Why do newspapers cover social movement actors, and why is this coverage sometimes favorable? Early scholarship saw the news media mainly as a source of data on collective action, and sought to ascertain its biases, but scholarship has increasingly focused directly on why movements gain coverage, especially coverage that can advance their goals. To understand why and how newspapers cover movement actors, we start with the insight that movements rely on the news media for many reasons, but their coverage is largely in the control of news institutions. In this review, we focus on perspectives that specify 3-way interactions between the characteristics of newspapers, social movement actors, and the social and political contexts, but we begin with how news media institutions are organized. We conclude with suggestions for future research that take advantage of the digital revolution of the last generation.

“Do Muslims Vote Islamic?” asked an article by Charles Kurzman and Ijlal Naqvi in the April 2010 issue of the Journal of Democracy . The answer, at that time, appeared to be rarely. This essay presents updated data on Islamic political parties’ performance in parliamentary elections through the end of 2014, along with an expanded set of electoral platforms. Since 2011, the trend toward liberal themes has stalled, but Islamic parties have not fared much better in elections since the Arab Spring than before. As in earlier years, a handful of Islamic parties have won pluralities of the vote, especially in “breakthrough” elections after long periods of autocratic rule, while most Islamic parties received less than 2 percent of seats in parliament. The Islamic political sector as a whole—that is, the proportion of seats won by all Islamic parties in each election—has remained virtually unchanged, with a median figure of 14 percent both before and since the Arab Spring.

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When social movement organizations receive extensive newspaper coverage, why is it sometimes substantive and sometimes not? By “substantive,” we mean coverage that reflects serious treatment of the movement's issues, demands, or policy claims. Scholars agree that the news media are key to movement organizations' influence, helping them alter public discourse and effect political change, but often find that protests are covered nonsubstantively. Employing insights from literatures on historical institutionalism, the social organization of the news, and the consequences of movements, we elaborate an “institutional mediation” model that identifies the interactive effects on coverage of news institutions' operating procedures, movement organizations' characteristics and action, and political contexts. Although movement actors suffer compound legitimacy deficits with journalists, the institutional mediation model identifies the openings news institutions provide, the movement organizational characteristics, the forms of collective action likely to induce substantive news treatment, and the political contexts that will amplify or dampen these effects. We derive four interactive hypotheses from this model, addressing the effects of organizational identities, collective action, and political contexts on news outcomes. We appraise the hypotheses with comparative and qualitative comparative analyses of more than 1000 individually coded articles discussing the five most-covered organizations of the 1960s U.S. civil rights movement across four national newspapers. We find support for each hypothesis and discuss the implications for other movement organizations and the current media context.

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