From Seattle 1999 to New York 2004: A Longitudinal Analysis of Journalistic Framing of the Movement for Democratic Globalization

This article examines how journalistic framing of the democratic globalization movement evolved in the five years after its 1999 emergence in Seattle. It takes a longitudinal approach to analyzing social movement coverage by looking for changes in news reporting over time. Protests against the World Trade Organization put this movement on The New York Times’ map, with ‘Seattle’ enduring as a symbolic reference connoting the threat of civic disorder. We found signs of both resilience and change in the newspaper's coverage, which demonstrates complex interactions between reporters, activist groups and real-world events. Delegitimizing language was constant over time, evoking the protest paradigm and riot, confrontation and circus frames as templates. However, this analysis also found evidence of frame dynamism, suggestive of a possible evolving sympathy through which movement members improve access to reporters and get their issues across to the public. Journalists increasingly used movement members as sources, described the movement with fewer marginalizing terms and framed protests more favorably. Our findings about the increased presence of celebrities over other sources and of photographs over text – a phenomenon we call the tabloidization of protest – could have important strategic consequences for social movements. We argue, based on news values relevant to this activism, that mainstream spokespeople and tabloid-like coverage – which may indeed oversimplify and trivialize issues – also have the potential to publicize and popularize social movements.