Focusing on Focusing Events: Event Selection, Media Coverage, and the Dynamics of Contentious Meaning‐Making

Abstract

Despite the prevalent assumption among scholars of social movements and contentious politics that transformative contentious events are also the focus of public attention and discussion, there has been little attempt to substantiate this. After making a case for why to focus on focusing events and suggesting that these events should be thought of as products of a dialogical contentious meaning‐making process, we develop a coverage attribute‐based method for identifying focusing events. For illustrative purposes, we apply our method to the coverage of contentious events during the “first” intifada by Israeli‐Jewish, Jewish settler, and Palestinian newspapers. Findings from analyses of 11,868 news items reveal that newspapers are likely to strategically quiet contentious events that are strategically amplified by newspapers affiliated with opposing or targeted parties, and vice versa, depending on their interpretation of these events as political opportunities or threats. Analyses of variations across and within contending parties reveal the role of structure and agency in the dialogical seesaw‐like dynamics of contentious meaning‐making.

The framing of 9/11 in American, French, and Dutch national newspapers (2001–2015): An inductive approach to studying events

“…We measured how many newspaper articles per year from each country mentioned the event in the period 2001–2015, and then standardized these numbers according to the newspapers’ respective sizes (cf. Alimi and Maney, 2018: 765–767).…”

Diversités sexuelles et construction nationale : Une exploration des frontières de l'homonationalisme au Québec

“…En somme, nous observons un discours qui s'apparente à du nationalisme sexuel ou de l'homonationalisme dans la presse écrite québécoise. Comme en fait foi l'absence relative d'un tel discours dans les années 1990, il s'agit cependant d'un phénomène relativement récent associé à des « événements focalisant » ( focusing events ), c'est-à-dire des événements qui « reçoivent une attention du publique qui est intensive, substantive et relativement soutenue » (Alimi et Maney, 2018 : 760, notre traduction ). Ces deux grands événements focalisant ont été le mariage entre conjoint/es de même sexe et la question des accommodements raisonnables.…”

Environmental hazards, rigid institutions, and transformative change: How drought affects the consideration of water and climate impacts in infrastructure management

“…Second, how does uncertainty interact with broader socio-environmental conditions to enable institutional change? Third, are there particular focusing events (Tomlinson 2015;Alimi and Maney 2018) that better catalyze public support around institutional change (e.g., a town losing its water supply)? Lastly, what might be the effect of slow and rapid onset hazards interacting?…”