Media and Revolt

Strategies and Performances from the 1960s to the Present

Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Erling Sivertsen, Rolf Werenskjold, Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Erling Sivertsen, Rolf Werenskjold

• Verlag: Berghahn Books
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857459992
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: History
• Thema: World History

In what ways have social movements attracted the attention of the mass media since the sixties? How have activists influenced public attention via visual symbols, images, and protest performances in that period? And how do mass media cover and frame specific protest issues? Drawing on contributions from media scholars, historians, and sociologists, this volume explores the dynamic interplay between social movements, activists, and mass media from the 1960s to the present. It introduces the most relevant theoretical approaches to such issues and offers a variety of case studies ranging from print media, film, and television to Internet and social media.

Part I

Systematic Approaches to Protest and Media

Chapter 1

Changes of Protest Groups’ Media Strategies from a Long-Term Perspective

Dieter Rucht

This chapter explores the relationship between protest groups and the mass media with a special but not exclusive emphasis on progressive leftist groups in West Germany. It aims at answering two questions: What are the basic shifts of leftist (or progressive) groups’ media strategies from the 1950s to the present? What factors, both exogenous and endogenous, have influenced these strategic shifts?

Conceptually, the analysis will rely on a distinction between four ways in which protest groups can deal with media. It is argued that in different periods, protest groups put different emphasis on one or several of these media-related strategies. Given the broad scope of this analysis, the chapter will mainly rely on secondary analysis.

The Conceptual Framework

Basic Characteristics of the Modern System of Mass Media

Modern mass media, in particular newspapers/journals, radio, television, and the internet, represent a complex and partly interrelated system that serves entertainment, information, education, the expression of interests and opinions, deliberation, and mobilization. As far as political communication and mobilization is concerned, the mass media are a crucial link between the citizenry and the political decision makers (Bennett and Entman 2001). They are both a forum and an actor. Not only do they show (in a highly selective way) what is going on in politics, but based on their selection criteria, biases and opinions, they are also shaping people’s minds, including those of the political decision makers.

While the mass media generally compete with each other for the attention (and money) of the mass publics, this competition mostly occurs within vaguely defined market segments. These segments are oriented toward certain social milieus, characterized by similar social and educational backgrounds, age cohorts, territorial spaces, political leanings, lifestyles, etc. Most newspapers, for example, represent a rough political-ideological tendency (in German, redaktionelle Linie) so that they can be located on the Left-Right axis. Accordingly, they have differential positions vis-à-vis different political subjects. While there are some players and some kinds of political events that are covered, though not necessarily positively, almost obligatorily (e.g., the results of a presidential election), other actors and events have to struggle to get media coverage.

On the input side, the mass media are constantly bombarded with an abundance of offers: reports by news agencies, press releases, press conferences, speeches, commentaries, and invitations to watch and cover various kinds of events. Not only because of their limited carrying capacity, but also because of their own selection criteria, most of this input goes into the wastebasket. On the output side, individual media and journalists are keen to be the first—and hopefully exclusive—source for offering what they deem to be spectacular, newsworthy or at least interesting. Therefore, they actively seek stories, news, pictures, commentaries, interviews, etc. This search is highly strategic and selective, so that political actors cannot hope to be approached more or less automatically in order to respond to the media’s requests. The likelihood of actors and events being covered in the mass media depends on a number of factors, of which, besides issue attention cycles (Downs 1972), the news values of actors and events are crucial (Staab 1990). Such values, for example, conflict, damage, prominence, credibility and proximity to the audience, are partly endogenous “objective” properties of the actors/events but partly also ascribed and socially constructed attributes. News values are also crucial for social movements and protest groups trying to gain mass media coverage (Hocke 2002).

The Relationship between Social Movements/Protest Groups and Media

In scholarly literature, the relationship¹ between mass media and social movements is sometimes characterized as symbiotic (Wolfsfeld 1984; Imhof 1996). This view is based on a simplistic assumption: on the one hand, the mass media are keen to cover spectacular conflict, possibly with the occurrence of aggression and physical violence. This is something protest groups may potentially offer. On the other hand, protest groups, in order for their voices and claims to be heard, actively seek media coverage and sometimes even engage in spectacles or aggressive acts to secure that coverage. In other words, protest groups and the mass media are said to need, and profit from, each other. While such a symbiotic relationship may occur in certain instances, most other cases are characterized by a fundamental asymmetry. Protest groups, to the extent that they seek a mass audience to become known and attain support, desperately need the mass media, while the media, facing the daily avalanche of inputs, are hardly dependent on protest groups. To be sure, there is a general expectation that the media should not ignore large and/or very disruptive protests. Indeed, the mass media tend to cover such events to a high degree (Smith et al. 2001). But this pattern does not apply to the great bulk of protest mobilization, which only takes place on a small or medium-sized scale and does not comprise disruptive action, let alone violence. Consider that in cities such as Berlin and Paris more than three thousand protests take place every year. As a result, most of these groups, who are unable to mobilize the masses or are unwilling to resort to severe disruption, are either doomed to be ignored by the mass media (usually with the exception of local newspapers) or seek to compensate for their unattractiveness by other means. This brings me to a typology of the strategies that protest groups can choose with regard to media.

Media Strategies of Protest Groups

In an earlier publication, I typified and exemplified four kinds of strategies that social movements/protest groups can choose. These strategies, named the “quadruple A” (Rucht 2004), are:

Abstention: No effort is made to access media, usually because of frustrating and unsuccessful attempts in the past.

Attack: Protest groups actively criticize the structure, mechanisms, and biases of the mass media, appealing to certain general normative standards (openness, plurality, truthfulness) and professional rules (balance between different views, verification, separation between facts and opinion, etc.), and hoping that this will result in a reduction of selection and description biases.

Adaptation: Protest groups try to discover and instrumentally use the mechanisms and rules of the mass media in playing the latter’s game, for instance, by staging media-savvy protest events, offering adequate quotation and sound bites, and establishing personal contacts with journalists. In terms of their publicly visible actions, apart from serving the media’s hunger for big numbers or disruptiveness (Shoemaker et al. 1987), protest groups can rely on two other tactics that also imply news values: First, they may seek prominent, credible or politically relevant supporters and allies. These options range from a movie star to an established political party. Second, they may engage in creative and innovative actions that, by their very form, are attractive to media. This is why protest groups sometimes engage in performative action like street theater or risky stunts.

Alternative: Protest groups can rely on self-controlled or self-produced media such as flyers, posters, newsletters, brochures, books, radios, video groups, and, more recently, the various tools offered by the internet (emails, websites, chat rooms, Facebook, Twitter, etc.).

Of course, these four kinds of attitudes toward media are not mutually exclusive. While this is obvious for the last three, it is also possible that one and the same group moves over time from abstention to one or several of the three other patterns, or vice versa.

While it is relatively easy to investigate which media-related strategies are generally applied by which kinds of groups (after all, this is public or semipublic information), it remains a theoretical and empirical challenge to identify both the structural and situational factors that make groups choose a certain strategy or a combination of different strategies. To my knowledge, only a few theoretical thoughts are available on this causal question. Nevertheless, common sense would lead us to formulate some plausible hypotheses. For example, when protest groups encounter the mass media that are not only open but also generally supportive to their claims, these groups would have few reasons to attack the media or to agonize on how to improve their adaptation and/or alternative strategies. While more such ad hoc hypotheses could be formulated, it might be wiser to first consider a number of empirical cases of interaction between media and protest groups. This may allow us to produce better-informed hypotheses, move toward some tentative conclusions, and, based on further and broader empirical investigations far beyond the scope of this chapter, ultimately formulate a theory about the interrelationship between protest groups and the mass media. Before addressing and presenting a few empirical cases, I first wish to provide a brief historical background on that relationship in Germany.

A Brief Historical Background

Up until the nineteenth century, social movements and protest groups in Central and Western Europe were embedded in fairly distinct social milieus (Lepsius 1966). Communication and mobilization was mainly based on networks of people who were physically close to each other and met face-to-face in their neighborhoods, market places, factories, churches, pubs, voluntary associations, clubs, etc. With the partial erosion of such milieus and the shift from parochial and local to nationwide contention (Tilly 1978), mediated communication, in particular via newspapers, became an increasingly important instrument of political communication. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the major social milieus were to a large extent still congruent with basic ideological tendencies. The social milieus relied on their own media, which, in part, served as the mouthpiece of and catalyst for milieu-specific political activism. Therefore, for particular groups, access to their ideologically similar media was relatively easy while attempts to gain (positive) coverage in ideologically distant media were doomed to failure.

In Germany, up to the point when the Nazi movement seized power, a plethora of ideologically bound media existed, each occupying their own specific position in a highly segmented media market (Wilke and Noelle-Neumann 1994: 439). This changed dramatically when the Nazis began to streamline and rigidly control all forms of mass media so that these served as a platform and an agent for strong but also sophisticated political propaganda and mobilization. In addition to newspapers and other more traditional tools such as posters and flyers, radio became a primary source for political mobilization “from above.”

After the defeat of the Nazi regime, a new era of mass communication began. With both the help and pressure of the Allied forces, a fairly pluralistic system of mass media, especially newspapers, was established along with democratic political institutions in West Germany. However, in contrast to the era of the Weimar Republic, this system of mass media was hardly segmented along the lines of the former or existing traditional social milieus (and corresponding political parties), which were rapidly decaying. This does not mean that the major media, especially the newspapers, could no longer be located on the Left-Right axis. However, their positioning was less obvious and more flexible because most media tried to secure some sort of internal pluralism and, probably more important, most media tried to comply with standards of professional journalism. These standards required a more detached and balanced way of reporting, and a separation between news and the opinions of journalists and other actors. Thus, from the 1950s onward, West German protest groups of all types and political leanings faced a system of mass media that, by and large, was similar to that of other Western liberal democracies (Voltmer 1993). Obviously, a strikingly different situation existed in the communist bloc countries where, to various degrees and with some changes over time, the mass media were centrally controlled and inaccessible to opposition groups.

A Chronological Look at Selected Protest Campaigns

From the end of the Second World War, a plethora of different types of social movements, political campaigns, and protest groups were revitalized or came into existence. These phenomena have been studied from various angles. Apart from numerous cases studies, there is also a large amount of quantitative data on protest events from 1950 onward that allows us to identify the occurrence and characteristics of all kinds of protest (Rucht 2003). Moreover, several broader studies on sets of movements, in particular the so-called new social movements, have been written. Furthermore, a comprehensive handbook on social movements in Germany from 1945 to the present has been published (Roth and Rucht 2008).

Yet very little research has been carried out on the media strategies of protest groups. Some scholars have written more generally about attempts to establish a counterpublic (for Germany, see, e.g., Stamm 1988; Oy 2001; more generally, see Warner 2002). Others have studied particular aspects, such as the development of underground or alternative press in certain periods (Peck 1991; McMillian 2011), or the media strategies of groups like Greenpeace (Dale 1996). However, no detailed study is available that would compare the use of different media strategies over time and across groups or issues. The following presentation of selected protest campaigns and their usage of media is nothing more than a first step toward such a comparison, which, however, would deserve a much broader and deeper investigation in order to attain more solidly grounded findings and conclusions.

I chose large and memorable campaigns, not necessarily because of their coverage in the mass media but rather because of their investment in terms of mobilization efforts. In addition, I focus on cases for which primary literature is available and/or that I know from my long-standing study of social movements and political protest in Germany. I excluded the situation in East Germany where, with the remarkable exceptions of June 1953² and the peaceful revolution of 1989, it was only possible to engage in small and relatively modest forms of protest. Such protests were mainly based on face-to-face mobilization that, to some extent, was flanked by a samizdat-like underground press (e.g., the newsletter Grenzfall). These media, however, had a very low circulation and could not be distributed in public.

The 1950s

Contrary to common assumptions, the 1950s were not a quiet time in terms of political protest in Germany. This period was marked by occasional unrest, such as strikes and the mobilization of groups that had suffered in the war and were now asking for state subsidies. However, these issues were not remarkable in terms of the groups’ media strategies. Protest was staged by conventional organizations usually based on formal membership. These organizations tended to rely on their own means of communication and mobilization, such as flyers, posters, and newsletters. Large protests were covered by the mass media as part of an almost obligatory news reporting. The organizers made few efforts to influence this media coverage.

Yet the picture was more differentiated for the two major waves of peace protests: the first directed against the reestablishment of an army in the early 1950s, the second against nuclear weapons under control of West Germany some years later. On the one hand, given the disastrous experience of the Second World War, large numbers of West Germans sympathized with the protest against rearmament. Support was widespread among social democrats and trade unionists but also among “progressive” groups within the Protestant Church. No wonder that segments of the mass media were relatively open to these groups’ activities against rearmament, at least in the early years of the campaign. On the other hand, the coexistence of West Germany alongside a communist state in East Germany as part of the Soviet bloc and the general climate of the Cold War fostered strong anticommunist attitudes in major parts of the population and among almost all political elites. Protests for peace and against rearmament fell under the suspicion of serving the interests of, or even being steered by, Moscow. In response to the protesters’ critique of West German institutions and politics, people uttered, “If you don’t like it here, just walk over to the other side.” With the intensification of the Cold War and the ever-stronger embedding of West Germany in the Western alliance, the groups protes...