Choose one of the following active movements as your case study: #Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, HongKong pro-democracy protests, Anti-gun violence movement (e.g. #NeverAgain), or the environmental/climate crisis movement (e.g. Global Climate Strike). Choose a movement/ campaign you have not already written about.
Identify a key event for this movement in the last five years as your entry point. Focusing on media discourse around a key event is much more productive than a general search.*
Locate and analyze at least 12 news stories involving your movement around this event/date from professional mainstream media sources (e.g. CNN, Fox, Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, National Review). Ideally, use both liberal and conservative outlets.
Identify and review at least 100 tweets, Instagram or Facebook posts (or any social media you know well, e.g. Weibo) about the movement event. Search by topic or hashtag(s) if there are one or two that are major. Try to randomize the tweets/posts you read as much as practical – e.g. don’t just read the first 100, read every fifth or tenth post up to 100. It is almost impossible to randomly sample social media as the discourse is huge and fluctuating, but try to avoid getting only one set of people/one conversation. The specific media and hashtags you find/review will depend on the event you choose.
Questions/Prompts:
Using this media data on your movement, and your knowledge of other media-movement interactions and models from class and readings, address the following questions:
What are this movement/campaign’s main communications strategies? How are they/their issues discussed on digital media platforms? How did they use social media themselves in this campaign (if they did)? How were they and their issues represented in mainstream media? Any differences left/right? How does their interaction with media compare to other movements we know about? Overall, how would you characterize the relationship between your group and media? What kind of resource is media -- social, mainstream, or alternative – for your group?
Sample Solution