Portraying Protracted Conflict in the Entertainment Industry

Abstract

Protracted conflicts are common and complex, and differ from other types of disputes because of their ongoing escalation, non-negotiable issues, unsuccessful interventions, and passage of time. Prior research on this topic lacks good operationalizations of these features. This not only makes it difficult to compare research on how journalists and media portray such conflict but also challenging to analyze such phenomena. Hence, this study develops codes for features of protracted conflict and then applies those to the case of the news coverage (n = 148) of the 2008–2009 negotiations between the Screen Actors Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Results demonstrate the applicability of these features to describe news coverage of a labor management conflict setting, illustrate how these features vary over time and show how features are interrelated, to reveal two underlying dimensions of the particular conflict (temporal context and resolution flexibility) and possibly protracted conflicts in general.

KEYWORDS:

• Content analysis
• framing
• labor negotiations
• media entertainment industry
• protracted conflict

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors wish to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their critiques of the manuscript.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

The codebook is available as supplementary material at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2018.1513817.