This paper discusses news as a political resource for social movements. Specifically, the paper elaborates a conceptualization of news as a discursive resource, and suggests a dialogical model for media-movement relationships. The paper then uses this framework to investigate U. S. women's movement groups interactions with news media. I describe how the two "branches" of the women's movement understood news differently and developed quite different and specific strategies which I call media pragmatism and media subversion. The study raises questions not only about what kind of a resource news might be, and to whom it might be available, but also about the forms of knowledge that can be distributed widely in a society saturated with media "logics." Social movements, especially the "new" social movements such as the women's, environmental, and peace movements, have come to be seen as important transformative agents in modern societies (Touraine, 1985; Boggs, 1986; Eyerman and Jamison, 1991). In particular, the feminist or women's movement, has been associated with fundamental challenges to traditional or "old" political distinctions, (such as that between public and private concerns), and with subtle, but radical extensions of what can even legitimately be considered a "political" issue (Habermas, 1981; Offe, 1985; Van Zoonen, 1994).

This paper investigates the resource mobilization and media access of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Using data from NOW's archive and from a content analysis of the New York Times, it tracks NOW's 1966–1980 media access. Two factors were key to NOW's media access. First, NOW mobilized the material resources—money, skills, technology, labor, and especially information—needed to serve as a news source for journalists. Second, NOW developed effective and reflexive media strategies by using its knowledge of the routines and discursive structures of news in its own media communications.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract