
11 turnout in the country in 2020 (Ohio Valley ReSource, 2020). This “otherness” and disengagement is translated into popular media regularly.
“Which Side Are You On,” is hardly the only popular song to come out of coal country, or even Harlan County. Darrell Scott’s fatalistic “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,” has been covered by country stars and used as a theme in AMC’s Justified TV series. The area is popular as a setting in film, literature, and comic books. Perhaps the most timely example is the new
Netflix-produced adaption of Hillbilly Elegy, a best-selling autobiography that has earned scorn from locals as self-help propaganda that ignores systemic issues of the region (Sexton & Ray,
2020). Even videogames have their share of coal-centric Appalachian narratives, from cult- classic indie games like Night in the Woods, in which coal country is depicted as an economic and spiritual wasteland, to multi-million-dollar titles like Fallout 76, in which coal country is depicted as a literal wasteland. In podcasts, Appalachia is used as a backdrop for mystery, such as in the “Amnesty” arc for popular Dungeons and Dragons podcast The Adventure Zone, or centered as a cultural touchstone, such as in the progressive political Trillbilly Worker’s Party podcast. For an area of the world so well-represented in popular culture, it is almost an aspect of its character to be “rough” and “unknowable.” In pop star Taylor Swift’s music video for “You
Need To Calm Down,” (which currently has more than 227 million views on YouTube [Swift,
2019]) poor, rural whites coded to be Southern/Appalachian are caricatured into bigots (Lewis,
2019). Even our pronunciation of the region differs without consensus, some pronouncing the region Appal-LATCH-a, others Appal-LAY-shuh. It should come as no surprise that the news media often struggle with mediating an honest “reality” for this complicated area of the United
States. The dismissal the region faces falls on both sides of the political spectrum (Young &
Resource, 2020). Samantha NeCoup, at a panel discussing how Appalachia and coal has been
12 covered by journalists over the years, said this distaste was developed in the 1880s as popular writers satirized the area. “And by viewing things through the lens of ‘otherness,’ we deny responsibility of institutions,” NeCoup said (NeCamp, 2020). This unknowability was commented on by a few of those reporters interviewed for this study and cited by a national labor reporter as a key reason to cover the protest: “I think this story offered … people within these communities are a lot more than what that stereotype perpetuates.”
A review essay published in the Journal of Appalachian Studies discussed the 2016 NPR event called “A View from Appalachia,” a tour of three states where reporters interviewed residents for their thoughts on the upcoming presidential election. The reviewers were from
Appalachian studies and media studies, and the consensus was that NPR made a strong effort to illustrate the variety of life in the region it still fell back on stereotypes of poverty and helplessness (Four Views on NPR's "A View from Appalachia,” 2016). In mass news media, the coal industry is often paired with imagery associated with the military (Kitch, 2007). Accidents in coal mines are framed within a myth-making frame of the working class man making a
“sacrifice” to feed his family and keep the nation powered, especially by national cable-news channels, and only covered nationally when tragedy strikes (Martin, 2006). Rarely do stories focus on the coal companies themselves as culpable for shoddy safety practices, unless the newspaper is local (Kitch, 2007; Martin, 2006).
This might be due to journalism’s complicated relationship to coal interests. A study published in Australia suggested that coal controls which narratives it participates in, boosting its business interests and downplaying environmental effects through media (Bacon & Nash, 2012).
And this subject itself is a very important component to the coverage of the Blackjewel protests.
Nearly all reporters mentioned in their interviews the decline of coal as a big contributor to
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Appalachia’s struggle with poverty and the overarching air of desperation over the protest. Coal jobs, while famously deadly and unsustainable, are nearby, well-paying jobs for those without college degrees. They offer a chance for a middle-class life in a part of the country where there is almost no other real industry. A local reporter interviewed for this study commented that this was by design. “So much of the dominant American understanding is of Appalachia as this, you know, sort-of hillbilly backwater. But there are real challenges here, and those challenges were created intentionally in order for the [coal] companies to retain their stranglehold.”
Racial and class disparities in protest coverage. The kind of news a local consumer might see is heavily dependent on socioeconomic status (Hamilton & Morgan, 2018). Hamilton has worked extensively with the economics of news, and with Morgan found that newspapers in poorer neighborhoods were fundamentally different, the researchers use the words “poorer quality,” than that of news in wealthier neighborhoods (2018). Is this a question of the journalist writing for the audience, or being limited by a paper’s resources? Is this a question of dismissing normative news values in favor of more descriptive news values? My thesis asks how accurate a journalist’s perception of their own coverage is, but a part of that is understanding what the journalist identified as the important parts of the story and who they were writing the story for.
Was it the audience that they felt limited by, or was it the paper’s resources?
There is some evidence of the “deviance” angle of strikes and protests being downplayed by the American press over the past 50 years but there is also evidence of a shifting framing taking place (Maurão, Kilgo, & Sylvie, 2018;Boyle, McCluskey, Mcleod, & Stein, 2005; Martin,
2008). New frames focus on the legitimacy of the cause over the deviance of the protestors, but this too changes based on the cause and if reporting is episodic or contextual (Maurão, Kilgo, &
Sylvie, 2018; Kilgo & Harlow, 2019). Recent literature has even found that the “protest
14 paradigm” is affected by region and topic (Kilgo & Harlow, 2019). There is scant literature over how protests in Appalachia are covered as compared to more urban or coastal protests. Boyle,
Mcleod, and Armstrong (2012) found that coverage of a protest depends almost entirely on its tactics, which can be region and goal-dependent, though the goals of a protest had almost no influence on how it was covered. This is useful for understanding how labor can be covered, and how the Blackjewel protest might be covered given its peaceful tactics and relatively micro-level goal. It’s also worth noting that the labor beat has seen significant cuts over the last fifty years that has also affected how labor protests are covered (Martin, 2019). A study from the 1980s covering a coal protest in the UK found that coverage of the strike often oversimplified goals and framed the conflict as individuals warring against each other rather than discussing problematic safety guidelines or the merits of wage increases (Wade, 1985). More recently, as newspapers retreat upmarket in the continuing corportization of news, their audiences change shape, and this influences the frame of their coverage, as described by Occupy Wallstreet member Mark Bray
(2012). Martin has found extensive evidence of the reframing of labor strikes and protests happening over time in major American media markets (2008).
Racial injustice protests have seen clear differences in coverage than protests that don’t challenge a “status quo,” like the Women’s March protests (Kilgo & Harlow, 2019; Gitlin,
1980). While protests around the environment, health, or immigrants rights are viewed through a lens of validation, protests around racial injustice are viewed through a “delegitimatization” lens, and are less likely to have their demands explained to mainstream news consumers (Kilgo &
Harlow, 2019). The reporters I interviewed were largely sympathetic to the miners, despite the protest having stepped outside what would usually be considered “normative” behavior.
However, Leopold and Bell would argue that this might be due to the white protestors, and not
15 necessarily the labor element itself, and more research is needed to better understand the differences between how white and Black protests are covered (Leopold & Bell, 2017).
The decline of the labor beat. This brings us to a much broader question about how labor has been covered that should be addressed, if briefly. The American labor beat has seen sharp ups and downs in the past hundred years. Martin has an entire bibliography demonstrating how labor protest issues are often either dismissed (2008) or ignored completely (2019). This is often connected by Martin to the reliance upon advertising, and the need to pursue wealthier and wealthier audiences to sell to advertisers, and so as newspapers become more of a luxury good, the prevalence of working-class issues gradually fell off the coverage table. In 2014, only two of the top 25 publishers in the country had a dedicated labor reporter, The New York Times and the
Wall Street Journal (Martin, 2019). The labor beat slowly deteriorated for much of the late 20th century before recently making somewhat of a rebound, even if that only means the prominence of the issue of classism in newsrooms being addressed (Backlund 2019). Today, labor reporters are most often freelance or a part of an online publisher, such as VICE News or Vox Media. This lack of coverage has been addressed in opinion pages in the past, but not in-depth by scholarship
(Greenhouse, 2019).
News Values. Of course, each of these elements are defined by “news values.” Parks,
(2019) who I base most of my content analysis schema on, says they define how journalists select news, “trained tendencies that shape the reported world while rendering invisible those people and events that do not meet explicit or implicit standards of newsworthiness.” (p. 785)
The element this study was most interested in was the awareness on the reporter’s part of these
“trained” decisions as they happened, and what kind of insight hindsight provided reporters.
Research over news values (and not even considering gatekeeping, agenda-setting, or frames,
16 which overlap with news values) has been around since media scholarship has existed in
American media as outlined in a working paper by Bednarek and Caple (2013). I will be focusing on the interaction between the journalist and the news values as a decision-making process, specifically the “intuitive” nature of these news values.
Today, we can consider the key values to be some variation of: Prominence, proximity, timeliness, impact, novelty, and conflict (Parks, 2019). They are the stick that journalists use to measure potential stories against before they are covered, and ubiquitous in newsrooms
(Shoemaker & Reese, 2014). If we were to look at news values through a functionalist lens, they are our shorthand for defining what to cover one story over another. Yet, they have been difficult to measure, perhaps because Tuchman’s 1970s finding is still correct today: Journalists rely on gut instinct to determine the “newsworthiness” of a story (Harcup & O’Neill, 2017; Scammell,
Semetko, & Tuchman, 1972). The gut instinct is influenced by different factors, which play off each other and help journalists in their jobs to mediate reality (Galtung & Ruge, 1965). In their classic study, Galtung and Ruge (1965) established a kind of algorithm for how news events are selected, highlighting how predictable these news values can be. In their update on this study,
Harcup and O’Neill found that the same rules still apply to most stories forty years later and what events will be covered is still largely predictable (2001). This “doxa,” as Schultz defines it, is instinctual and fine-tuned with experience (2007). In her analysis, Schultz outlined that some news values (such as the traditional ones outlined above) are industry standards and outside the realms of debate (2007), despite their ephemeral nature. However, these values are not as absolute as they seem.
Why Mixed Methods.
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Mixed methods is recommended by Plano Clark and Creswell if there is a need to enhance initial findings and explain initial results, both of which my study falls under (2011). My thesis is interested in causal relationships between news values and individual journalists, which seemed to necessitate quantitative methods. However, those initial quantitative results would be useless without context, which only qualitative research could provide. The content analysis would yield a snapshot of this particular portrayed reality (Wimmer & Dominick, 2006), yet I would not be able to extrapolate intent from the data, which was the key part of my research question. In-depth interviews, on the other hand, could provide that insight but not any meaningful data on the reality (Morris, 2015). Having the interview data contextualized within the content analysis was the only real way to judge my research questions, with the ultimate goal to better understand how journalists cover the marginalized and disenfranchised. Whatever data I gathered would need to include both kinds of analysis to yield any really useful scholarship, and so I settled on performing a case study of a single issue with plenty of intersectionality. I decided on an explanatory design as proposed by Creswell and Plano Clark (2011). Using content analysis, I observed which news values appeared in reporting about Blackjewel. In the second phase, I performed semi-structured in-depth interviews with the journalists themselves to help provide insight into my initial data collection. This allowed me to answer the question of how well journalists actually understand their own reporting when covering communities different from their own.
Methodology
In-Depth Interviews.
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Interviews help us understand individual motivations with far more nuance and complexity than with other methods (Morris, 2015). This gave me insight into the self-awareness of the journalist and their relationship to news routines and values. Interviews have given us more useful data when interrogating confusing or conflict within the system and provide insight into systemic pressures in the newsroom that might manifest in management styles or deadlines
(Everbach, 2006; Ryfe, 2009). This is why I wanted to use interviews specifically, and not a survey, because I wanted to better understand a holistic view of what kind of pressures the journalists faced as they covered Harlan.
A thematic analysis of interviews was conducted and a codebook developed as described by Ando, Cousins, and Young (2014). After reading through transcripts stored on a secure transcribing software service and correcting the transcript, and then reading once more while taking notes, initial coding began. Themes were synthesized in the method suggested by Braun and Clarke (2006) and illustrated by Ando et. al (2014).
Sample. Fourteen journalists who were identified as covering the Blackjewel coal miner protest often (more than once a month) were approached first by phone and email. In the end, six journalists agreed to be interviewed, and interviews were conducted over the phone and lasted between 20 minutes and almost an hour. These journalists were be identified through bylines in the sample and through the “author” sort function in Factiva, and were later sought through coverage from local publications, which Factiva lacked.
Operationalization. These interviews were coded according to date, organization, participant name, and quality of interview, and stored in an organization software, along with scanned releases.
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Their responses were coded along themes of frequency of coverage and how they viewed their own coverage. These codes were refined as-needed throughout the research process (Ando,
Cousins, & Young, 2014). They were asked questions around three topics: the reporter’s past experience; why they covered the protest; and to reflect on their coverage. Questions within these three topics included: how long they had been working at their current publication; had they covered similar protests; what was their experience in the region (which tested Kilgo &
Harlow, 2019, and Shultz, 2007); What directed them to the story; how they knew it was newsworthy; what value did they find during their reporting; and what differences they identified in local vs. national reporting (which tested Harcup & O’Neill, 2017, Shultz 2007, and Allern
2017); what they would have improved, if they could; and what would they have changed?
Which tested Gans, 2003, and Bray, 2012. For details on the probes within these questions, please see appendix B.
While fourteen reporters were contacted for this study, only six ultimately decided to participate, four of these being local reporters responsible for nearly half of the articles analyzed.
As Ando et al. (2014) suggests, this was enough to reach data saturation for a few themes, and interesting interactions to occur between them. Of those interviewed, two were national reporters and four were local reporters. All had written print stories on the subject and had been reporters for more than five years, and had previous reporting experience in Appalachia, though not all reporters had covered protests before. Interviews ranged from twenty minutes to nearly an hour long. They were asked about: 1) Their past experiences in reporting; 2) Why and how they covered the protest; 3) Reflections on their coverage of the Harlan coal miner protest. Because the elements of the very story itself influenced news values, I further distinguished between news values and news content. For more specific questions and probes, please see the appendix B.
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The first set of questions sought to establish what preconceptions the reporters might have about the area and to what degree their career might have influenced their read of the news values of the protest, testing Kilgo & Harlow (2019) and Shultz (2007). Understanding the established news values of the reporter coming into the protest was necessary for measuring how their news values were applied later, as they were covering the protest. The second set of question used the earlier questions as a springboard for testing Allern (2017), Harcup and
O’Niell (2017) and Shultz (2007) again. I was challenged by the results on their preconceived notions of audience, news hook, and instinct in covering the story. The third set of questions allowed room for nuance and explored more of the possible editorial challenges that would explain content analysis data. One reporter commented on a frustrating lack of time, and others commented on the difficulty of getting direct quotes from Blackjewel lawyers, which would have influenced the number of sources these journalists got. All of this plays into how Gans (2004) theorized newsmaking as a constant challenge and back and forth between journalists and their managers, and Bray’s essay (2012) about news media seeking out certain story elements over others. Themes from the interviews appeared rather quickly, despite the limited number of interviewees. These themes are broken down in the “findings” section.
Content Analysis.
My first research question, which asks what news values appear in protest coverage for
Blackjewel, was quantitative in nature, relying on content analysis to observe trends in the articles. I followed the content analysis with qualitative interviews with the journalists who wrote them to discern deeper themes, a methods design previously used by Tanikawa (2017). Content analysis allowed me to examine the messages and the “reality,” and has been used to study media’s image of specific groups in society (Wimmer & Dominick, 2006). What news values are
21 apparent in coverage of the protest, and why are they there? I performed an analysis of the newspaper articles written about the protest, both from the national and local levels, from the first of June to the end of October, 2019.
Sample. The final sample size was 47 articles that two coders analyzed, with one coder replacing another later in the study, which were found by searching “Blackjewel AND protest” in Factiva. Exact duplicates were deleted, and articles not directly dealing with the protest were ignored. Another coder was brought on to replace one coder as the original became too busy to recode to reach reliability. Because Factiva does not include local coverage, so three regional papers were identified and the same search was applied; These included the Courier-Journal, in
Louisville, the Lexington Herald-Leader, in Lexington, and Charleston Gazette-Mail out of West
Virginia. A subscription was bought to both the Herald-Leader and Courier-Journal for access to all coverage, but many articles focused only on the bankruptcy and only covered the protest peripherally. These were eliminated.
Coding Scheme. From this sample, I observed news values as they appear in news stories. Traditional news values, as defined by Park’s research, are as follows: proximity, timeliness, prominence, human interest, conflict, and consequence/impact (Parks, 2019). I coded these values “ABSENT” ( or numerically zero) or “PRESENT” (or numerically one) within the news stories, using the following respective definitions described by Park’s analysis: the nearness of a news event to readers, the “new-ness” of an event, how socially powerful the subject is, how traditional the narrative arc is, emphasis of drama and strife, and the potential to affect a reader’s everyday life.
Definitions of variables were outlined to increase inter-coder reliability. If the article was published by a paper that frequently covers the area around Harlan County, then the publication
22 can be considered local, and "proximity" a news value. If the article mentioned powerful political figures, activists, or similar local "celebrities," then "prominence" could be considered a news value. If the article captured human-centered drama and conflict, either suffering or joy, using sources directly affected by the events covered in the article (Parks, 2019), then “human interest” was generally considered a news value. If the article portrayed two sides to an issue without absolution or is ongoing, conflict would be considered a news value. If the article is published within 48 hours of the update or news event that occurred, timeliness could be considered a news value. If the article covered policy, events, or ideas that would directly affect the audience of the publication (for example, federal policy would be “societal,” but an announcement for a charity drive would be “community,”) then "Impact" could be considered a news value, and the coder was asked to select an option of “NO CONSEQUENCE / INDIVIDUAL LEVEL /
COMMUNITY GROUP / REGIONAL / SOCIETAL.” Of course, more than one realm of consequence could be applicable in a story, and coders were asked to simply select the highest level of application. These definitions proved troublesome, which will be discussed later in the thesis. For details on the coding scheme, please see appendix A.
More on this decision will be discussed in the general findings of the content analysis.
Because of the low reliability of news values between coders, in the interest of transparency the scores for each of the reporters have been displayed. An average was taken of the reporter’s data for each news value across the body of work that was analyzed. It should be noted that some articles in the reporter’s work might have a value that another may not, such as one article published within 48 hours (and thus have a “timeliness” value) while another may be missing this value. The interviews only dealt with reporters reflecting on their full body of work, however, and so an average is appropriate in this case. Their scores are represented below, with a
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“high” level (average of 1-.7), “moderate” level (.69-.4), and “low” level (.39-.0). Impact, which was measured on a scale, was also taken as an average. For details on each news value, please refer to the coding scheme in appendix A. It should be noted that Regional Reporters 1 and 2 often shared bylines, though occasionally reported separately. Articles analyzed here are articles with last names that had first bylines.
Content analysis allows us to examine how different groups are portrayed and what
“reality” is being communicated (Wimmer & Dominick, 2006). However, they do not allow us to infer authorial intent, which is a key part of my research (Wimmer & Dominick, 2006). To address this information gap, initial results are supplemented by interviews of the journalists themselves. Because this study focused specifically on news values and their interpretation, an in-depth analysis of how each reporter interviewed was interpreted by each coder was performed.
This provided a nuanced understanding from three perspectives of what the story was actually about, perspectives that did not necessarily agree and I believe this in itself could provide us insight into the subjectivity and nuance of how news stories are read and interpreted by readers.
Findings
In-Depth Interviews
In-depth interviews were intended to help answer RQ2; how journalists perceived what the news values were. I sought concrete points of comparison with the content analysis through their reporting background, which might affect their judgment of news values (Armstrong, 2004;
Schultz, 2007; Fedler, Smith, Marzolf, & Jeter, 1996), and then how they identified and why they covered the story, examining directly what their identified news values were, and then what they might have changed about their coverage, which would help control for discrepancies
24 between content analysis findings and what was said. Quotes will be by four regional reporters and two national reporters, or RR1-4 and NR1 and NR2.
Reporting Background
Reporters learned of the story through other reporting. Consistently, reporters cited their background as not having influenced their reporting overmuch, and almost all of the reporters cited other reporting done in the area as what alerted them to the protest in the first place. This was not as notable for the local reporters as it might have been. Given the limited news landscape in Harlan in the first place, it should come as little surprise that these reporters are actually regional and have coverage areas that expand to nearly half the state.
In fact, most local reporters were not immediately aware of the protest (though it was spontaneous and not a thing to be planned for), and instead focused on the bankruptcy case. RR1 said, “July 1st of 2019 was simply… – I have the headline pulled up – ‘Major Appalachian coal company files for bankruptcy protection.’ So that's how we got into this. And that's how it all started.” Their experience of being introduced to this theme through Blackjewel filing for bankruptcy was the case for all of the local reporters, and being alerted to the protest specifically through other reporting, usually TV news. One possible exception was the regional reporter who had the most experience out of those I interviewed, RR4, who said, “So I have contacts there. I talked to people routinely there.” However, this does not necessarily mean they found out the protest from the protestors.
Both national reporters interviewed said that they had been working on other stories in the area. “I was doing another story on coal miners about black lung, and I was driving around with an organizer for Without Voices and he mentioned ‘Oh, that they started this protest’ and I saw there was a local report about it.” NR2 was alerted through the local news reporter’s
25 reporting, which would conform simply with experience. None of these findings were surprising.
Due to the expanding area that reporters have to cover, it is not surprising that reporters had to find out about the protest second-hand or from other reporting in the area.
Reporter’s background did not influence news values identified. Both in the interviews and in the data, the reporter’s years of experience or reporting background did not seem to have much influence on why they identified the Harlan protest as newsworthy, though it did alter how they talked about the news values. All reporters were peripherally aware of the story without editors having to direct them to it, and all but one were encouraged to pursue it.
The reporter that met a modicum of resistance, NR2, cited simply that both they and their editor did not know how long the protest was going to last, and did not want to invest time in it until they were sure what the story was going to be. Instead, the reporter filed another story in the area first, and returned to the protest some weeks later.
While both national and local reporters identified similar news values, it should be noted that for both national reporters their interpretation of newsworthiness was modified somewhat by the need to add complexity to a misunderstood framing of the situation. I will explore this theme further in the news values themes I identified, but it should be noted that part of their
“newsworthiness” instinct was influenced by the potentially counter-intuitive role of a labor protest in what is broadly considered “Trump Country,” with unions being a part of that. The reality is the United Mine Workers of America didn’t endorse one candidate or another in the
2020 election (UMWA Staff, 2020). In fact, while Trump has earned more union votes since
Reagan, these fall heavily along demographic lines (Leary, 2020). This offers a complicated confounding variable – is Trump supported by unions because he speaks to their concerns, or because he speaks to the concern of white men, which make up an overwhelming proportion of
26 unions? It is one example of how the story of Coal Country is not simple, and the reporters I interviewed wanted to highlight this nuance while keeping the protest grounded in the fact that these particular miners were not in a political protest. At least, that is not how they labeled it in their own words. Again, they were much more concerned with receiving the funds they were owed. National reporters needed to highlight more universal themes in their stories than regional reporters to make it applicable to a wider audience, and capitalized on this nuance. However, two of the local reporters also mentioned this as an element of what drew them to the story.
News Values Themes
Impact, Novelty, and Conflict identified as. While some reporters identified timeliness as a news value in the protest, mediated as it was by the Blackjewel bankruptcy, others mentioned the prominence news value by speaking about the inundation of politics and political figures that surrounded the protest. However, all reporters commented on the “striking” image of protestors “putting their bodies on the line” to get what they were owed. One national reporter mentioned the “gravity” of the act. This reflects both the conflict and the novelty news value, though one local reporter disagreed with my prompt that which could be called “novelty,” in that they thought it oversimplified the action. Most reporters also noted the novelty of a labor action of this size without a union present, and how deeply entwined the history of this county is with the history of organized labor. “One key way it was different was because there wasn’t an organized labor [presence],” noted RR4.
RR3 said the simplicity of the story and the conflict also made it newsworthy, “I think that's the main thing that makes it newsworthy is there's people in my coverage area, who they believe they've been…What's a better term than ‘screwed over?’ but you know, screwed over, and are taking a pretty public and disruptive step.” RR3 does a couple of interesting things here
27 by using very descriptive language (“screwed over” over “wronged” or “breached contract”) and identifying the Harlan protest as “public and disruptive,” which is ostensibly where the news value comes from. This is interesting in two ways that Fishman (1980) would immediately seize on: Non-neutral language and applying that to a news event, which in theory would change the nature of the news event itself.
Impact was mentioned as another large news value, given the size of the mine and the seismic effect the closure had on not only the miners, their families, but this community at large.
“A major employer … filing for bankruptcy is always pretty newsworthy,” noted RR1. RR3 said the protest was symbolic of a larger issue, and this modified its impact value, “You know, how
[coal] actually impacts people's lives is a good example of a larger problem.” This was echoed by another local reporter, who said, “I knew it was newsworthy because it affects a lot of families. The mining industry at that time still had a fair number of jobs, especially in Harlan
County…” This communicates the immediate and present impact the story had on the region, in this case economic. That it was a “good example of a larger problem” indicates that the effects of coal mine closures are a regional problem, broadening the potential audience with which this story might resonate. With RR3, this story was useful in illustrating a systemic issue that had direct effect with the economics, and therefore the well-being, of the people of the region.
Context as a news value. While context has always been framed as a valuable asset to any news story, it in and of itself is not traditionally considered a news value. It does not modify a story’s likelihood of moving it to the front page, traditionally (Parks, 2019). However, in this particular case, my analysis indicates it was not only a popular reason but the primary reason this story was considered so newsworthy. “I think the audience would think it was important because, again, because of the history…” noted one local reporter. Given the profound role of organized
28 labor in the history of Harlan County, and its steep decline in the 80s and near obliteration in the recent decades, to have it seen once again was remarkable. Even the miners themselves are quoted as being “proud” to be a part of that history (Young & Resource, 2020).
One local reporter noted, “There's been a history of coal mining protests in Harlan
County and Eastern Kentucky… I think that makes it into a good story.” Another I interviewed said, “I think what made the Blackjewel protest historic is that it was a modern expression of the same forces that people were protesting against 100 years ago.” The word “historic” is interesting in this context, because this protest did not fundamentally change policy or law. To this day, there has been very little improvement or accountability with the WARN Act, the law that was originally violated. The broader impact of this story beyond Harlan is negligible.
However, both of the national reporters I spoke to seemed convinced of this story’s universality, and remarked on how history seemed to be repeating itself. If this county had a more peaceable or less labor-focused history, the story would not been as newsworthy or likely covered to the extent that it was.
I did not code for this in content analysis, and if I had only done a content analysis on this protest I would have been left believing that impact, novelty, and conflict were the most important ingredients to the news coverage. This would have been incorrect. As analysis shows later in this study, it would seem that most reporters would not have been able to tell this story as well or as fully without it. This unspoken news element was dominant in all interviews. While I did not code for it in reading, however, looking back only a select few articles actually mentioned the coal wars of the 1930s. Usually, only longer articles that were not wire stories included this history.
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One reporter pointed out something in their interview that is good to note as well: “The context of the region and Harlan's history of protest, I think just makes it even more interesting, and gives it more depth. You know, so I don't think that the context makes it newsworthy, but it certainly makes it a more interesting story.” For this reporter, an interesting story and a newsworthy one aren’t necessarily the same. This introduces complications to the study that would be good to expand on.
Protest Coverage Content
History of violence in the region unspoken throughline. Based on the interviews alone, this history of Bloody Harlan was a huge component of content in their reporting. Each reporter mentioned this, although the content analysis did not see this element explicitly talked about very often.
One national reporter with a special interest in labor reporting said, “I was learning a lot about the history of the area, you know, with previous labor strikes in the turn of the 20th century, massacres between coal miners unions and hired guns from coal companies…” This reporter had worked in the area before, but did not specialize in Appalachia. They did not seem to have known about the context beforehand, but ended up including it in their article. This is notable. It implies that despite word limits (which this reporter admitted to dislike) and time constraints, they still viewed context as integral to include. The other national reporter only expressed it as one name: “Bloody Harlan, you know, this sort of holy ground of labor movement.” They repeated the word “fascinating” when referring to the dynamic of the story, and hit on a theme that a local reporter mentioned of the simplicity of the story: The small coming together to stand up in the face of being wronged by corporate powers much larger than themselves.
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One local reporter with extensive experience in covering the area even gave a short history on the issue in their interview, despite their interview being the shortest. “Going back, particularly in Harlan County, to the 1930s, the 20s … was called Bloody Harlan because of the shootings and bloodshed and the fights that were attended to the labor organizing.” Another local reporter spoke about the huge influence that this piece of history had, “The mine wars here in
Harlan County, in West Virginia, really shaped so much of the region… they changed the world.” They expanded on this later in the interview, “The miners, 100 years ago in the mine wars … they had no power. And so the only thing available to them was violence. But it was it was coordinated violence. It was violence in the community understanding of what was being pushed for.” This kind of framing falls back on the kind of political theory this paper doesn’t extensively touch on, but it does involve the kind of philosophy familiar to places that suffer from the “paradox of plenty” with unresponsive leadership and the constant threat of insurrection due to the simplistic political structure (Smith & de Mesquita, 2011). This is the secondary theme I found in discussing content and news values with reporters: disruptive protest as a “last resort,” possibly due to political alienation that permeates the region (Solt, 2010).
Protest as a “last resort.” This was another overarching theme to the interviews. This might have been filed under the “conflict” or “novelty” news value, though one reporter took issue with labeling the event as “novel.” It was much less frivolous than “novel” implies. One regional reporter characterized the miner’s anger as, “We can't feed our families because we got screwed out of our wages, we gave years … we gave a lot to a company that then sort-of screwed us over and there was a lot of anger and a lot of larger questions about how does this not happen again.” All of the reporters I interviewed were sympathetic to the miners, characterizing their situation as being “screwed over” or stolen from. For the two national reporters, their view of the
31 company was largely negative, using words like “theft” and “fly by night” to describe
Blackjewel LLC. This sympathetic view is interesting when viewed through the lens Boyle and
Armstrong offers us (2012), which tells us that protest coverage is often mediated by tactics and topic. This becomes even more interesting when viewed in the light of Bloody Harlan and its history. More analysis follows in the discussion portion of this thesis.
“It's not that often you see people taking that kind of step and actually blocking a track, you know,” said one reporter, “Doing something, that … could be illegal, or certainly disruptive… there's so much emotion tied up in it, coupled with the decline of the industry generally, it was a pretty stark example of where things could go when these companies fold.”
This reporter saw their action as possibly prophetic, or perhaps an expression of the anguish that comes with the closure of such a cultural touchpoint and economic driver for the region.
However, while this reporter uses the words “it’s not often” and supposes that what the protestors did was “illegal,” nowhere in their interview did they use the words “radical” or
“extreme.” The words left out could be considered negative value statements, connotating unreasonableness. Instead, the reporter used words that were sympathetic to the miner’s reaction.
In fact, it seemed the reporter viewed this action as an appropriate response to grave injustice, but this is speculation.
Another local reporter commented on this idea with hindsight: “At the time, I guess I didn't really realize that this was happening, this protest was happening out of powerlessness, these guys had no other option.” This is difficult to interpret, because it highlights the desperation it isn’t able to be extrapolated to impact, necessarily. At this time it is hard to know the effects of the protest, but it did bring more to attention the problematic CEO and his new resort, and highlight how little power the labor department has to enforce regulations on coal
32 companies. While complaints were made to the labor department, that didn’t necessarily mean
Blackjewel was going to be made to answer for stealing from the miners. It might be that nothing would have happened if the protesters hadn’t brought wider attention to it, but this is speculation.
Another local reporter with extensive regional experience noted on how remarkable this labor action was without union presence in the area. “There were some in Western Kentucky as recently as, maybe, I don't know, ten years ago, but there's been no UMW mines in Eastern
Kentucky for probably twenty years or more.” Again, while unions had played a large role in
Bloody Harlan and labor disputes throughout the 70s, this was not the case for the most recent protest. This is another case where the novelty element is only there because of the context of the region, with the novelty element occurring because while in previous history mine unions were a focal point and organizer for protest.
Protest as nuance or counter-narrative. The journalists in interviews also often spoke about the protest as a counter-narrative to what might be assumed about Appalachia. Even local reporters spoke about the need to better understand the forces affecting the miners and what drove them to drastic action. One local reporter who was raised in Appalachia said, “Just like the country wants to … generally understand Appalachia better, I think that that's true within the state as well.” This was an interesting comment to make, because it suggests that the region seeks to understand itself and its own cultural identity.
One of the national reporters said that the story offered, “insight into a community that, you know, has a lot of negative stereotypes… a ‘Trump's country’ type of thing, and the
Republican party has really pushed that... I think the media has really kind of bought into it without really actually doing much investigating... or trying to get behind the truth of the matter.” This reflects what one of the local reporters mentioned earlier, with the tension between
33 local and national coverage. Both of the national reporters I interviewed were very cognizant of the danger of turning this story into a “Trump” story and wanted to focus on the novelty of this protest seemingly going against the grain of a very pro-business administration. This offers another point of interest that deserves closer attention. What is the discourse within the region about how its political stances have changed or reinforced the country’s perception of it?
Another local reporter said, “I knew it was newsworthy because protest, rightfully or wrongfully is associated with urban areas, and with the left wing. It's not that simple.” This seems to confirm the underlying politicization of the protest. One local reporter, who was broadly impressed by the national coverage, did note that this was a problem. “We were asked, ‘What is this mean for
Trump? or What does this say about President Trump and his administration's environmental policies or energy policies and his promise to miners about bringing coal back?” Local reporters took issue with this frame. Reporters complained that to represent the protest as miners rebelling against Trump administrative policies or within any context of overt political action was simply incorrect and diminished the real desperation behind it. RR1: “… I think generally it was, we can't feed our families because we got screwed out of our wages, like we gave years and … we gave a lot to a company that then sort of screwed us over…” This reporter was not seeing this through a lens that implied a Republican or Democrat leaning to the story: That is very high- level conflict that ultimate was not viewed (by any of the reporters) to have much bearing on the protest. “We can’t feed our families” in some circles could be rooted in political ideology as a complaint, but it was not interpreted as such for any reporters. “We gave a lot to a company that then sort of screwed us over,” turns this from a potential political statement to a transactional one. The miners are not crying out for tougher regulations for the coal companies, but rather
34 simply that they should be paid for the work they did, not to achieve equity but to literally feed their families in a very literal way.
The national reporter with an interest in Appalachia noted that these miners knew exactly the kind of political narrative they could be pawned for. “Well, they were very aware how parachute journalists come in, and say, ‘What do you think about Trump?’ … and it clearly, they said it grated on them.” This is worthy of analysis in two aspects: It shows that the news subjects are aware of how this story could be perceived, on a very basic level, in terms of newsworthiness, and two; They disapproved of that perception. That is, miners were aware that national journalists saw them as an anomaly and want to cover them within the national political context, whereas the miners simply wanted their paychecks and 401K funds back.
Protest as emblematic of larger issues in coal. Another element commonly mentioned in the interviews was how the coal industry has inundated the economy of Appalachia, and now that it is collapsing it has left very little industry behind. RR2 perhaps made the most direct connection:
“… When coal declined, because of market forces, there was just no other industry here.
And that was by design … there are real challenges here, but those challenges were
created intentionally in order for the companies to retain their stranglehold.”
RR1 noted that the interest was in part generated because it was so commonplace. “We’ve been seeing a lot of bankruptcies lately, that the writing is on the wall, for coal in general is not doing well in this region.” For this reporter, this protest was simply a larger expression of the disruption of the economic driver for a community that had existed for more than a hundred years. RR2 specifically named it as a systemic issue, describing coal’s role in Appalachia as a
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“stranglehold,” which implies both a lack of consent and a lack of agency to disrupt this monopoly on well-paying work that did not require a college degree.
For NR2, this was a source of regret that they were not able to dig further into. “At the heart of it, I don't think I appreciated it until possibly afterwards, just how this reflected the state of the coal business.” This could be interpreted as the journalist wishing to change their frame to reflect the systemic nature that RR1 and 2 commented on. Again, this story becomes more newsworthy with context. The fact that these rapid closures are becoming more common lent the story the “timeliness” value, modified by the conflict of the miners on the tracks. However, the reporter also said, “It would have been nice to get a little bit meatier into why this specific grievance [reflected] larger trends in a really tragic industry.” The reporter is wishing they had more time to develop depth (as implied by “meatier”) in their description of the reporting business as a whole (as implied by “larger trends in a really tragic industry”). Context was an element NR2 wishes they could have learned more about, if not included more prominently in their reporting. This quote also reflects an interesting question on the reporter’s part that we should also ask as researchers: The reporter says, “… why this specific grievance” reflected the decline of coal (my italics). If coal is an “evocative” industry to this reporter (as quoted in another area of this paper), why this event in particular? Bankruptcies, according to the interviews, were happening all the time. Were there simply no other protests occurring that summer? Were other protests led by unions, or not in front of a train? Why did a few dozen families strike such a chord when other examples of the effects of the coal industry, be it mountain-top removal, Black Lung advocacy groups, or busses to D.C. simply didn’t strike these reporters as strongly? Our understanding of how news values work help answer this question.
Park (2019) would say that news values are fluid according to the cultural values of a given place
36 where the news is being reported. Theoretically, Appalachia, with a perceived culture of alienation and violent protest, would place a higher news value on an event that reflected these news values over one that portrayed another kind of narrative. That is, a protest on train tracks over a protest that might take the form of more traditional political action like a bus-in.
Perceptions of Audience
Audience as separate from news subjects. Nearly all of the interviewees acknowledged that their coverage was most likely not going to be read by the protestors, or possibly anyone in
Harlan County. In particular, local reporters identified their audience as usually affluent and well-educated, of which Harlan County is not. One local reporter saw her audience as typical of the regional news service she worked for: “Our web audience and our social media audience and listening public radio audience, are kind of all a little bit different, but generally … they're a little bit older and well-educated.” In my interviews, two journalists specifically commented that they knew that covering the Harlan protestors was coverage meant to be consumed by another, more affluent audience. One regional reporter had a particularly striking understanding of their news audience. The audience, “want to seem like they know what's going on when they run into their colleague at the watercooler… But that sort of disinterested take on the news is really not what lower income communities need … and it's not physically reaching them.” RR2 is right in that the medium of news, its physical presence in the world, is highly predictive of who is going to read it, as the literature review (Hamilton & Morgan, 2018) and other news experiments have indicated (Bair, 2019).
RR2 acknowledged that this is not just limited to their paper, and that the information needs between those of Harlan and those of their audience are different.
37
“…We're interested in current events because they want to be informed… Or they [the
audience] want to seem like they know what's going on when they run into their
colleague at the watercooler, quote, unquote. But that sort of disinterested take on the
news is really not what lower income communities need, it's not meeting their needs, and
it's not physically reaching them.”
This falls back on what Hamilton and Morgan (2018) found with their survey of information needs and communities. While interviewees didn’t acknowledge any conscious effort to cater to this audience’s lifestyle interests, as Allern (2017) might define it, they did seem to try to adjust to the storytelling value an audience might find in it, as will be analyzed further in the discussion. This reporter also mentioned: “I think it's unfortunate that one of the main voices from the protest was my voice. The voice of an outsider, the voice of someone who's never been underground.” This is notable because it is a clear example of the reporter stating their inadequacies for truly understanding this story as an “outsider,” as someone who is not a miner, and has never “been underground.” This would follow with more modern discourse on the blind spots introduced to stories by reporters lacking the community context to fully report a story
(Schneider, 2020; Lowrey, 2020). A question remains on whether or not this journalist sees themsleves as an outsider because they are not a member of a mining community specifically, or if they still see Appalachia as “other,” as NeCamp would say (2020).
For both of the national reporters, NR1 and NR2, they acknowledged that the need to frame this story for a broad audience did influence framing somewhat. This could have influenced why they found the story newsworthy, which would be confirmed by both of these reporters citing the universality of the miners rallying against the coal mine. RR2 also indicated that this frame was not a strength, necessarily.
38
“My job is very much framed as documenting this part of the country for the
consumption of outsiders. And I don't like that, it's not what I want to be doing, but it's
the reality of my job.”
RR2 was perhaps the most outspoken about their discomfort with who consumed the news they were creating, namely affluent, more urban audiences. This actually follows literature that involves normative values, as mentioned in the literature review, and the collapse of the ad- revenue model of journalism. Siegelbaum and Thomas found that this collapse of capitalistic journalism has created a gap between journalists and normative functions, creating an inability to do what they once did as a part of their “normative” news values (Siegelbaum & Thomas, 2016).
Their language is specific. “Documenting,” which implies a more neutral, extractive process, more scientific in nature. “Outsiders,” is also a more divisive term than alternatives, like “People in Lexington,” or “Non-Appalachians.” This reporter might feel their work is extractive, and clearly isn’t comfortable with this dynamic. Implications of this relationship are discussed later.
Overall, these reporters all seemed to be largely sympathetic to the miners and find a lot of value in the context of Harlan County. Their largest points during their interviews were usually impact or conflict news values. RQ2 asked how journalists perceived what news values there were in the Blackjewel protest, and from this analysis we might say that while they identified traditional values like impact and conflict immediately they also identified more cultural and contextual elements of the protest that were huge influencers on their protest.
However, was this reflected in coverage?
Content Analysis
General Findings
39
To answer the first RQ, “What news values appeared in protest coverage?” three coders were used to conduct quantitative content analysis. One had a background in some news reporting, while another had a background in public relations, while another lacked either of these backgrounds. Reliability was reached for level of coverage, previous coverage, gender of the reporter, and how many sources were coal miners or family members of coal miners, however, reliability was only reached for the “Proximity” news value between all three coders. News values proved unreliable, which provided interesting elements to analyze. If no coders could agree on any other meaningful news values, then how did each interpret the story, and what could be possible reasons behind this? These questions are answered later in the quantitative analysis.
For regional reporters, the most prominent news values were proximity, human interest, and the community-level impact of the story. Proximity averaged .94 (present), human interest averaged .78 (present), and impact (which was measured on a scale from 1 – individual level, to
4 – society level) average at 2.3, which landed between community and regional impact levels.
For national reporters, the top news values were human interest, at 1.0 (present) and conflict at
.667 (mostly present).
Overall, RR3 and RR4, even though they are still regional reporters, still identified different themes in their interviews of what was important about the protest than RR1 and RR2.
The regional reporters agreed that proximity was a news value, and on the regional and community impact of this story, but little else. RR1 and RR2 agreed that human interest was a key news value, but this wasn’t as apparent with RR3 and RR4, who didn’t discuss this element as in depth. Both national reporters emphasized human interest and conflict in their reporting, ostensibly more universal themes that aren’t so local to Appalachia. However, NR2 easily
40 conveyed the societal news value this story had, while NR1 seemed to struggle to convey this to the coders.
Themes Identified with Reporters Interviewed
Regional Reporter 1
PROXIMITY PROMINENCE HUMAN CONFLICT TIMELINESS IMPACT
INTEREST
INTERVIEW H H* H H M Regional/Community
CODER1 H L H H M Regional/Community
CODER2 H M H M L Regional/Community
CODER3 H H M H H Regional/Community
Regional Reporter 1. Asterisk denotes value is heavily influenced by another.
Regional Reporter 1 (RR1) clearly communicated proximity as a news value in their interview, given they were reporting on related stories in the region that eventuated in the protest. “Our first story that we published on July 1 of 2018 [sic] was … ‘Major Appalachian coal company files for bankruptcy protection.’ So that's how we got into this. And that's how it all started.” They also identified prominence as a news value, although this was heavily affected by the proposed news value of “context.”
“At the time, we had done a little bit of looking into Jeff Hoops, the former owner of
Blackjewel, because he came up as one of another person who owed a lot of money …
Although Jim Justice, the governor of West Virginia and his family, who's also a coal
mining family, they were the top of the list so we focused on them, but Hoops was in
there and so he was like a friendly reminder like we've heard this name before.”
Prominence in this case came from the minor celebrity, but his mention was only relevant because of other events happening outside of this story, the reporter’s previous coverage, and the
41 history of exploitation in the region. Human interest and conflict were very strongly represented by this reporter in their articles, and the impact of their reporting was consistent across their body of work.
The reporter clearly understood what their reporting covered and what made the story newsworthy, for example the high “human-interest” factor, which reflected in their interview: “I think what kept making this newsworthy was the sheer number of people and families that were being impacted.” The reporter also clearly understood who the audience was for their paper, even if in the interview they acknowledged that this would not necessarily be in Harlan County. They spoke about impact through the coal industry: “We’ve been seeing a lot of bankruptcies lately, that the writing is on the wall for coal in general, not doing well in this region.” This communicates an understanding of regional issues, but they also spoke about the individual and human effect of this mine closing:
“There was … What does this say about President Trump … and his promise to miners
about bringing coal back? And I think, for those who were involved, I'm sure that was a
consideration. But I think generally it was, ‘we can't feed our families because we got
screwed out of our wages … we gave a lot to a company that then sort of screwed us
over’ and there was a lot of anger and a lot of larger questions.”
This reporter was able to portray what they felt were news values for most of the news values they identified. They also identified some themes that distinguished the event from other news events, as in the quote above where they mediate what national outlets might identify as a news factor versus regional reporters like themselves.
Regional Reporter 2
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PROXIMITY PROMINENCE HUMAN CONFLICT TIMELINESS IMPACT
INTEREST
INTERVIEW H L H H* H Community/ Regional
CODER1 H L H M L Community
CODER2 H L H M L Community/ Regional CODER3 H L H M H Regional
Table 1. Asterisk denotes value heavily influenced by another.
Regional Reporter 2 (RR2) had high representation of their interview themes of proximity and human interest in their work, and this modified how conflict was talked about in their work.
“There wasn't there was no avenue for them, the only thing they could do was put their bodies literally on the line.” This quote could both be read as a conflict news value (risk) but also human interest (human lives). Conflict, as we defined it, was not as present a theme in their work as one would initially expect from their interview. However, this might be due to this reporter’s emphasis on communicating agency and human impact through their work, even as they acknowledge in the interview that the protest was very conflict-driven. “I wanted them to be actors and not victims,” RR2 said in the interview. This, coupled with what the coders identified in their body of articles, indicates a complex grasp on what their audience for their reporting is, compared to what they view the larger story to be in terms of impact. RR2 pointed out, “The bankruptcies had been kind of academic, it was difficult to connect those to people's lived experiences … It was evident that this was the human cost of that wave of bankruptcies.” This reporter had a singular view of the protests as having an obvious regional impact, but also saw it as a symptom of larger issues within society about equity and had very consistent ways of conveying news values to the reader. This was also the only reporter to mention the BLM protests from the summer of 2020.
43
Regional Reporters 3 & 4
PROXIMITY PROMINENCE HUMAN CONFLICT TIMELINESS IMPACT
INTEREST
INTERVIEW H/H L/M L/L H/L L/H INDIVIDUAL/
COMMUNITY
CODER1 H M M H M INDIVIDUAL/ COMMUNITY CODER2 H H H M H COMMUNITY/ REGION CODER3 H H M H H INDIVIDUAL/ COMMUNITY Table 2. Asterisk denotes value is influenced by another.
Because Regional Reporters 3 and 4 shared bylines on every one of their stories, their analysis will be viewed collectively. Their analysis was actually very interesting when viewed in conjunction with each other, because neither really spoke in-depth about the “human interest” element in the story in the same way the other regional reporters had, and had fewer stories that were coded as containing elements of human interest than the regional reporters. It wasn’t that these reporters rejected human interest elements in this story, but rather, they did not focus on that when asked about the story’s newsworthiness. In interviews, their human interest value was modified both by the context and potential impact. For example, RR4 said, “I knew it was newsworthy because it affects a lot of families … the mining industry. I mean, at that time it still had a fair number of jobs, especially Harlan County. The mining industry nationwide has lost tens of thousands of jobs.” This can be read as human interest in that it is affecting “families,” but RR4 specifies this as an economic effect from the mining industry, broadening the news value’s source to be regional (“Especially Harlan County”) and contextual (“has lost tens of thousands of jobs.”). RR3 had a similar take on the story, “It was a pretty stark example of where things could go when these companies fold. You know, how it actually impacts people's lives…
44 it’s a good example of a larger problem.” RR4 does not discuss in the same way that RR1 and
RR2 did (and to some extent, RR3) the immediate financial impact that the job loss would have on this community, nor the anger behind the protest, nor the kind of “last stand” language that other reporters used. RR4, and somewhat RR3, saw this more as a repetition of old news stories of organized labor, except without actual union representation, and saw that as the more prominent value.
45
National Reporter 1
PROXIMITY PROMINENCE HUMAN CONFLICT TIMELINESS IMPACT
INTEREST
INTERVIEW L L M H* H Societal/Regional
CODER1 L H H H L No Impact
CODER2 L L H H L No Impact
CODER3 L L H H H Community
Table 3. Asterisk denotes value was influenced by another.
For one national reporter (NR1) some values were obviously going to be lower priority than others, such as proximity. NR1’s readers weren’t going to understand this story from a local perspective, and instead relied on the drama or national implications of the story to be relevant to their lives. In fact, NR1 specifically remarked on this: “I think that it was just a very compelling story that just had that kind of [universal] appeal already.” Conflict was a high-ranking value that was communicated clearly to all coders, though in the interview this value was modified by context. NR1 spoke about how their background in labor reporting helped them understand this conflict, but that they also learned, “a lot about the history of the area, with previous labor strikes in the turn of the 20th century, massacres between coal miners unions and hired guns from coal companies…”
Measuring impact was a much more complicated exercise. While in the interview the journalist discussed the impact of this protest more in terms of national problems, modified by external context again, “Wage theft is the biggest form of theft in the U.S. It's common in the people who are either low income or working class Americans … whether it's coal miners or some kind of other service or blue collar position.” However, the journalist didn’t really address larger themes of who this protest affected outside of wage theft. This does not necessarily mean
46 that impact was not an important consideration for this journalist, but given their national audience and their beat, it did not appear they were seeking to tell this story within the frame of how this affected the audience directly.
National Reporter 2
PROXIMITY PROMINENCE HUMAN CONFLICT TIMELINESS IMPACT
INTEREST
INTERVIEW L L H H* L Societal
CODER1 L H H H L Societal
CODER2 L L H L L Societal
CODER3 L H H L H Regional
Table 4. Asterisk denotes value heavily influenced by another.
National Reporter 2 (NR2) also did not have proximity as an identified value and did not have timeliness as a news value either. Prominence could have been complicated based on CODER2’s definition of local celebrity, and in the interview, it was unlikely that this reporter would have spoken about the local politics because they identified this as an evergreen story. Their angle primarily focused on how history was repeating itself in a small way, which the “conflict” value was modified by and might be why two coders did not immediately recognize this story as containing “conflict” given the coding scheme. “To me, the historical context is primarily what was the value of this is … this is indicative of what has not been happening here for years.” NR2 was explicit in their interest of the region, “And it's also an opportunity to talk about the history here. You know, labor history is really in danger of being forgotten.”
This desire to tell a more universal story is also reflected in the high “human interest” value, which was clearly communicated to all coders. This, too, was wrapped up in the context of the region. “Even more than the underlying grievance, which is not just a layoff – they laid you off and they stole money from your bank account from work you've done – but to me, it was so
47 historically evocative in the history of the labor movement.” They layer the personal, theft and injustice, with the societal, a history of labor movement. The reporter also communicated this through their article by framing their impact at the societal level, which exceedingly few articles in our content analysis managed to do. This could be influenced by how context is presented, which shifts the concentration of the story from Blackjewel to the broader picture of coal mine protests.
Discussion
The Research Questions
RQ1: What news values appear in the protest coverage of the Blackjewel miners? First, we need to understand what news values actually appeared in the coverage of Blackjewel. This was problematic because of low reliability between the coders, but by taking the agreed-on categories and analyzing the disagreed-on categories, we can see that the predominant news values of our interviewees were human interest and conflict for the national reporters.
RQ2: How do journalists perceive what the news values of the protest are? For local journalists, there were divisions between RR1 and 2 and RR3 and 4. RR1 and RR2 identified all news values as necessary with some disagreement over prominence. They believed the protest had community and regional impact and communicated that clearly in their body of work. RR3 and RR4, however, had some trouble being made understood to the coders what level of impact this story had. There were overall some mixed interpretations of how important prominence and conflict was for this these stories. NR1 and NR2 both agreed on more “universal” news values, conflict and human interest, and communicated this clearly.
Importance of Understanding Context in News Values
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Mixed methods helped me identify the interaction between context and news values in the interviews. Context modified and complicated nearly all of the news values for the reporters. It wasn’t simply that they found the protest novel, but it was novel because it was a repetition of the violent protests of decades past. It was timely because it was one example of a larger issue at hand with the decline of coal in Appalachia. It was impactful not because it detracted economic value from the larger community, but it returned to the same issues that Harlan faced in the past of exploitative work practices.
Finding that “newsworthiness” is not necessarily the most important element to a story is something Niblock and MacHin (2007) found in their study of a UK newsroom. However, the audience was only noted peripherally when it came to coverage, which moves Allern (2019) out of our realm of working theories, and a portion of Niblock and MacHin (2007) as well. However, when we apply Perry’s (2019) established news values to the story, we see those values left out but the central core of what he talked about being repeated: News values change according to what journalists deem newsworthy (Schultz, 2007) but that newsworthiness itself is a fluid algorithm (Galtung & Ruge, 1965) determined by cultural values. The culture of Appalachia is one of labor rights and activism. It is also a culture of coal and exploitation. This story is exemplary of that culture, which is why it resonated so well.
What I found interesting, and why I think context played such an important role in the coverage, is specifically because the audience was separate from the subject of this news story.
That is, affluent audiences will never have to make the choice of standing on the train tracks, which makes the subjects of this story novel, and the human interest aspects of this story far more interesting to these readers. They, as RR2 pointed out, only read the paper to know “what’s going on.” They don’t need news to find out critical information that will determine quality of
49 their lives, just like they will never need to make the choice to block an employer’s train filled with coal. One reporter interviewed for this research remarked that it was strange that “I can’t breathe,” the slogan used by BLM demonstrators, is also a slogan used by former coal miners suffering from black lung as they lobby for expanded rights to healthcare. “Americans are suffocating in all kinds of different ways … I still believe that the Blackjewel protests were historic, because they they fit into that framework of demanding better from the system.”
Practical applications for reporters from this study are easy to identify, but difficult to implement. The context of Bloody Harlan and the mine protests of the 1970s and 80s are how journalists drew in the ideas of systemic injustice, whether they thought about their coverage this way intentionally or not. It is what makes this coverage remarkable and worthy of further study.
Today’s protest coverage have anecdotally been cited as lacking context, and this is supported in tangential studies (Robinson & Culver, 2019; Smith, McCarthy, McPhail, & Augustyn, 2001). I should be more specific: Mentioning the death of a Black person at the hands of white police does not mean “context.” This is episodic. That is no more context than including the reason for the Harlan coal miners blocking a train. Talking about the violence of the mine wars in decades previous is context, just as talking about the Kerner Commission or Jim Crow is context to BLM protests. While I do not believe including an outline of all the ways Black Americans have been oppressed in the US would be practical for breaking-news protest reporting (or even possible) including this kind of context could be a way to “modify” the news values being applied to protest coverage, just as the past changed the way reporters talked about Harlan’s protest. Yet
Gans (2003) has pointed out that a news cycle is aggressive, and resorting to time-saving measures like news routines are the default in most newsrooms, edging out the ability to spend the extra time needed to locate, absorb and explain context surrounding a news event.
50
The Subjectivity and Complexity of News Values
Throughout my research I was struck by how differently this protest was treated compared to its ancestors. The previous protests had usually meant bloodshed and national guard becoming involved. Miners were talked about like insurgents and treated as such, despite injustices. It was usually more than a hundred miners involved in any given civil disturbance. The Harlan County protest of 2019 was nowhere near as violent, probably because of the sympathy federal powers expressed, and actually had a federal representative (usually a local judge) speaking out on their behalf in the articles I analyzed. Most of the reporters themselves, at least privately, seemed to sympathize with the miners, and miners or their family members were far more likely to be quoted than Blackjewel representatives (though, it should be reiterated that reporters had difficulty getting statements from its lawyers). None of the interviewees talked about “both sides” of this issue, or mentioned the need for “neutral” or “balanced” reporting. This is not to say that their reporting product itself was subjective, that was not coded for, but Tuchman and
Gans, as well as many other media sociologists, have shown us that personal views of journalists can have a way of making themselves known in media coverage.
This subjectivity became obvious as coding of news values continued. Overall, reporters had strong control over how they communicated impact as a news value, and proximity.
Prominence, timeliness, and conflict were much more subjective according to the coders. This might be because coders had low reliability between them, and the subjectivity of their experience or poor coding scheme influenced interpretations. However, there are consistencies within the interviews that indicate to me that reporters had strong awareness of some values, and not so much of other values. A positive example of awareness would be of NR2’s sense of the larger impact of this story, and clearly communicating that through their article. A negative
51 example that stemmed from awareness but caused the reporter to withdraw attention in reporting would be of RR2’s sense of conflict in the story, which was prominent in their interview, yet they resisted the urge to let that play center-stage in their articles. Coders agreed that “conflict” did not appear in their body of work. They were cognizant of the power reporters held over what appeared in the news. “Am I leaving things out of the public record because of my own agenda?”
RR2 asked rhetorically in the interview. “Am I leaving things out of the record that are newsworthy and that are relevant because of my own perspective on things? Or am I leaving them out because I don't fully get it yet?... And I don't want to get it wrong… Or am I leaving it out because it's not newsworthy?”
RR2 seemed to center their news values around the subject of the story. That is, their decisions on what to include and what to represent seemed to revolve around respect to the subject matter. A question RR2 might have asked themselves is, “Does this do diligence to the miners?” Whereas NR2 seemed to center their news values around the drama of the story, the historical context. A question NR2 might have asked themselves: “Does this do diligence to the struggle of this region?” Which is not to say, again, that these questions are mutually exclusive in the minds of the reporters, but in prioritizing one question over another they are making an active choice of what to leave out and shaping the reality of this story (Fishman, 1988). Unconscious bias appears in these individual-level decisions, which include news values. How reporters prioritize the important elements of the story is a direct reflection of whose voices or concerns they are choosing to elevate or ignore.
It’s also worth noting that about half of the reporters I spoke to wished that they had had more time to spend on the story. Modern reporters face pressures not just from editors but the market (Hamilton, 2004). This pressure of expanding coverage areas (as local newspapers and
52 outlets close) create a larger content burden on reporters. This leads to a breakdown called
“normative failure,” the failure to live up to the “normative” values that Harrison (2009) outlined of “accuracy” and “sincerity” (Siegelbaum & Thomas, 2015). Simply put: Reporters just don’t have enough time to tell stories like Blackjewel very often, and even then, some reporters felt they missed an opportunity to investigate systemic issues that contributed to the protest.
It should be noted that RR1 and RR2 wrote and produced journalism for a nonprofit, which they both said gave them somewhat more time and resources to spend on the story than other journalists. RR3 and RR4 produced journalism for a for-profit outlet. Nevertheless, it’s clear that how the story was communicated depended heavily on the journalists’ interpretations of what greater context was at play, what value their audience might draw from it, and who they owed journalistic loyalty to – the region, the history, or the miners, though again, these were not mutually exclusive categories.
Implications
What does this ultimately mean for journalists, academics, and how we understand journalistic routines? The reporters were somewhat able to control what they presented to their audience in terms of news, and this depended largely on what they interpreted as important about the story. For RR1 and RR2, the human element was the most important part of this story. For
RR3 and RR4, timeliness and conflict were huge indicators of newsworthiness. For all of these regional reporters, clearly communicating impact was extremely important. For national reporters, this story was most important in its universality, the small banding together to take on the big, and to some extent this meant human interest as well. It was not a product of trying to meet a deadline or a publisher’s brand necessarily, as Gans might have expected, but it was extremely subject to personal choice, as Tuchman and Breed have suggested. Our theories about
53 news routines – largely cynical and likely to place the most agency in how a story looks on the editors or personal biases of the reporters – do not address what I saw in the reporting of this story. I saw a very real and inspiring need to retell the story of people who had been wronged picking up the age-old tradition of their community and trying to fight back, falling into the normative values Harrison proposed (2009). Of course, this sample size was very small, and it may be that with more interviews I would find some reporters who churned out a story because their editor needed them to and thought no more of it.
A study by Don Heider (1996) has shown that journalists of color learn to pitch more white-centric stories, and stories that do not have to deal with racial injustice issues. The reporters did not explicitly point to racism as the reason, but rather, journalists of color learned to prioritize different news values and different frames when telling a story. Unconscious bias leaked into even these journalist’s storytelling, simply by using the shorthand of news values to make editorial decisions. Racism is a complicated thing to report on and talk about, which journalists still struggle with (Bodinger-de Uriarte & Valgeirsson, 2015), and reporting on it well does not always fit neatly into the values of conflict, timeliness, human interest, impact, proximity, and prominence. A story on race that promotes the news value of conflict falls into stereotypes. A story that promotes the news value of human interest ignores the systemic problems. Where does the news value of context come up in budget meetings? And of course, a sister question: Where does the news value of justice appear in editorial meetings? Of course, journalists often see themselves as “guardians of democracy,” and whose job it is to “hold power to account,” but I hope my literature review successfully explained why this self-branding is simply not good enough.
Importance of Mixed Methods
54
The benefit of mixed methods became immediately apparent in this case study. While I was intent on creating a profile of news values for the Blackjewel case and examining how this influenced sourcing, as well as how previous coverage, the interviews were much more revealing. Had I not conducted interviews, I would have assumed that conflict and timeliness were the foremost news values in this protest, as these values appeared most often on average in the articles, and context would not have even factored into the analysis.
What’s more, speaking with the reporters provided much more insight into their perceived audiences and why they might have framed these stories as they did, and chose to highlight the news values. It became clear that while the national reporters I spoke to did value the minutiae of the story, their most valued aspect was its simplicity and universality. The qualitative methods provided nuance and perspective to the messier data, while quantitative methods provided an analytical profile that created a much more reliable context for these interviews.
While I hadn’t expected the reporter’s intentions to vary widely from what they reported,
I also hadn’t expected reporters to have such a complicated perception of their own reporting.
Some elements, like proximity or impact, were news values that reporters seemed to have fine- tuned control over and could communicate clearly. However, communicating conflict, its effects and outcomes, was much more difficult for some reporters. I had predicted that reporters wouldn’t be able to identify the news values of the story right away and instead rely on “gut instinct,” (Scammell, Semetko, & Tuchman, 1972; Shultz, 2007) and for the most part I believe this was confirmed. RR4, when asked what made this event newsworthy, said they knew “I guess by virtue of my experience.” NR2 said that they had covered this story instead of mass layoffs in the trucking industry, which arguably had a much larger impact, because there was something
55 particularly “evocative” about coal. Something drew this reporter to the local story that was more difficult to articulate than might have been expected out of a reporter with almost two decades of national paper experience, but they repeatedly called the story “fascinating.” RR1 did not directly address why they felt the story was important but noted the chaos and strangeness of
Blackjewel’s bankruptcy that first tipped them off that something newsworthy was happening, but they did not address the protest itself specifically. RR2 felt that the story was newsworthy because protest “rightfully or wrongfully” is associated with urban areas, which indicates novelty in a rural area, yet this same reporter felt that labeling this news value as “novelty” was insufficient. It’s this grey area that was also extremely revealing for the data collected in content analysis, and even the coder’s misinterpretations of the presentation of this grey area that indicates the need for better understanding of journalist’s routines. Each of the coders came from a different background and had different exposures to newsrooms, so given the evidence presented in the literature review that our backgrounds influence our storytelling, it shouldn’t surprise us that each had different interpretations on the news values. However, this could also easily be due to researcher error and a confusing scheme. Because of this, more research should be done around defining concrete news values.
The last expectation I thought to find in my study was very little representation of the impact that this protest might have, given scholarship extensively examining the shortcomings of protest coverage (Boyle, Mccluskey, Mcleod, & Stein, 2005; Kilgo & Harlow, 2019). However, all the journalists I interviewed were invested in making sure the effect of this protest was communicated to their audience, whatever that effect may be according to their national or regional audience.
Future Research on News Values
56
Our understanding of context as a news validator should be explored. We might be told in journalism school that context adds nuance and deeper understanding of a story, but in the professional world we aren’t usually given the capacity for this kind of news value, which requires additional time and effort and which does not have an exact correlation to profit. And yet, it was a predominant theme in all of my interviews, and it might not be unfair to say that this story would not have been covered as extensively without it. Whether or not the nature of news should be profit-driven or public-good-driven is a matter of extensive debate and not the subject of this study, however a researcher seeking validation for an argument for viewing journalism as a public utility could easily be found here. It would be fair to say that the meaning of this story would have been sorely missed if it hadn’t.
A journalist’s ability to identify news stories should also be further studied. Anecdotally, it seemed that younger journalists had a slightly easier time naming what had drawn them to the story, while older journalists with more experience seemed to grasp for language to describe what had made the protest worthy of very precious reporting time. This would push our understanding of Shultz (2007) and add nuance to our understanding of the kind of personal biases journalists bring to the table. Understanding why journalists decide one element is newsworthy and another is not is key to understanding how we can improve coverage on beats and communities that often suffer from undercoverage.
In my conversations with these journalists, a few mentioned that they knew their reporting wasn’t directly intended to go to people in Harlan County, where according to the 2010 census more than 30% of people live below the poverty line (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019). The journalists’ news was intended for affluent consumption. This introduces an element of class that journalists don’t often acknowledge in their journalism, as outlined in the literature review. One
57 journalist meditated on this fairly extensively in their interview, and spoke of stepping into a
Starbucks for the first time in a while and being, “walloped with full-blown culture shock, like the decor in there was not only signaling the Starbucks brand identity, it was signaling money.”
It was an environment completely different than the one they had been living and reporting on in eastern Kentucky, and although they didn’t think this revelation had affected their reporting, it was a startling discovery. Research that investigates this tension within journalists between class, their audience, and their journalism, would create a building block from which to better understand classism in American journalism more effectively beyond just the quantitative data we have now.
The journalists were mostly sympathetic to the miners in their interviews. More study is needed beyond what’s cited in my literature review to understand how some protests are
“sympathetic” and some protests are not, and the differences between the two. In that line, while not deeply discussed in my thesis, more literature is desperately needed to understand the differences between protests of predominantly white and predominantly Black protestors. As
RR2 noted in their interview, there is widespread discord in the country over systemic injustice.
Blackjewel is a part of this injustice, and its justice was slow in coming. To borrow a phrase from BLM protests and from the 17th century, it could be argued that justice delayed is justice denied (Shapiro, 2010), and yet some journalistic outlets fail to learn from previous mistakes and failures in coverage (Robinson & Culver, 2019). Is this ultimately the fault of personal biases or news routines that remove the news value of context from consideration, and therefore diminish an event’s newsworthiness beyond that of just conflict or prominence? This is what future research will have to answer. Until then, the question remains, as Florence Reece first asked:
Which side are you on?
58
Limitations
There are limitations on methodology that should be acknowledged. Creswell and Plano
Clark only recommend mixed methods for an experienced researcher, and such a study is complex and difficult to put together (2008). I must say that this is true. While weaknesses of the individual methods are also shored up by the strengths of the other, it’s also worth acknowledging that they have drawbacks. For content analysis, there is some concern around finding messages relevant to the study (Wimmer & Dominick, 2006). While my interviewee’s voices added valuable context to the content analysis, they could also have presented inaccurate information and their views can’t be generalized (Morris, 2015). Because of how long ago the protest was now for many of these reporters, one of whom has moved on to another job in this time, their impressions might have changed with hindsight.
The standard .70 was used to determine an acceptable level of reliability (Wrench, 2008).
With the original intention of using a chi-squared analysis to synthesize data, I would have used this to understand a broader picture of what all the journalists involved covered. However, even after an extra coder was brought on, only “Proximity” achieved reliability between all three coders. Given the statistical weaknesses around using this data for the rest of the news values, a chi-squared analysis was rejected in favor of transparent averaging of only the six journalists interviewed. There might have been a self-selecting result in the sample as well. The 14 journalists were originally contacted for this study, and it might be that these journalists not interviewed only viewed this story as another aspect of the job and not anything of particular importance at all, and I only spoke with journalists who thought this story had much broader importance than others did.
59
Because this study is only a case study, and has low external validity, it’s not certain as to whether this modifying factor affects other areas of news, or even other protests. While aiming to be comprehensive of this single event, this study does not interrogate the relationships between reporting experience and cultural fluency. It doesn’t even examine the relationship of the
“proximity” news value and cultural fluency with much depth, which would have been useful in understanding how local, regional, and national publications covered this event. Because it is a case study with low external validity, it can’t be generalized, and more scholarship on these issues could help with understanding the relationships between news values and industry-wide struggles with covering marginalized communities.
What’s more, this study does not address how bias or stereotypes appear in reporting.
While this study strove to better understand how a journalist’s intent appeared in print, it did not answer a fundamental question about bias. While this study sought to better understand how and why journalist’s reporting appears the way it does, it ultimately cannot draw conclusions about agenda setting or framing that would be integral to understanding how media contributes to existing systems of oppression.
60
Conclusion
News values help us determine what kind of stories are covered, and what kinds of stories are left out of the paper (Breed, 1955; Correa & Harp, 2011; Schultz, 2007). The better we understand how news values manifest in stories of labor and protest, the better we understand the state of the coverage in the US. With this study, my supposition that reporters don’t deeply reflect on the news values they identify within a story, simply relying on “gut instinct” to form a narrative (Scammell, Semetko, & Tuchman, 1972; Schultz, 2007) was somewhat confirmed.
However, I had expected this study will illustrate that the angle of labor and the news value of
“impact” is not one that’s actively thought of in protests – I am happy to report I was wrong according to interviews, though the content analysis still leaves this idea up in the air. Impact is very difficult to measure in a concrete way, and all coders had problems agreeing on a single definition.
Future research should investigate more broadly how white protest around labor issues and minority protest around labor issues differ, and examine the routines that go on within specific newsrooms during major protest coverage. Ethnographies that can take a snapshot of decisions in real-time would bring much more to our understanding of news values and news routines. In addition, so much of this story was determined by the context of the place itself. A greater understanding of Appalachian media is desperately needed, along with more literature reviews about such a complex region. More research on generational protests and how modern day participants of “historical” events view themselves would also be helpful, along with better understanding of how the media has covered these events, then and now.
61
While this case study cannot be extrapolated to the media at large, the prominent role of an often overlooked news value should be considered and studied more extensively. My analysis concludes that context was integral to how the story was framed and what news values were deemed most important as reporters performed their news routines. How we as journalists present long, violent histories like the ones belonging to the Blackjewel miners is important to our audiences and ourselves. Context is not only about depth, or objectivity, or nuance in a story, it is also about justice.
62
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Appendix A
Coding Scheme
News Values of the Blackjewel coal miner protest (2019)
Article ID: Fill in the last name of the journalist, month, then day of publication. For example: LASTNAME.6.10. If no name, go by publication name. If another date is published online, default to the most recently updated date.
Coder ID: Last name Title of Article: "title"
News Values: Please mark "present" or "absent" on the following news values.
• proximity: If the article is published by a paper that frequently covers the area around Harlan County, then the publication can be considered local, and "proximity" a news value. Mark “present” or “absent.” • prominence: If the article mentions powerful political figures, activists, or similar local "celebrities," then "prominence" can be considered a news value. Mark “present” or “absent.” • human interest: If the article captures human-centered drama and conflict, either suffering or joy, using sources directly affected by the events covered in the article (Parks, 2019). Mark “present” or “absent.” • conflict: If it portrayed two sides to an issue without absolution or is ongoing, conflict can be considered a news value. Mark “present” or “absent.” • timeliness: If the article is published within 48 hours of the update or news event that occurred, timeliness can be considered a news value. Mark “present” or “absent.” • consequence/impact: If the article covered policy, events, or ideas that would directly affect the audience of the publication then "consequence" can be considered a news value. Please select the realm of consequence applied, (i.e. if the news event affects the reader on a community level, code 2). If more than one realms of impact are applicable, please go with the highest-level.
No Individual Audience Community/Group Regional Societal Consequence = Memeber = 1 = 2 Implications = 3 = 4 0
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Appendix B
Interview Questions
Topic 1: Reporter’s Past Experience
Q: How long have you been working at your current publication?
Probe: What have you been working on there? If this is a new position, what were you working on before?
Q: Had you covered similar protests before?
Probe: In what capacity? How often? How long did you spend on that story, or in that community?
Q: What is your experience in this region? (Testing Kilgo & Harlow, 2019).
Probe: How long have you been working in this region, what is your tie to it? If you aren’t from this area, how did you acquaint yourself with it while covering this story? Have you covered communities similar to Harlan County, or worked on reporting in mining communities? How did this inform your coverage? (Testing Shultz, 2007).
Topic 2: Why They Covered the Protest
Q: What directed them to the story?
Probe: How did they come to find out about the story? What kind of direction did their editor offer?
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Q: How did they know it was newsworthy? *(Testing Harcup & O’Neill, 2017; Shultz, 2007).*
Probe: What perceived news value did it offer? (Proximity, Prominence, Timeliness, Impact, Novelty, and Conflict).
Q: What value did they find during their reporting?
Probe: Why do they think their audience will care about this story? (Testing Allern, 2017). What news values did they end up identifying in their coverage?
Q: What differences did you identify from local vs. national reporting?
Topic 3: Reflecting On Their Coverage
Q: What would they have improved, if they could?
Probe: Are there sources they would have liked to have? Do they think they could have gotten a different angle on the story? Did they run up against a deadline?
Q: What would they have changed?
Probe: Did an editor ask them to change anything about the article, and why do they think they did that? (Testing Gans, 2003). Do you think the audience influenced how you told the story? (Testing Bray, 2012).
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