International Press Coverage of East German Protest Events, 1989

The Diffusion of Collective Violence: Infectiousness, Susceptibility, and Mass Media Networks

“…It seems clear that larger cities with television stations act as opinion leaders in some way, but details of this arrangement and its limitations remain unclear. Ongoing work toward understanding reporting patterns for collective events (e.g., McCarthy, McPhail, and Smith 1996;McCarthy et al 1998;Mueller 1997;Oliver and Maney 1998;Oliver and Myers 1999) continues to contribute to this agenda, but in some sense, the work has only just begun.…”

“…The two most robust findings in the media bias line are, first, that news media are more likely to report events that involve larger numbers of people (McCarthy, McPhail, and Smith 1996;McCarthy et al 1998;Oliver and Myers 1999;Oliver and Maney 1998) and, second, that events near the media source are more likely to be reported than those farther away (Snyder and Kelly 1977;Mueller 1997;Paige 1975;Franzosi 1987). Both of these findings are explained by the underlying newsworthiness of the event: those events that are more intense and involve more people are considerably more newsworthy than smaller events.…”

“…Because media coverage is tied so tightly to the intensity of a collective event (McCarthy, McPhail, and Smith 1996;Mueller 1997;Snyder and Kelly 1977;Oliver and Myers 1999), it follows that large riots will receive more widespread and intense coverage and, as a result, be subject to considerably more imitation than small riots that receive little or only local coverage. This effect occurs first because imitation requires knowledge of prior events and their outcomes.…”

“…Just as with any other type of news item, news media reports on protest and collective violence events are biased (e.g., Gans 1980;Herman and Chomsky 1988). Bias exists not only in the specific information reported about events, but also in whether the event is reported at all (Snyder and Kelly 1977;Danzger 1975;Mueller 1997;McCarthy, McPhail, and Smith 1996;McCarthy et al 1998;Oliver and Myers 1999;Myers and Caniglia 2000). The issue of media selection bias has received considerable attention recently because so many important studies of collective protest have relied on newspaper accounts for their data.…”

The Arab Spring Protests and Concurrent Disability Protests: Social Movement Spillover or Spurious Relationship?

“…Thus the reports do not always go back very far. Additionally, McCarthy, McPhail, & Smith, (1996), Mueller (1997), and Snyder & Kelly (1977) argue that media reports always substantially under-represent protests. They show that media reports are biased towards covering more disruptive protests-those which are longer, larger, and more violent.…”