No abstract

This discourse analysis of audience reception examined journalistic response to the May 1, 2006, immigrants’ rights protests in mainstream newspapers, niche news and opinion outlets in the United States. The organizers of the protests faced a particular rhetorical challenge: to craft a message that would be well received by both hostile and friendly audiences. In addition to attracting significant media coverage, the actions sparked both celebration and criticism in public commentary. Three key themes were identified based on primary texts from protest organizers and existing research on media coverage of political protest: economy; policy/rights; and law/order. Linguistic representations of these themes were constructed and keywords were searched across a corpus of newspaper front pages and television transcripts to identify general trends. These trends were then analyzed at the level of sentence and utterance. Our findings illustrate the particular challenges of polysemy for social movements that seek to use mass media to advance their political goals in an increasingly fragmented media environment, as well as the persistence of some aspects of the “protest paradigm” in media coverage.

The discourse of difference is a concept derived from studies in speech codes and the ethnography of communication tradition. The concept refers to the act of naming or remarking on social, racial, or other types of difference between individuals or groups. Such a speech event often provokes a challenge to the speaker of difference, and may involve a prolonged contestation over the meaning of the original utterance and its appropriateness. Such a contestation is called a social drama, and, in the course of it, participants often engage in talk about talk—evaluations of the speech of others—that may include explicit statements about the values, premises, symbols, and rules of speaking that are important in their community.