The dialogic of media and social movements

Changing Coverage of Domestic Violence Murders

“…To the extent that RICADV consistently helped reporters produce timely news that captured public interest, and to the extent that RICADV in its organizing and legislative work was making news, media outlets came to rely on the organization as a routine, reliable source. We interpret RICADV's success as evidence in support of a dialogic model of media-movement inter-action (Barker-Plummer, 1996). Stressing context, timing, reflexivity, and relations between movements and reporters, communications scholar Bernadette Barker-Plummer (1996) suggests that: a dialogic approach looks for two-way influences from any interaction, and it assumes the participants in any interaction can learn about and use the resources of the other-especially if those resources are discursive knowledge resources .…”

Shifting frames of the Palestinian movement in US news

“…Barker-Plummer's (1996) dialogic model, for example, is a needed reminder that news reporting is often contradictory and that social movement activists are reflexive. The media-social movement relationship has multiple sides, and we must examine more than just what the media 'do to' social movements.…”

“…If we were to map political communication, media frames would be situated between the collective action frames advanced by social movements and the 'mentally stored clusters of ideas that guide individuals' processing of information' (Entman, 1993: 53; see also Scheufele, 1999). While the news media are 'a crucial bottleneck for distribution of new information by and about social movements' (Barker-Plummer, 1996), they are more than a mere conduit of information from social movements to individuals. Media frames interact with and influence the construction of both social movement frames and individual frames.…”

Systematic Monitoring as a Dissident Activist Strategy: Palestine Media Watch and U.S. News Media, 2000-2004

“…I follow the recommendations of Barker‐Plummer (1995) and Kumar (2007) whose “dialogic” and “dialectical” models require the researcher to identify the means of resistance available to movements as well as the mechanisms in media institutions that make change possible or subvert it. Critiquing Gitlin (1980), Barker‐Plummer (1996, p. 29) argued that researchers need to focus on activist strategies because focusing on representations makes it “impossible to tell how much of a movement's coverage is the outcome of hegemonic news processes and how much is the result of movement choices.” She identifies a movement's strategies and examines their effects on coverage: “In short, what worked and what has not? A dialogical understanding may produce critical or strategic knowledge, knowledge that may be used to produce change” (Barker‐Plummer, 1995, p. 311, emphasis in original).…”

“…These practices lead news organizations to produce meaning that serves power (Herman & Chomsky, 2002) 3 and hegemonically manage those who challenge power (Gitlin, 1980), but it is important to move away from these ''macro'' level analyses in order to understand the ''microdetails'' of media-movement struggles so that we can understand the capabilities of and limits to strategies employed by movements and to determine if these strategies are worth the labor required of them (Barker-Plummer, 1996;Kumar, 2007). PMW pursued change by monitoring news coverage of the conflict for months at a time and meeting with newsworkers to present its critique and normative vision of journalism, arguing that the dominant narrative was unfair and would be corrected if journalists fully committed themselves to their professional and public obligations.…”