To understand social change and the politics of the disadvantaged one needs to understand social movement organizations and their media coverage. Movement organizations provide critical resources to seek social change, help to construct political identities and interests, and spur collective civic engagement, and scholars agree that the attention of the mass news media is critical to the struggles of challengers and is a mark of their influence. But there is no big empirical picture of any aspect of the rise, decline, and persistence of movement organizations across movements and over time. To fill this major gap, the investigators propose to collect new data on articles in which U.S. movement organizations were mentioned in national newspapers--the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times, since the populist movement of the 1890s. These data are now available through ProQuest Historical Newspapers and will be collected electronically. These data will allow the researchers to address several fundamental questions about movement organizations and families: Which U.S. movement organizations and families have received the greatest newspaper coverage since the 1890s? Are they the ones that movement scholarship would lead us to expect? How has coverage changed over time overall and across movements? How does coverage compare to standard, limited measures of movement organizational scale or activity, such as organizational density, membership, resource mobilization, and protest events? Are there systematic biases in coverage of movement organizations similar to the biases surrounding the coverage of protest events? Can coverage figures serve as a partial substitute for data much less easily generated? Are the historical trajectories of coverage consistent with the main theories of social movements? The investigators will address these questions and assess the main theories of movements through methodological innovation and integration: by synthesizing historical investigation, formal qualitative analyses, and time-series regression. One of the most important impacts of the project will be the first long-term mapping of the movements and organizations that have made the greatest imprints on the public consciousness over more than a century. This big picture of movement organizations will be of considerable interest to the general public and policymakers. The project will also promote greater understanding of today's social movements, such as the environmental, feminist, and Christian right movements through a comparison with past movements such as the prohibition, labor, and civil rights movements. The project will also advance social theory, methodological integration, and training of graduate students.
