Gender, age, and political legitimacy: Activist (in)visibility in broadcast news, 1970–2012

ABSTRACT

We assess whether media professionals construct stories in ways that enhance or diminish women’s legitimacy as agents of change. Our analysis of 269 broadcast news stories sampled between 1970 and 2012 examines depictions of activists in five social movements—Women’s Rights, Gay Rights, Immigrant Rights, Occupy Wall Street, and Tea Party—at the intersection of gender, age, and race. We find that broadcast news coverage diminishes the legitimacy of women and older activists and activists of color by underrepresenting them, presenting opponents’ claims at higher rates, and reinforcing dominant cultural narratives about political authority.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• broadcast news
• intersectionality

Acknowledgments

We thank Alexandra Olsen and Haley Gentile for their research assistance and Jo Reger and Nancy Whittier for their feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Social scientists frequently distinguish sex from gender. Sex refers to the biological differences between males and females, while gender refers to the socially constructed characteristics (e.g., normative behavior) attributed to men and women. Gender, in other words, is performed rather than an ascribed status (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Because we focus on activists’ gender self-presentations via media coverage and are interested in how these self-presentations potentially challenge or reinforce broader cultural narratives about gender, we do not make analytic distinctions between sex and gender in this article.

² This is an important point. Social scientists who use the “protest paradigm” as a lens through which to understand media coverage focus exclusively on progressive movements (see, for example, Dardis, 2006; McLeod, 2007; Shoemaker, 1984). This ignores the reality that opposing movements often are included in the same stories and may be presented differently.

³ This can be a problem for social movements. The Congress on Racial Equality, for instance, struggled with its decision to allow White college students to speak on behalf of the civil rights movement (McAdam, 1988).

⁴ Because there is not a definitive source of information for movement demographics, we use a variety of sources to provide a sense of the general diversity of participants in movements and their campaigns.

⁵ We encountered some difficulty constructing a time line for the Occupy movement because it was ongoing when we were at the archive.

⁶ While this is the topic of another paper, we found significant differences between newspaper and broadcast news coverage. There were several critical events, such as the murder of Harvey Milk, which received a lot of newspaper attention and almost no broadcast media coverage. We found that events that had at least 10 newspaper stories were significantly more likely to get covered in broadcast news. Because our focus is on patterns over time, we tried to distribute the events sampled across the decades.

⁷ The Vanderbilt News Archive has been collecting and abstracting news coverage from ABC, CBS, and NBC since August 5, 1968. The archive began adding limited coverage from CNN in 1995 and FOX News in 2004. The news archives for ABC, CBS, and NBC are abstracted with far more detail than FOX News or CNN since the “big three” have dedicated archivists. The archive received a grant, so some of the years had more detail about the content of newscasts on FOX News than others (although the lead archivist could not provide a specific range of dates for this detailed abstracting). This is important because it made stories on FOX News more difficult to locate. Generally, FOX News abstracts only provided a list of stories included in the hour-long broadcast, rather than the minute and second at which a story began. Consequently, most of the stories on FOX News had to be located while we were at the archive. As the cost associated with the archive ($30/hour) was relatively high and funds were limited, FOX News is underrepresented in the sample.

⁸ Given the relatively low rates of activists of color in coverage, we combined Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and Native American into a single non-White category.

⁹ As sexual orientation was not consistently reported or available, we dropped this variable from our analysis. It is also worth noting that our research included measures for each news station and the technological era (e.g., broadcast television, cable, and Internet eras) on legitimacy. None of the results for these variables was significant, so they are not presented here.

¹⁰ While these analyses are not shown, we also coded for activist emotion, dress, and activity. These analyses are available upon request.