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This article considers how we are to understand democratic media activism, which has recently burgeoned in Canada, the UK and the USA. What is its political significance and potential? Is it a new social movement, a new style of politics cutting across movements, or are new concepts needed? Drawing illustratively upon interviews with media activists, notably in Vancouver, we explore insights offered by social movement theory - including resource mobilization formulations and the new social movement theories of Melucci, Habermas, Cohen and Arato, and Fraser. While all these traditions offer valuable insights, media activism reveals limitations in existing conceptualizations. It has some of the characteristics of a movement, but lacks a distinct collective identity or niche within movement ecology. It may be destined to be a boundary-transgressing nodal point for other movements, articulating a coherent project for radical democracy, rather than a movement-for-itself.

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As part of a research program called CHAMP (Canadian Health and Media Project) devoted to examining health literacy in Canadian daily newspapers, and operating from a theoretical framework that posits journalism as a practice of representation, this article is based on a series of formal interviews with English-language and French-language health reporters. The interviews sought answers to three central questions about health reportage: how do journalists demarcate such a vast topic as health? where do they find their stories? and to what extent are they familiar with research into the social determinants of health? It concludes that in spite of their dependence upon published scholarly research as a source of news stories, Canadian health reporters overemphasize the roles of the health care system and personal health habits in the production of Canadians' health, and they underemphasize the role of social determinants. Keywords Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 32 (2007) 557-574 ©2007 Canadian Journal of Communication CorporationRésumé : Dans le cadre d'un projet de recherche nommé CHAMP (Canadian Health and Media Project) qui examine le niveau de connaissance par rapport à la santé dans les journaux quotidiens du Canada et dans un cadre théorique qui avance le journalisme comme étant une pratique de représentation, cet article est basé sur une série d'entretiens formels avec des journalistes de santé publique dans les milieux anglophones et francophones. Les entretiens avaient pour but de répondre à trois questions centrales à propos du journalisme de santé publique : comment les journalistes cernent-ils un sujet aussi vaste que la santé ? Où trouvent-ils leurs histoires ? À quel point sont-ils familiers avec l'étude des détermi-nants sociaux de la santé ? Il en arrive à conclure que malgré leur dépendance sur les études académiques publiées comme source de nouvelles, les journalistes de santé publique canadiens mettent une accent démesurée sur le rôle du système de santé et des habitudes de santé personnelles sur la santé des Canadiens.Mots clés : santé de la population; déterminants sociaux de la santé; journalisme santé

A textual analysis of an archive of US newspaper articles published during the first two weeks of the Gulf War reveals that three interpretative news frames—the Enemy Within, Marginal Oddity and Legitimate Controversy—dominated press coverage of antiwar protest. Salient textual characteristics (themes, metaphors, argumentation strategies, tone, syntactical and lexical choices) of each frame are discussed, particularly as they were manifested in opinion/editorial commentary. The differential treatment of different voices (moralist, utilitarian, radical) within the peace movement is also analyzed, showing that some perspectives tended to be relatively privileged over others; but more important, the movement as a whole was placed on the defensive in press discourse, compelled to defend its own legitimacy. These patterns of press discourse are related very broadly to America's `master narrative' of war, a narrative which had been threatened by the Vietnam experience.