Occupy Wall Street in Alternative and Mainstream Media
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Department of Informatics and Media Social Science – major in Media and Communication Studies Fall 2012 Master Two Years Thesis Occupy Wall Street in alternative and mainstream media A comparative analysis of the social movement’s framing in the media Andra Stefania Negus Fall 2012 Supervisor: Christian Christensen Abstract The Occupy Wall Street movement is one of the strongest and most visible reactions to the economic crisis that began in 2007. As a result, it has consistently generated media attention since its birth on September 17, 2011, despite the fact that it was repeatedly criticized for lacking a clear agenda. This thesis provides an analysis of the different ways the Occupy Wall Street was presented by OccupyWallSt.org ( the movement’s own media source), and The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today from July 2011 up to the end of June 2012. This was done by using Entman’ theory of media framing together with Castells’ network theory of power. The former provided a way of addressing the different types of frames that mainstream media utilize, while the latter offered an understanding of how power is built through the media processes. Additionally, Castells’ theory described another type of media frame which is mostly used by alternative media, the counter frame, which could successfully be applied to study the content that the social movement decided to provide about itself. The study first employs a quantitative approach by using Crawdad, a centering resonance analysis (CRA) software. This provides a reliable pool of data that was then analyzed by using the above theories. Additionally, in order to check the reliability of the qualitative conclusions, a statistical test was done for the overall top centers resulting from the CRA. Table of Contents 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 1 2. What is Occupy Wall Street? ................................................................................................... 3 2.1 Timeline of the OWS Movement ..................................................................................... 4 2.2 The sources: OccupyWallSt.org ....................................................................................... 5 2.3 The sources: The New York Times.................................................................................. 5 2.4 The sources: The Wall Street Journal .............................................................................. 6 2.5 The sources: USA Today ................................................................................................. 6 3. Literature review ...................................................................................................................... 7 3.1 Connective vs. collective action ....................................................................................... 8 3.2 Social media: can it generate long term support? ............................................................ 9 3.3 A cross-media analysis .......................................................................................................... 9 3.3 A social movement’s changing media exposure ............................................................ 11 3.5 Social movement websites: what are they used for? ........................................................... 12 3.6 Alternative media: definition, structure and content sourcing ............................................ 12 4. Theoretical background ......................................................................................................... 16 4.1 Network Society ............................................................................................................. 17 4.1.1 Power and Counter-Power in the Network Society ...................................................... 18 4.1.2 Counter-power and Social Movements ........................................................................ 22 4.2 Media Frames ................................................................................................................. 27 4.2.1 The media and the public: how the connection is built ................................................ 27 4.2.2 How to create and recognize a frame ........................................................................... 29 4.2.3 Types of media frames ................................................................................................. 32 4.2.4 Counter-frames ............................................................................................................. 33 5. Methodology .......................................................................................................................... 34 5.1. Source Material .................................................................................................................. 35 5.2 Extracting and Processing the Source Data......................................................................... 37 5.2.1 Extracting and processing the primary corpus ............................................................. 37 5.2.2. Extracting and processing the secondary corpus ......................................................... 38 5.2.3 Creating datasets for analysis ....................................................................................... 39 5.3 Centering Theory and Centering Resonance Analysis ................................................... 39 5.3.1 Centering Theory .......................................................................................................... 40 5.3.2 Centering Resonance Analysis ..................................................................................... 46 6. Analysis ................................................................................................................................. 53 6.1 Brief description of the overall newspaper content on Occupy Wall Street ....................... 53 6.2 Monthly evolution ............................................................................................................... 54 6.3 Overall top centers: how do they compare? ................................................................... 83 7. Conclusions ........................................................................................................................... 89 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 93 Appendix 1 .................................................................................................................................. 100 Appendix 2 .................................................................................................................................. 104 1. Introduction The topic that I will be looking into is the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) social movement and the messages that it used in order to achieve a broad social appeal and support. The movement that began on September 17, 2011 and is ongoing at the time I am writing this paper, came as a response to the economic and political factors behind the economic crisis that started in the late 2000s. The choice of topic came as a result of a combination of reasons. On one hand, the idea of the many but socially, politically and economically weak joining forces to fight for what they believe in and actually looking like they might make a dent is certainly appealing. On the other hand, the academic interest came from the desire to understand the way that the OWS movement managed to be long lived and to spread across nations, and from the interest in seeing the way in which social movements function and how they can be better explained and understood. The attitude towards new media platforms is ambivalent. Some believe they generate no real life / offline reactions, while others are sure that they will and they are currently changing in a profound manner the way people interact and assemble. First of all, online interactions may or may not lead to action, but what is certain is that the new media platforms are unique means of communication. Some of their users may not be satisfied with simply posting or commenting and do feel the need to further their actions, but not all of them act in such a way. Second, the message of OWS seems to be reappearing in different geographical settings and despite changing location it still manages to gain support. Therefore, I would like to see exactly how that message is built and why it is so popular. After considering and reconsidering the topic of this paper, I returned to my initial choice: looking at the Occupy Wall Street social movement and comparing the way they portray themselves with the way they are portrayed by mainstream media. At first, having seen a few random OWS articles from The New York Times it seemed that the picture they were drawing was simplistic and stereotypical. Those involved in the movement were often described as disorganized, not knowing exactly what they were fighting for and even completely unaware of 1 the situation. At other times, participants were simply presented as strange: protesters chant, a flag was burned “as a tantrum”, someone “discovered an apparently abandoned infant” (Emery 2012). However, upon further review the story looked much more diverse and nuanced and definitely worth the effort of looking into. A comment that often comes up when talking about this non-violent social movement