Media Roles in a Social Movement: a Model of Ideology Diffusion

Abstract

Exploratory findings show a digusion of environmental movement concepts occurring through a progression from early use of specialized channels to subsequent general audience media involvement, and a content emphasis that graduates over time from relevant but unfocused information, to doctrinal content, to related substantive concerns.Sociologists are increasingly in agreement that "environmental pollution," in all its manifestations, is a clearly recognized "social problem" (19) and that "environmentalism" is a bona fide "social movement" (4, 14), with an "ideology" focused on social change. As such, environmentalism has been the subject of a wide variety of mass media coverage, and numerous studies have examined various aspects of relationships among the environmental movement and communication media (12,30). By analyzing content trends in 3,056 articles in two selected special interest (Audubon, Environment) and two general audience (Time, Saturday Review) magazines over the period from 1959 to 1979, the study reported in this article examines the roles of these two media types as well as the communication processes involved in the crystalization and diffusion of an ideology of social change (environmentalism) and the translation over time of this doctrine into a unified realm of substantive concerns.A guiding framework for this study posited that mass media organizations evolve through three basic adaptive phases-termed disambiguaGlenn C. Strodthoff is a graduate student and Robert P. Hawkins and A. Clay Schoenfeld are Professors, all in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison. 134Media Roles in a Social Movement tion, legitimation, and routinization-in their processing of information relevant to a maturing social cause. Gleaned from general systems theory, the involved processes correspond metaphorically to sequential phases in the growth of a system (gestation, maturation, and equilibration). Each deals with processes that seem to be characteristic of a certain temporal phase in the unfolding of a larger process-the diffusion of ideology. Thus these concepts should be seen in terms of both processes and of phases (1).Disambiguation is a process whereby the basic doctrinal tenets of an emerging social cause themselves become defined and distinguished from each other and are first manifest in the content of mass communication channels. Disambiguation should be predominant during the earliest phase of the diffusion progression and continue until the approximate point of cresting in media attention to the philosophical themes of the social movement.Legitimation is a process by which those who regulate the content for a given channel or media organization (gatekeepers) recognize various concerns pertinent to a social cause as valid topics for coverage by their particular channels.Routinization is a process whereby content relative to the movement is incorporated into the channel's operations on a fixed basis, such as through regular space, time, or personnel allocation. Th...

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