Protests on the Front Page: Media Salience,Institutional Dynamics,and Coverage of Collective Action in the New York Times,1960-1995

Abstract

Past research has illuminated consistent patterns in the type of protests that receive media attention. Still, we know relatively little about the differential prominence editors assign to events deemed worthy of coverage. We argue that while media routines shape whether events are covered, mass media organizations, social institutions, and systemic changes are important factors in determinations of prominence. To examine patterns of prominence, this study analyzes the factors influencing page placement patterns of protests covered in the New York Times, 1960-1995. We find that (1) protests are less likely to appear prominently over time, but this effect is conditioned by the paper’s editorial and publishing regime; (2) regime effects were especially consequential for civil rights and peace protests; (3) effects of event size and violence weakened over time; and (4) events embedded within larger cycles of protest coverage during less constricted news cycles were more likely to be featured prominently.

Keywords

contentious politics news media prominence newspapers

Introduction

The dynamics of social movements are deeply entwined with those of the media. Social movements seek and depend upon media coverage in order to gain the recognition of policy makers in multiple institutional fields, and to reshape policy agendas in line with movement goals (Gamson, Croteau, Hoynes, & Sasson, 1992; Gamson & Wolfsfeld, 1993). The media are central in the constitution of movement frames and narratives that enter public discourse (Chan & Lee, 1984; Snow, Rochford, Worden, & Benford, 1986), and news outlets may also use movement mobilization as a source of sensational content or as a means to supplement coverage of other major events. This mutual exchange between movements and media is unequal and hotly contested. Movement actors worry that the media distort their message and often warp the self-image of activists (Gitlin, 2003; Sobieraj, 2010, 2011), or perhaps offer no coverage at all, while reporters and editors fret that the over- or undercoverage of a given movement may tarnish their image as balanced, neutral, and unbiased observers (Gamson & Wolfsfeld, 1993).

Scholars have developed a significant body of research on one aspect through which movements and media interact: the selection of protest events for reporting by newspapers (see Earl, Martin, McCarthy, & Soule, 2004, for a review). There are, nevertheless, two noteworthy omissions in the existing body of research on the processes underlying media selection. First, the bulk of scholarly attention concentrates on whether social movement mobilization is covered by the media (e.g., Barranco & Wisler, 1999; Earl et al., 2004; McCarthy, McPhail, & Smith, 1996). Media attention, however, is multidimensional (Kiousis, 2004). Comparatively less attention is paid to the prominence of coverage given to those events that are deemed worthy of reporting (but see Koopmans & Olzak, 2004; McCluskey, Stein, Boyle, & McLeod, 2009). Prominence is quite significant because most readers pay particular attention to stories appearing on a newspaper’s first page (Bogart, 1984) and that the topical content of stories on the front page is distinct from other sections of the paper (Puglisi, 2011). The relative paucity of research on the prominence of protest reporting is therefore a consequential omission, as it is a major criterion of how widely events penetrate public discourse (Maier, 2010), and should therefore shape whether any response to a protest is deemed necessary by targeted institutions and policy makers (Boydstun, 2008) as well as signal the broader agenda-setting preferences of the media (McCombs & Shaw, 1972).

Second, previous work has largely suggested that patterns of media attention to protest are stable, as journalists tend to follow a “protest paradigm” in reporting practices (Chan & Lee, 1984). Research has strongly suggested that stability is widespread for coverage patterns of social movement activity (see, for instance, Barranco & Wisler, 1999; McCarthy et al., 1996), but it is an open question whether this finding holds for other types of media attention, and indeed there are good reasons to expect much more volatility.

The present study seeks to overcome these two limitations—the unidimensional emphasis on media attention and the lack of a dynamic, historically situated understanding of prominence—by examining trends in front page placement of articles about collective protest events published in the New York Times between 1960 and 1995. The New York Times is recognized in a broad body of work as a predominant source for coverage of major protest events, thus making prominent coverage in the paper a meaningful measure of media impact for contentious collective actors. This offers the opportunity to investigate the different spheres of influence that affect protest coverage in a major daily newspaper, which can significantly extend scholarly understanding of how the media and social movements interacted over a key period of American history. Using insights from Shoemaker and Reese’s (2014) Hierarchy of Influences Model of media content—which we review below—we suggest that routine practices shape whether an event is covered by the press and remain relatively stable over time. However, higher level influences—in particular media organizations, social institutions, and social systems—affect whether protest is given prominent coverage. These latter set of influences are much more temporally and contextually sensitive.

Media Attention, Prominence, and Protest Events

Which protest events make it to the front page of a newspaper? The processes through which protests are selected for coverage and then editorially judged as sufficiently important to be featured prominently are complex and not well understood. It has long been established that the mass media play an agenda-setting function in society (McCombs & Shaw, 1972), in that by controlling what is news, the media play a significant role in shaping public opinion about which issues or topics are important (Lee, 2009). As a result, protest activity challenging the status quo or existing power structures may receive entirely different coverage, in both tone and content, compared with more quotidian social movement mobilization. Scholarly investigation in how and why the media cover protest is therefore important as it can uncover the manifest and latent preferences of media organizations.

Research on media attention to protest generally emphasizes one aspect of coverage: the set of events selected for coverage (e.g., Earl et al., 2004; McCarthy et al., 1996). Despite this, a larger literature on media salience suggests that coverage is but one aspect of media attention. Kiousis (2004), for instance, demonstrates that media salience is better treated as a multidimensional concept and argues that visibility and valence are central axes of newsworthiness. As a result, high levels of attention to one type of media attention may overlook important divergences in the factors influencing other aspects of media coverage.

The existing literature has identified patterns of commonality in the factors predicting media salience, pointing to specific elements that make a story more newsworthy (Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Harcup & O’Neill, 2001). The “newsworthiness” model originally proposed by Shoemaker, Danielian, and Brendlinger (1991) focuses on two main themes that influence news coverage: first, the degree to which an event is deviant, and second, whether it is socially significant. Events with high deviance and high social significance receive the most intense media attention. When it comes to media attention to collective action, scholars have found consistent support for specific news values in reporting practices. Here, journalists often rely on a “protest paradigm” (Chan & Lee, 1984), where coverage focuses less on the issues raised by protesters, and more on the deviant, conflictual, or otherwise remarkable aspects of the event, which may ultimately undermine or discredit social movement mobilization. Protest is also covered more frequently when it coincides with larger issues or events, though often in ways that discredit participants (Gitlin, 2003). These findings have been replicated in a wide variety of movements and contexts (e.g., Harlow & Johnson, 2011; McLeod & Hertog, 1992, 1999; Shoemaker, 1984; Weaver & Scacco, 2013).

We seek to overcome the limited focus on media attention as a binary construct in this study by expanding the scope of analysis to consider the relationship between prominence, which is a key element of media salience (Kiousis, 2004), and protest. To generate expectations about the factors influencing prominence, we make use of the Hierarchy of Influences Model proposed by Shoemaker and Reese (2014), which provides a synthetic framework integrating five nested levels of media influence: individuals, routine practices, media organizations, social institutions, and social systems. This approach allows us to emphasize the multiplicity of contexts, routines, and institutional practices that shape the news, while providing the conceptual tools to hypothesize how different levels of influence matter in specific scenarios but not in others. Below, we use insights generated by the Hierarchy of Influences Model to build specific hypotheses about how different levels of influence coalesce to affect whether protest events are given prominent coverage. Our central argument is that routine practices are the most powerful predictors of initial selection. For prominence, however, we expect the importance of routine practices will be offset by more heightened sensitivity to media organizations, social institutions, and social systems. A consequence of this distinction is that we expect media selection to exhibit relative stability over time (as established in previous work), while the patterns of event prominence will be much more temporally volatile.

Media Attention to Social Movement Mobilization

As we have noted, one of the most frequently studied topics on media attention to social movements has focused on which events are covered by the media. McCarthy et al. (1996) refer to this process as selection bias, which they define as “media bias in the selection of but a few of the many possible events to observe and report” (p. 479). Protest events selected for any coverage pass a set of filters indicating that journalists and editors find the event sufficiently newsworthy in comparison with the other news items of the day. The insights from the literature on media selection provide a clear understanding of the factors that can transform a protest from something that may safely be ignored to something truly newsworthy.

Several studies have consistently pointed to three robust factors that influence the degree to which a story is newsworthy that hold over time and place. First, consistent with the importance Shoemaker et al. (1991) place on deviance as a predictor of newsworthiness generally, large or sensationalistic protest events are also more likely to receive coverage compared with more routine demonstrations. Events featuring higher levels of conflict are more likely to be reported (Ortiz, Myers, Walls, & Diaz, 2005) and featured more prominently than other types of protests (Gitlin, 2003). This tendency has been well documented, with many studies confirming that large protest events or demonstrations with violence are more likely to be covered (e.g., Barranco & Wisler, 1999; Earl et al., 2004; Kielbowicz & Scherer, 1986; McCarthy, Titarenko, McPhail, Rafail, & Augustyn, 2008; Myers & Caniglia, 2004; Ortiz et al., 2005). Given the strength and consistency of these findings for media selection, we expect similar results for prominent news coverage. We therefore propose,

Hypothesis 1: Conflictual, large, or sensationalistic events are more likely to be featured prominently in the New York Times.

Second, a protest’s institutional targets may influence an event’s newsworthiness (Bagdikian, 2000; Herman & Chomsky, 1988; McLeod & Hertog, 1999). Such accounts claim that the mass media are guardians of corporate interests and thus have an interest in growing their market share while maximizing capital accumulation and maintaining the status quo. Herman and Chomsky (1988) examined coverage patterns in the New York Times and concluded that the Times systematically and intentionally underemphasized events that challenge corporate interests or American hegemony. Based on this, we propose,

Hypothesis 2: Protest events with corporate targets will receive less prominent page placement in the New York Times.

The third factor emphasizes how a protest event’s geographic proximity to the newspaper can also influence selection. For example, Myers and Caniglia (2004) find the distance between the publisher’s city and an event is negatively associated with the likelihood of coverage (see also Mueller, 1997), and we also know that events centered in Washington, D.C., are often seen as having national significance (e.g., McCarthy et al., 1996). Given this, we expect that

Hypothesis 3: Protest events occurring in either New York or Washington, D.C., will receive more prominent page placement in the New York Times.

Synthesizing this discussion, protest coverage is shaped by a protest paradigm (Chan & Lee, 1984), which itself is constitutive of a strong set of media routines that emphasize deviance, novelty, proximity, and the atypical elements of demonstrations. As Shoemaker and Reese (2014) note, these routines develop from the organization of journalistic work as well as norms of journalists. Research on the durability of these routines has found remarkable consistency in their use, as media attention to the unique over the mundane has held over long periods of time (Barranco & Wisler, 1999) and even across major political upheaval (McCarthy et al., 2008). Though the literature has primarily focused on whether events were covered by the media at all, our hypotheses will allow us to test whether the importance of media routines holds for prominence as well.

After Selection: Prominence and Secondary Screening

While a robust literature has made significant progress in understanding the media routines shaping whether a protest event is covered, this is less the case for other, equally important, forms of media coverage. Here, we focus on the factors influencing whether events are featured prominently, and specifically, if they are placed on the front page. This is, of course, one element of a much wider range of factors influencing media salience (see Kiousis, 2004); however, the front page is a highly symbolic space for newspapers. A story’s placement on the front page signals that its content is expected to draw broad public attention (Clayman & Reisner, 1998), because they are a sign of the perceived quality of reporting by the story’s author (Tuchman, 1978), and of course, because they are most likely to be read by newspaper consumers and widely disseminated throughout the broader public sphere (Bogart, 1984; Reisner, 1992; Sigal, 1973).

The decision-making process to determine which stories make the front page is complex. Space on the front page is extremely scarce, especially during major news cycles such as a presidential election, the outbreak of war, or a natural disaster. Research has pointed toward an evolution in the composition of front page news over time as editors have increasingly emphasized local news and human interest stories, rather than the “hard news” stories that were historically given prominent attention. Weldon (2008) argues that the front page has evolved toward a model of “everyman news,” which emphasizes the humanistic elements of news stories in an attempt to establish and maintain connections with readers. The personalization of print media is particularly acute when media gatekeepers face environmental uncertainty (Beam, 1996).

While the literature on media selectivity does offer a useful set of expectations about what may make a protest newsworthy, determinations of prominence are a form of secondary screening that departs in meaningful ways from initial selection processes. Making use of the insights provided by Shoemaker and Reese’s (2014) Hierarchy of Influences Model, we argue that prominence in the New York Times is determined by (1) the organizational evolution of editorial regimes at the New York Times, (2) an event’s place with broader issue-attention cycles that arise from the social institutions shaping media content, and (3) larger, more systemic changes that brought about the institutionalization of protest in Western democratic societies. In contrast to the factors influencing media selection, which are based primarily on news routines, we suggest that combining these different levels of analysis yields a much richer and historically situated way to understand the prominence of protest coverage over time.

Organizational influences: Editorial regimes and protest reporting

A key level in the hierarchy of media influences has to do with its social organization, which may shape editorial policy, provide or limit access to resources, and generally set the direction of news coverage (Shoemaker & Reese, 2014). Here, we outline key editorial regimes at the New York Times, which are used to generate hypotheses about how prominence may be reflective of implicit and explicit preferences by those in the highest position of the Times’ bureaucracy. We define an “editorial regime” as a publisher and managing editor who work together to establish editorial policy for the period during which they function as a coherent editorial team. For the New York Times, we have identified six regimes taking place between 1960 and 1995, during which we expect to see marked differences in editorial choices about the relative prominence of protest events. While a full history of the reporting of protest by the Times since the 1960s is beyond the scope of this article, we do provide an overview of the distinct temporal periods that made up the Times regimes since the 1960s wave of protest, noting how each specific team of media elites may have affected protest reporting.

Regime 1: A. H. Sulzberger, 1960-1962

During the early 1960s, as the civil rights movement was gathering steam with the sit-in campaign and the Freedom Rides, the Times was published by Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The early 1960s regimes at the Times were quite sympathetic to the civil rights movement (Talese, 1969). An advertisement that the New York Times ran in March of 1960, titled “Heed Their Rising Voices,” sought to raise funds for The Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South,¹ and implicitly threw the paper’s weight behind the cause. L. B. Sullivan, an elected commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama, sued the Times for libel in publishing the advertisement, despite the fact that he was not named directly in the ad (Lewis, 1983). The case ultimately went to the federal Supreme Court, with much on the line for the paper. The high court judgment came down on the Times’ side in a decision limiting the ability of public officials to file suit in libel cases; more importantly for present purposes, the very publication of the original ad made clear the Times editors’ sympathies to the cause of civil rights. Given these particulars of the first regime, we propose

Hypothesis 4: Protests revolving around issues of civil rights will receive more prominent page placement in the New York Times during Regime 1.

Regime 2: Punch’s early reign and expanding societal unrest, 1963-1968

During the period of expanding unrest over the war in Vietnam, civil rights, and student activism, the Times was also undergoing its own changes. In 1963, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger took over the paper. The junior Sulzberger was known to be unsympathetic to the peace movement in particular (Halberstam, 2000). There is, however, evidence that the Times’ publishers intervened in reporting and editorial decision making (Chomsky, 1999). In addition, there may have still been a sense among the staff about what would be considered acceptable in covering protest, resulting in an organizational dynamic encouraging a certain type of protest reporting. The widespread prevalence of multiple social movements made it harder to omit their activities and we expect that the Times generally remained sympathetic to the civil rights movement, yet it is clear that the manner in which movements were covered became a point of contention in the upper echelons of leadership at the New York Times. Based on these conditions, we hypothesize,

Hypothesis 5: Protests revolving around issues of civil rights will receive more prominent page placement in the New York Times during Regime 2.

Hypothesis 6: Protests revolving around issues of peace will receive less prominent page placement in the New York Times during Regime 2.

Regime 3: Punch, Rosenthal, and the Left in decline, 1969-1976

In 1969, Punch replaced E. Clifton Daniel as managing editor with A. M. Rosenthal. Rosenthal has been described as a trusted figure for Punch (Tifft & Jones, 1999). This left Punch and Rosenthal in strong control of the paper during these turbulent years. The paper’s reputation began to undergo significant changes in the period after the mobilization of the civil rights and new left movements. The Times was particularly critical of U.S. policy in Vietnam (Diamond, 1993). More generally, the Times began to highlight its standing as a principled organization and yet faced increasing criticism for voicing views counter to the positions of many policy elites. In Livingston and Bennett’s (2003) terms, it would appear that the Times was paying a price for its earlier reliance on unmanaged, or spontaneous, news over a more managed approach. Given the overall tone of the Times in this period, we expect that

Hypothesis 7: As the civil rights and peace movements declined, they were featured less prominently in the New York Times during Regime 3.

Regime 4: The Punch-Rosenthal-Topping years, 1977-1985

In 1977, Rosenthal was elevated to the executive editor position and he more firmly institutionalized his control by strategically selecting and placing likeminded individuals into other editorial positions (Diamond, 1985). Seymour Topping replaced Rosenthal in the managing editor spot, thus returning the paper to an editorial structure somewhat similar to that of Punch’s early years. Rosenthal became known for his quite conservative approach to political matters and insistence that the Times aim toward the middle of the political spectrum in its coverage. The protests that took place under the Punch-Rosenthal-Topping regime at the paper were of a different nature than those faced earlier in the 1970s. Evidence from the Dynamics of Collective Action (DCA) data suggests that the issues, tactics, and targets or protest began to shift during this period (Walker, Martin, & McCarthy, 2008). Absent an ideological bridge between the claims articulated by protesters and the senior Times’ editorial staff, we expect a reversion to the protest paradigm in reporting, and thus hypothesize

Hypothesis 8: Only the most sensationalistic events will be featured prominently in the New York Times during Regime 4.

Regime 5: The close of Punch’s reign as publisher, 1986-1991

By 1986, Punch had been publisher of the Times for nearly 23 years. At this time, Punch installed Max Frankel as executive editor, with former metropolitan and deputy editor Arthur Gelb now serving as managing editor. The external environment for a paper of the Times’ standing continued to be challenging despite an increase in circulation. Claims of media bias began to spread significantly during this period, with one estimate showing that claims of liberal media bias made by political elites nearly doubled between 1988 and 1992 (Domke, Watts, Shah, & Fan, 1999), a trend that continued into the mid-1990s. In this environment, Frankel took any errors in stories quite seriously and published corrections often as prominently as the original story in question. Many in the newsroom saw him as being open to publishing more human interest stories (Diamond, 1987). But the paper’s broader orientation had not changed, and its coverage of protest appears to have followed the same course of moderation as it did under Rosenthal. Consequently, we expect that

Hypothesis 9: Only the most sensationalistic events will be featured prominently in the New York Times during Regime 5.

Regime 6: A. O. Sulzberger Jr.’s early reign, 1992-1995

Punch’s departure as publisher of the Times, and his eventual replacement by his son A. O. Sulzberger Jr., was long anticipated. Arthur Jr. was an active participant in the social movement mobilization that took place during his formative years (Tifft & Jones, 1999), immediately raising questions about whether his personal biography would reshape protest coverage. Still, by the 1990s, the editors of the Times placed much less emphasis on protest than they did during the major protest wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Sulzberger Jr.’s early reign likely did not change the broader trend. We therefore expect that

Hypothesis 10: Only the most sensationalistic events will be featured prominently in the New York Times during Regime 6.

Institutional influences: Issue-attention cycles

Scholars have developed a variety of perspectives on the institutional processes governing media behavior that help to determine the newsworthiness of an event. One of the most widely accepted ideas is the issue-attention cycle. Introduced by Downs (1972), issue-attention cycles are based on patterns of heightened coverage to particular social problems or issues. These cycles result in extensive coverage and attention to a topic, typically across a wide variety of media organizations, yet the attention is fleeting and typically winds down prior to reaching a meaningful resolution to the problem that began the cycle. We treat issue-attention cycles as institutional-level influences (Shoemaker & Reese, 2014), as they are a product of the interaction between media organizations, policy makers, government actors, and other major social institutions.

An event’s location within an issue-attention cycle may influence the timing, frequency, and content of how it is covered. For example, Boydstun’s (2013) analysis of what makes the front page of the New York Times points to evidence of “explosions” of coverage devoted to specific topics (pp. 78-108). She further demonstrates that prior front page attention to an issue is a strong and robust predictor of future front page attention at the Times. In regard to the relationship between issue-attention cycles and determinations of prominence, research suggests that protest events related to significant yet temporally variable social, political, or economic issues might be selected for front page attention. In an examination of how the New York Times covered the women’s movement between 1966 and 1986, Ashley and Olson (1998) find that while only 11% of articles were placed on the front page, those related to the Equal Rights Amendment were disproportionately featured.

Based on this previous work, we expect that protest events that are more deeply embedded within issue-attention cycles should be deemed particularly newsworthy and that such stories should enjoy higher levels of front page attention. We also highlight a further consideration regarding how prominence may beget prominence. Many major events trigger protest cycles, yet the amount of media attention devoted to social movement mobilization, in particular, can vary considerably when many major events are competing for media attention. It follows that it may be important to differentiate media coverage that highlights the protest angle of an issue from coverage that merely addresses issues more generally. To test these expectations, we propose two hypotheses:

Hypothesis 11: Prior front page protest attention will increase future front page coverage.

Hypothesis 12: More competitive news cycles will reduce front page protest attention.

Systemic influences: The institutionalization of protest

Our final set of hypotheses concern systemic changes that took place during and after the 1960s wave of protest and, in particular, how major social restructuring resulted in the institutionalization of protest in Western democracies. Modern protest involves a much more diverse array of groups than was the case a generation ago. As societies become more resource-rich, protest has become a means by which a growing and more diverse number of citizens become engaged in the political process (Dalton, Van Sickle, & Weldon, 2010). Institutionalization is best understood as “the activities and mechanisms by which structures, models, rules, and problem-solving routines become established as a taken-for-granted part of everyday social reality” (Schneiberg & Soule, 2005, p. 122; cf. Berger & Luckmann, 1966). Although there is a degree of inconsistency in the use of the term “institutionalization” by scholars, it is becoming clear that movements have become a relatively routine part of democratic politics in many advanced societies (Dalton et al., 2010; Meyer & Tarrow, 1998). Explanations for the institutionalization of protest have focused on a variety of factors, including the expansion of social movement tactics to an increasingly wider set of social groups, changes in police management strategies during protest events that emphasize negotiation rather than coercion, and the extensive expansion of professionalized social movement organizations (McCarthy & McPhail, 1998; Meyer & Tarrow, 1998).

There are compelling reasons for investigating how the institutionalization of protest has reshaped what the media considers newsworthy. First and foremost, as protest moves from being seen as a sporadic, disruptive, and sensational element of society to a recognized form of institutional politics, it should be reflected not only in how policy makers and authorities negotiate with protest groups but also in how the media reports about protest. There is a key distinction between “unmanaged” or “event-driven” news and “managed” or “institutional” news (Livingston & Bennett, 2003, pp. 365-366). Unmanaged news “is cued by the appearance of dramatic news events and the ‘story cues’ for reporters that arise out of those events,” and is “more volatile and difficult for officials to control or to benefit from . . . [this type of news is] more open to challengers” (Lawrence, 2000, p. 9). Managed news, by contrast, is pegged to official reports and catalogs debates across various elite perspectives; for these types of stories, the reporter “looks to official channels to provide him with newsworthy material day after day . . . he vests the timing of disclosure, and hence the surfacing of news stories, in those who control the channels” (Sigal, 1973, p. 119). To the extent that protest is institutionalized in society and is seen as being less spontaneous in nature, we expect

Hypothesis 13: As protest became more institutionalized, overall levels of protest prominence declined over time.

Data and Method

Data

The data used in the statistical analyses to follow come from the DCA, 1960-1995.² The initial stage of data collection involved identifying all protests, demonstrations, marches, vigils, picketing, civil disobedience, ceremonial events, dramaturgical demonstrations, riots, ethnic conflicts, attacks, and other collective action events reported in the daily editions of the New York Times between 1960 and 1995. Rather than using keywords or full-text searches, the entire issue of each paper was read by coders, which was intended to minimize researcher bias (Olzak, 1989). Research assistants were instructed to retain and code any event that met three conditions: First, as the data are intended to capture collective action, only events with two or more individuals were included. Second, the participants at the event must make a claim, which may manifest as either a challenge against a target, an act of solidarity or support, or both. Third, the data are restricted to events occurring in the United States. In short, given the nature of our research questions, the DCA data are ideal to examine long-term trends in page placement for collective action events. An important caveat, however, is that our data set contains only those events deemed worthy of coverage by the Times at the outset. As explained earlier, the scope of our analysis is restricted to understanding those events already deemed newsworthy, and our goal is not to generalize our results to the universe of all protest events. We discuss this consideration in greater detail in the concluding section. After listwise deletion, our analytic sample consists of 20,349 events.³ During the construction of the DCA, regular intercoder reliability checks were conducted and all variables used in this analysis had a minimum of 90% agreement. Throughout the coding process, agreement was assessed using raw scores, which involved asking the research assistants to code randomly selected cases in kind, then for each variable the number of correct codes was divided by the total number of codes. Reliability checks were conducted weekly during research assistant training and monthly thereafter, which minimized the impact of agreement that may be a result of guessing or chance.

Variables

The focal dependent variable used here is based on the page and section location of each article within the New York Times. This is operationalized as a dichotomous indicator with categories for whether the news report for a specific protest event occurred on the front page of the New York Times versus any other section of the paper. The operationalization of this variable is also consistent with the idea that that the majority of readers focus their attention mainly on the front page of a newspaper, making stories placed on the front page not only more prominent but also most likely to enter into popular discourse. To ensure that this operationalization was appropriate, we also tested other specifications, such as a trichotomous measure with categories for stories appearing on the front page, inside Section A but not on the front page, and in all other sections of the paper. We also constructed a category for events occurring in the business section of the Times, as it is possible that certain corporate-targeted events were more likely to be placed in that section. To assess these alternatives, we estimated several multinomial logistic regression models, but these did not reveal differences between our chosen specification and the more complex operationalizations, and it was generally the case that the additional categories did not add substantive value.⁴ As a result, we use the simpler dichotomous measure below.

We used a total of six groups of independent variables to assess page placement in the New York Times. The first contains three control variables. As past research (e.g., Myers & Caniglia, 2004) has suggested that the New York Times tends to overreport events that occur in Washington, D.C., or New York City, we use two dichotomous indicators to capture whether the protest event occurred in either city (coded 1 if yes, 0 otherwise). In addition, as higher profile news reports also tend to be longer, we included a variable measuring the total number of paragraphs devoted to the event.

Second, to examine whether events that target powerful actors or institutions are the beneficiaries of front page placement, we use a polytomous variable. Here, we coded categories for events that target the state, corporate institutions, and educational organizations. A composite of all other targets is used as the reference category.

The next block of variables contains six measures of sensationalistic elements of a protest that are intended to capture the event features that make a particular protest more newsworthy. First, we include a continuous variable for the reported event size.⁵ Due to the presence of a small number of very large events, we took the natural logarithm of size to reduce skewness. The remaining variables consist of five dichotomous indictors (all coded 0 = no, 1 = yes) for whether civil disobedience, property damage, protester violence, arrests, or police violence was reported to occur during the course of an event.

Fourth, we began with a trichotomous measure of the central claim of the event. This includes categories for minority rights, the peace movement, and all other claims. Clearly this is only one of the many potential ways of operationalizing this variable. However, we used a simple threefold classification because this allows us to focus attention on what were arguably the most dominant protest movements of the period under investigation.

Fifth, we use three variables to place each event within its issue-attention cycle. The first variable is a dynamic count of the number of protest events on the front page of the New York Times in the prior week linked to each event’s major topic or issue (e.g., war, African American civil rights) based on the source article’s publication date. To ensure that the variable was not artificially inflated by the wide ideological range of events in our sample, we make use of the 23 major claim topics coded in the DCA, counting only the stories receiving front page coverage that fall into the same major topic as a given event. The second and third variables are drawn from Baumgartner and Jones’ (2014) New York Times Index that was collected as part of their larger Policy Agendas Project (PAP). This database contains a random sample of 27,797 newspaper articles appearing in the Times during our analytic period. Each article was coded using 1 of 27 major topical codes and we used the crosswalk variable contained in the DCA data to link each protest in our sample to its corresponding PAP code (see Baumgartner & Jones, 2014, for the complete list). Using this crosswalk, we then built a dynamic variable of the number of stories that received front page attention in the past week on a topic intersecting with the major claim of each event. Third and finally, we constructed a dynamic variable counting the topical diversity of the front page of the Times for the week prior to each event, based on the number of distinct PAP codes appearing on the front page.⁶

Sixth and finally, we include variables for the temporal period of an event and editorial regime. We operationalize these separately. First, we use a variable to measure the year each event was reported. To facilitate interpretation in the statistical analysis, this variable was scaled such that 1960 was coded as 0, with each subsequent year adding a value of 1 until reaching a maximum of 35 for 1995. Second, we use a series of dichotomous indicators for each of the six regime periods at the Times that we identified above. As shorthand, we simply refer to these as Regimes 1 through 6. Regime 1 ranges from 1960 through 1962, Regime 2 is from 1963 to 1968, Regime 3 is 1969 to 1976, Regime 4 is 1977 to 1985, Regime 5 is 1986 to 1991, and Regime 6 is from 1992 to 1995 and is used as the reference category.⁷

Analytic strategy

We use logistic regression to model the probability of front page placement. We specify two different sets of nested models in our analysis based on our two operationalizations of temporal period: year and regime. In both cases, we begin with a model containing our control variables, measures of target, sensationalism, claims, and issue-attention cycles, then include additional predictors of temporal period to examine whether the more complex specifications improves model fit. We then test a series of interactions to test for stability in prominence over time. As a large number of interactions are tested, we estimated the variance inflation factors to look for multicollinearity, which did not point to any systematic problems in our analysis, despite mild (and expected) collinearity among the interaction terms. We also plotted the deviance residuals against the fitted probabilities, as well as each case’s leverage against fitted values to look for influential observations. These results did not point to any atypically influential cases.

Results

We first consider the extent to which protest prominence did, in fact, decline during our period of observation as we expected in Hypothesis 13. Figure 1 displays the trend in annual prominence percentage for all protest events reported in the New York Times (n = 20,349) and Figure 2 displays the trend for events with more than 1,000 participants (n = 2,355), those with protester violence (n = 2,845) and those with police use of force (n = 3,623). The trends are quite dramatic, showing that the level of prominence for all events, including prominence devoted to large and confrontational events, declined steadily from their peak in the 1960s.

Figure 1.

Trends in front page placement for protest events appearing in the New York Times, 1960-1995 (n = 20,349).

Figure 2.

Trends in front page placement in the New York Times for events with protester violence, the police use of force, and more than 1,000 protesters, 1960-1995.

Descriptive statistics are provided in Table 1. Our results show, as is true by definition, the expected scarcity of protest events reported on the front page of the New York Times. Only 8% of events in our sample were placed on the front page. As expected, protests in New York City and Washington, D.C., are overrepresented in our data, and jointly comprise nearly 40% of events in our sample. There is also a high percentage of events with government targets (51%), as well as protests where minority rights were the central claim (31.58%). These patterns are, of course, a product of the major social movements arising during our analytic period that targeted state policies (e.g., the civil rights, women’s rights, Vietnam War).

Table 1.

Means, Standard Deviations, Minimums, and Maximums for Variables Used in the Analysis (n = 20,349).

	M or percent	SD	Minimum	Maximum
Dependent variable
Front page	8.02		0	1
Controls
Event in D.C.	8.06		0	1
Event in NYC	30.90		0	1
Length of article	14.17	13.08	0	100
Target
Government	51.05		0	1
Corporate	17.06		0	1
Educational	14.07		0	1
All other targets	17.82		0	1
Sensationalistic elements
Event size (ln)	4.36	2.15	0.69	15.61
Civil disobedience	16.07		0	1
Property damage	6.80		0	1
Protester violence	13.96		0	1
Arrests	15.72		0	1
Police use of force	8.51		0	1
Claim
Minority rights	30.58		0	1
Peace	8.58		0	1
Issue-attention cycle
Front page protest attention (last week)	2.38	5.58	0	43
Front page topical attention (last week)	0.08	0.30	0	3
Front page topical diversity (last week)	1.10	1.09	0	7
Period
Report year	15.12	10.08	0	35
Regime 1, 1960-1962	9.01		0	1
Regime 2, 1963-1968	23.52		0	1
Regime 3, 1969-1976	23.45		0	1
Regime 4, 1977-1985	24.35		0	1
Regime 5, 1986-1991	12.14		0	1
Regime 6, 1992-1995	7.52		0	1

Note. D.C. = Washington, D.C.; NYC = New York City.

We now turn to our results from our logistic regression analysis and first estimate a model containing our control variables, the measures for target, sensationalistic elements, claim, and issue-attention cycle. We then introduce a variable for the report year of the story to estimate a baseline effect for the trend in front page placement over time. Then, to examine whether there is stability in front page placement, we introduce a series of interactions using a set of theoretically relevant predictors. These include variables measuring the size and conflict level of a demonstration, as well as its central claims. The results for these models are provided in Table 2.

Table 2.

Logistic Regression Predicting Front Page Placement of Protest Events Appearing in the New York Times, 1960-1995 (n = 20,349).

	Model 1		Model 2		Model 3
Controls
Event in D.C.	0.517***	(0.111)	0.629***	(0.114)	0.643***	(0.114)
Event in NYC	0.575***	(0.064)	0.487***	(0.066)	0.543***	(0.067)
Length of article	0.063***	(0.002)	0.073***	(0.002)	0.075***	(0.002)
Target
Government	0.200*	(0.090)	0.090	(0.093)	0.108	(0.094)
Corporate	0.045	(0.110)	−0.117	(0.113)	−0.109	(0.114)
Educational	0.079	(0.115)	−0.162	(0.116)	−0.131	(0.117)
Sensationalistic elements
Event size (ln)	0.065***	(0.014)	0.062***	(0.014)	0.106***	(0.023)
Civil disobedience	−0.125	(0.084)	−0.191*	(0.085)	−0.195*	(0.086)
Property damage	0.100	(0.118)	0.072	(0.122)	0.065	(0.123)
Protester violence	0.447***	(0.098)	0.540***	(0.101)	1.131***	(0.147)
Arrests	0.049	(0.091)	0.029	(0.093)	0.029	(0.094)
Police use of force	0.530***	(0.103)	0.281**	(0.106)	0.406**	(0.158)
Claim
Minority rights	0.255***	(0.070)	−0.263***	(0.077)	0.010	(0.115)
Peace	0.179	(0.103)	−0.090	(0.102)	−0.003	(0.211)
Issue-attention cycle
Front page protest attention (last week)	0.074***	(0.004)	0.055***	(0.004)	0.054***	(0.004)
Front page topical attention (last week)	−0.131	(0.099)	−0.133	(0.097)	−0.139	(0.098)
Front page topical diversity (last week)	0.135***	(0.027)	0.087**	(0.028)	0.097***	(0.028)
Report year
Year			−0.090***	(0.004)	−0.053***	(0.009)
Interactions
Year × Size					−0.058***	(0.012)
Year × Protester Violence					−0.022	(0.016)
Year × Police Use of Force					−0.004*	(0.002)
Year × Minority Rights					−0.029**	(0.010)
Year × Peace					−0.002	(0.020)
Constant	−4.971***	(0.122)	−3.539***	(0.134)	−4.058***	(0.168)
Model χ²(df)	2,597.731***	(17)	3,127.385***	(18)	3,185.623***	(23)
Δχ²(Δ df)	—		529.654***	(1)	58.238***	(5)
AIC	8,808.422		8,280.768	8,218.687

Note. Reference categories are events with all other targets and all other claims. D.C. = Washington, D.C.; NYC = New York City; AIC = Akaike information criterion. Standard errors are in parentheses. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

The effects for our control variables are in the expected directions in Model 1, supporting Hypothesis 3. Relative to events that are placed in all other sections of the newspaper, demonstrations occurring in Washington, D.C., are significantly more likely to appear on the front page of the Times. This finding holds even when additional covariates are introduced in Models 2 and 3, such as events targeting the government. The same is true for events occurring in New York, which are also more likely to appear on the front page, as are events mentioned in longer articles. This pattern is replicated even in the more complex model specifications.

Turning to the set of covariates measuring each event’s target, we see in Model 1 that, compared with all other options, demonstrations targeting the government are more likely to appear on the front page, while the effects for corporate and educational targets are not statistically significant at conventional levels. The effect for government targets is not robust, however, as once the covariate for report year is added in Model 2, the coefficient is no longer significant, and remains insignificant when the interaction terms are included Model 3. Taken together, this suggests that there is little systematic relationship between targets and an event’s prominence in the full model specification, as we proposed in Hypothesis 2.

The variables measuring sensationalistic elements of a demonstration have mixed effects, though on the whole support Hypothesis 1. The coefficient for logged event size is positive and significant across each of the model specification, in line with our expectations. Larger events are not only more likely to be selected for any coverage but they are also featured more prominently in the New York Times. The coefficient estimates for protester violence and the police use of force are also positive and consistently significant across each of the model specifications, also consistent with our hypotheses. Interestingly, the estimates for civil disobedience, property damage, and arrests are not statistically significant, indicating that only events featuring some form of interpersonal violence, whether perpetrated by the protesters or police, are more likely to find a home on the front page of the Times.

The measures for the claim of the event point to an interesting pattern that is not fully in line with our expectations. In Model 1, the coefficient for minority rights is positive and significant, as expected, but not robust. Once the covariate for report year is added, the effect for minority rights protests remains significant, but reverses signs, and the main effect for this variable is no longer significant once the interaction terms are specified. As we scaled our measure of report year starting from 0, this translates to a significant decrease in front page coverage for minority rights events over time. The coefficient for peace protests is not significant in Models 1 and 2, nor is the main effect or interaction term in Model 3.

The three measures gauging issue-attention cycles point to important and interesting distinctions in how an event’s claims and location within recent reporting patterns by the Times shape the likelihood of front page coverage. Across all models, the effect for previous front page attention to topically comparable protest events is positive, as is the effect for front page topical diversity in the last week. The coefficient for front page attention to the issue claim of each protest event for the last week is not statistically significant in any of the model specifications. When considered jointly, it is clear that topical coverage alone does not push a protest event to the front page; however, when the New York Times prominently features the protest angle of a story in prior coverage, future front page coverage is more likely. During periods when the news cycle is less constricted, as evidenced by a higher level of topical diversity on the front page, protests are also more likely to be prominently featured. In contexts where front page attention is reserved for a smaller number of issues or topics, protest events tend to be ignored. These findings are consistent with Hypotheses 11 and 12.

Including the measure of the report year of the event considerably improves model fit based on the change in the model chi-square and Akaike information criterion (AIC). In Model 2, the effect for report year is negative and significant, which again is consistent with the temporal trends plotted in Figure 1. Once the interaction terms are added in Model 3—which also improves model fit based on the AIC and model chi-square—we see that there are changes in the stability of the factors influencing front page placement over time. Specifically, between 1960 and 1995, larger protests, as well as events where the police use force and demonstrations about issues of minority rights, are significantly less likely to appear on the front page of the Times. The interactions between report year and both protester violence and peace claims were not statistically significant. These patterns of significant interactions are notably different than we would expect if patterns of prominence followed a logic identical to the factors influencing initial media coverage of an event. The decrease in front page stories for minority rights protests is particularly noteworthy, given the accusations that the New York Times gave such events more prominent coverage that we discussed above. Overall, these results suggest that the stability of selection bias does not carry over to prominence and that the traditional measures used to explain patterns of media attention, particularly sensationalistic elements of events, are inadequate to explain front page attention for protest events in the Times between 1960 and 1995.

The use of a single continuous measure of time to capture the evolution of protest coverage at the Times is appealing because of its parsimony but is limited by the assumption that a single parametric effect can effectively capture temporal trends. As we outlined above, there are clear differences in the institutional environment of the New York Times that evolved over our analytic period and, in order to account for this, we respecified the regression models using indicators for the regime periods we identified above. These models allow us to make categorical distinctions about changes in front page placement over our analytic period and also to test more targeted hypotheses by interacting individual periods with different sets of predictor variables. We use Regime 6, which lasted between 1992 and 1995, as our reference category as by that point, protest in the United States had become relatively routine to most observers, and we expect that the Times had transitioned toward a managed news approach for protest reporting.⁸

Model 1 in Table 3 provides the estimates when the control variables and the measures for target, sensationalistic elements, claim, issue-attention cycle, and the indicators for regimes are included in the regression analysis. This is equivalent to Model 2 in Table 2; however, we use the variables for editorial regime periods rather than our continuous time measure. Comparing across the results for our controls, measures of target, sensationalism, and issue-attention cycle, we largely see agreement in the sign, magnitude, and significance of our variables, with corresponding support to some but not all of our hypotheses. The major exceptions are the differences between the main effects for event size, protester violence, and police use of force, which are no longer statistically significant, though the effects are comparable prior to the inclusion of the interaction terms (see Table 3, Model 1).

Table 3.

Logistic Regression Predicting Front Page Placement of Protest Events Across Editorial and Publisher Periods in the New York Times, 1960-1995 (n = 20,349).

	Model 1		Model 2
Controls
Event in D.C.	0.648***	(0.114)	0.685***	(0.115)
Event in NYC	0.452***	(0.067)	0.514***	(0.068)
Length of article	0.074***	(0.002)	0.079***	(0.002)
Target
Government	0.061	(0.094)	0.033	(0.095)
Corporate	−0.135	(0.114)	−0.176	(0.116)
Educational	−0.200	(0.118)	−0.239*	(0.121)
Sensationalistic elements
Event size (ln)	0.060***	(0.014)	−0.043	(0.064)
Civil disobedience	−0.152	(0.086)	−0.142	(0.087)
Property damage	0.051	(0.122)	−0.007	(0.126)
Protester violence	0.508***	(0.102)	−0.617	(0.510)
Arrests	0.028	(0.093)	0.050	(0.094)
Police use of force	0.285**	(0.107)	0.551	(0.672)
Claim
Minority rights	−0.265***	(0.079)	−0.981*	(0.404)
Peace	−0.161	(0.103)	0.517*	(0.260)
Issue-attention cycle
Front page protest attention (last week)	0.057***	(0.004)	0.058***	(0.004)
Front page topical attention (last week)	−0.126	(0.097)	−0.095	(0.099)
Front page topical diversity (last week)	0.070*	(0.029)	0.073*	(0.030)
Period
Regime 1, 1960-1962	2.052***	(0.173)	0.764	(0.408)
Regime 2, 1963-1968	1.644***	(0.161)	0.82*	(0.357)
Regime 3, 1969-1976	1.214***	(0.165)	0.408	(0.357)
Regime 4, 1977-1985	−0.152	(0.177)	−0.429	(0.396)
Regime 5, 1986-1991	−0.973***	(0.223)	−1.187*	(0.480)
Interactions
Regime 1 × Minority Rights			0.918*	(0.444)
Regime 2 × Minority Rights			0.856*	(0.421)
Regime 3 × Minority Rights			0.968*	(0.433)
Regime 4 × Minority Rights			0.455	(0.513)
Regime 5 × Minority Rights			−1.051	(0.664)
Regime 2 × Peace			−0.613*	(0.304)
Regime 3 × Peace			−0.808**	(0.298)
Regime 1 × Protester Violence			1.697**	(0.556)
Regime 2 × Protester Violence			1.240*	(0.525)
Regime 3 × Protester Violence			1.310*	(0.529)
Regime 4 × Protester violence			0.464	(0.621)
Regime 5 × Protester Violence			−0.937	(0.802)
Regime 1 × Police Use of Force			−0.082	(0.715)
Regime 2 × Police Use of Force			−0.336	(0.683)
Regime 3 × Police Use of Force			−0.227	(0.698)
Regime 4 × Police Use of Force			−0.854	(0.868)
Regime 5 × Police Use of Force			−1.116	(1.011)
Regime 1 × Event Size			0.175*	(0.076)
Regime 2 × Event Size			0.103	(0.068)
Regime 3 × Event Size			0.105	(0.069)
Regime 4 × Event Size			0.023	(0.077)
Regime 5 × Event Size			0.123	(0.091)
Constant	−5.627***	(0.190)	−4.995***	(0.337)
Model χ²(df)	3,197.466***	(22)	3,310.508***	(44)
Δχ² (Δ df)	—		113.042***	(22)
AIC	8,218.687		8,149.645

Note. Reference categories are events with all other targets, all other claims, and events occurring between 1992 and 1995. D.C. = Washington, D.C.; NYC = New York City; AIC = Akaike information criterion.

p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001. Standard errors are in parentheses.

The major point of departure between Table 2 and 3 concerns the effects and implications of how prominence changed over time. There is a strong temporal patterning in front page placement between 1960 and 1995 that was not apparent using only a single continuous variable for time. During the first three regimes, which range from 1960 to 1976, protests were significantly more likely to be featured on the front page of the Times, which more accurately captures the observed placement patterns in Figure 1. As the heightened protests of the long 1960s faded, however, protest also became less newsworthy, as events were no more likely to appear on the front page between 1977 and 1991 than they were between 1992 and 1995. In fact, during Regime 5, which included the final years of Punch’s tenure as publisher, protest events were significantly less likely to appear on the front page relative to during A. O. Sulzberger Jr.’s early reign as publisher during Regime 6.

The inclusion of the interaction terms in Model 2 significantly improves model fit based on the change in model chi-square and AIC. We hypothesized that during the 1960s wave of protest, the Times had exercised an apparent editorial bias favoring the civil rights movement during its heyday, with a simultaneous bias against the peace movement during the second and third regimes. As protest became institutionalized, however, we hypothesized that the Times came to place only the most violent or large protests on the front page. To test this, we interact the editorial/publisher regimes with the key variables of sensationalism: event size, protester violence, and the police use of force. If this argument is supported, we should expect to see positive interactions between these variables and the later editorial regimes.

Examining the pattern of estimates for the interaction terms only partially supports our expectations. On the one hand, we see that minority rights protests were featured more prominently during the civil rights era. During Regimes 1, 2, and 3, there are significant and positive coefficients, suggesting that all else equal, the Times regime was more likely to deem such events worthy of front page attention. These findings provide a more nuanced picture of the pattern of minority rights coverage where we treated report year as a single covariate, which told us that the prominence advantage for minority rights steadily eroded over time (see Table 2, Model 2). Instead, we see that there was a significant increase in prominence for minority rights protests, but this did not last. In contrast to the pattern for minority rights, when peace is the central claim of an event, the coefficients are negative and significant during the movement’s primary phase of mobilization, which was also consistent with our expectations. These findings may be reflective of the Arthur Sulzberger’s disapproval of the antiwar movement, as we discussed above. Taken together, these interactions suggest that the various editorial/publisher regimes privileged certain protest events of one movement over others, resulting in temporal instability in how protests landed on the front page.

There is less support for our hypotheses when it comes to the interactions between the sensationalistic event features and the editorial/publisher regimes. There is a relatively strong positive relationship between protester violence and front page coverage in the first three periods, which runs counter to our expectations. Recall that we suggested in Hypotheses 8 and 9 that protester violence would become an important predictor of front page coverage in later periods due to the institutionalization of protest. For event size, larger events are more likely to find front page coverage during the first regime, and this appears to explain the linear trend uncovered with the use of a continuous time specification in Table 2. There are no statistically significant effects for our interactions of the police use of force and our period variables. These findings challenge the well-established finding in the literature on media attention to social movement mobilization due to the temporal instability of violence and size (Earl et al., 2004). These effects are, however, consistent with our argument that prominence acts as a secondary screening filter that need not mimic the logic of the features making an event newsworthy.

Discussion and Conclusion

We established two goals for this study. First, we extended the analytic scope of how the media cover protest events beyond a simple binary indicator of whether an event was reported. To do so, we focused on the characteristics of protest events and how the broader societal, institutional, and organizational environments shape the likelihood that events will be given prominent coverage, using stories placed on the front page of the New York Times. Second, we argued that higher levels of media influence affect considerations of prominence, paying particular attention to organizational, institutional, and systemic factors. A consequence of this distinction is that while the media routines predicting media coverage are expected to hold constant over time, considerations of prominence are much more contextual and contingent.

We proposed a series of hypotheses that we empirically tested, using a sample of all protest events covered in the New York Times between 1960 and 1995. Our expectation that large events or those with high levels of conflict are overrepresented on the front page was supported (Hypothesis 1); however, inconsistent with Hypothesis 2, there were no meaningful differences in front page coverage for events targeting corporate actors, the government, or educational institutions. We did see higher levels of front page attention for events taking place in New York or Washington, D.C., in agreement with Hypothesis 3. Our hypotheses concerning editorial periods, which we argued were a product of organizational influences at the New York Times, received mixed support. On the one hand, as we expected, civil rights protests were more likely to be featured prominently during the movement’s main period of activity, while the opposite was true for peace demonstrations (Hypotheses 4-7). However, as protest became institutionalized, there is no evidence to support our expectations that the Times came to only prominently feature the most sensationalistic events (Hypotheses 8-10). Our arguments about institutional influences (Hypotheses 11 and 12), which we measured using issue-attention cycles, were largely supported. Finally, we linked the widespread societal changes bringing about the institutionalization of protest to an overall decline in prominence in event reporting, which was largely supported (Hypothesis 13).

Taken together, our findings extend the existing literature and provide several avenues for future research. We have demonstrated that for protest reporting, different dimensions of media salience are shaped by different levels of influence. Using the Hierarchy of Influences Model (Shoemaker & Reese, 2014), we emphasized the effects of media routines, media organizations, social institutions, and social systems, finding support for each level of analysis. This pattern of results departs in a considerable way from research on the set of events selected for media coverage, and thickens scholarly understandings of the different factors shaping media salience. It is important to emphasize that none of the levels of analysis we examine were clearly and consistently the best predictor of front page coverage. The preferences of media gatekeepers, for instance, are far from absolute, and there is clear evidence that institutional contexts and preexisting media routines all jointly influence patterns of prominence. Future research can further assess the different elements of media attention in several ways. For example, it is possible that the framing of front page stories is quite different relative to other areas of the paper, which is an important avenue for future inquiry. There is also relatively little research focusing on the pictures used in social movement coverage, and visual depictions of activism may set the tone for textual coverage as well. Comparisons of how front page attention to protest shapes or is shaped by public opinion would also highlight an important, but largely unexplored area of media salience.

We attribute the decline in front page attention to social movement mobilization to the institutionalization of protest, a process that normalized and legitimated protest tactics as a form of political engagement accessible to a wide variety of groups from diverse backgrounds. Protest became institutionalized in the cultural-cognitive sense used by institutional theorists (e.g., Schneiberg & Soule, 2005), in that it became a more “taken for granted” aspect of society. As U.S. society has become more affluent, it has provided resources to diverse groups for making protest claims (Dalton et al., 2010), and this has indirectly assisted in the legitimation of protest. And, as such changes have taken place, protest events have become less significant to those who decide which of a day’s events are worthy of prominent coverage. Newspaper coverage, in general and prominence in particular, is sensitive to the increasing differentiation of actors competing for news space and also to community composition (Tichenor, Donohue, & Olien, 1980; Weldon, 2008). As well, to the degree to that multiple groups use social movement tactics, there will be heightened competition for any media coverage, let alone prominent coverage. Boydstun (2013), however, shows that the distribution of issue prominence across the 22 major topic issues in the Policy Agenda’s data set is quite stable between 1996 and 2006 for the New York Times, suggesting that the increasing multiplicity of collective actors seeking media coverage has not substantially changed the substantive content of stories on the New York Times front page.

We close by discussing our external validity and general contribution to scholarship as well as how this study contributes to contemporary understandings of how news is created and disseminated. A central concern in broadly generalizing the analysis here is that we only examine the events covered by the New York Times, rather than the larger population of events that took place between 1960 and 1995. Attempts to generalize to the larger population of events are beyond the scope of this research, and would indeed be significantly biased as our sample does not contain information on events not covered by the Times. As we have argued, it is already well established that certain types of events are more or less likely to be covered (Earl et al., 2004), but comparatively less is known about what happens to events that are selected for coverage. In that sense, this study trades broader generalization for stronger conclusions about the internal dynamics of a major newspaper that informs many studies on the production of news, social movements, and their interrelations.

Finally, the analyses here end in 1995, prior to the rapid onset and adoption of Internet technologies that have dramatically and permanently altered both the mass media and social movement mobilization. It is therefore important to discuss how our findings may inform studies on current patterns in how the media and social movements interact. To this end, we emphasize two related points: First, though the main period of mobilization for the movements of the 1960s is long past, many claims and issues raised by activists remain lingering and largely unresolved in the present, particularly for the civil rights movement. Agenda-setting behavior in the media is highly consequential in shaping popular discourse (McCombs & Shaw, 1972) and it is well-established that media coverage of social movements can delegitimize or otherwise undermine mobilization (Gitlin, 2003; McLeod & Hertog, 1992, 1999). To the degree that the media may have amplified coverage of one movement at the expense of others, effects of this behavior may be felt in the present. Second, despite major shifts in the media as an institution since the close of our analytic window, the front page of the New York Times remains a highly socially significant space. Research suggests that individuals reading the paper version of the New York Times assign different levels of importance compared with those reading the online version (Althaus & Tewksbury, 2002). As well, the strong case made by Weldon (2008) that front page coverage is increasingly made up of feature stories at the expense of hard news stories suggests another potential explanation of the declining prominence given to protests. Weldon’s analysis covers only a short window in the early 2000s, but its implications are general, suggesting decreasing coverage of hard news of all kinds, not just protests. As such, understanding patterns of which protest events were given prominent treatment, and why this was the case, provide an important benchmark for future research and can be directly compared with the impressions of prominence in online versions of newspapers and other media products.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Doug McAdam, Susan Olzak, and Sarah Soule for their efforts in collecting these data and the editor and anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback on this study.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The study was supported by partial funding for the lead author provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (742-2006-2135). The New York Times database (Dynamics of Collective Action) was supported by National Science Foundation Grants SBR-9709337, SBR-9709356, SES 9874000, and SES 9911431.

Notes

Author Biographies

Patrick Rafail is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Tulane University. His research examines the structural, contextual, and technological factors influencing social movement mobilization. He is currently working on a project examining the Tea Party between 2009 and 2014 that is funded by the National Science Foundation. His other work focuses on the policing of protest in the United States, and the use of social media by social movement actors.

Edward T. Walker is an associate professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research investigates the mobilization and outcomes of popular participation both by social movement organizations and by business firms and trade associations. He is author of Grassroots for Hire: Public Affairs Consultants in American Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation (NYU Press, 2015).

John D. McCarthy is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the Pennsylvania State University. He is currently pursuing a project on public disorders, another on spiritual entrepreneurs, and a third on Tea Party mobilization, each funded by the National Science Foundation. In 2007 he received a Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award from the Center for the Study of Social Movements and Change at Notre Dame University.

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