Page 217 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge
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                                             StrategicPolitical Communication

                              positioninthedecision-makingarena(Gamson1988,228;Gamsonetal.
                              1992, 383; Hamdan 2000, 72). By creating controversy where there was
                              none before, speakers of a protest movement and allied sponsors are
                              granted access to and legitimacy among journalists (Gamson and Meyer
                              1996, 288). Indirectly, protest always creates political opportunities for
                              established political actors as well. This holds in the negative sense –
                              protestmayserveasapretextforrepression,asitdoesinapositivesense–
                              the cause may be adopted by some elite actors (Tarrow 1994, 98). In the
                              final analysis, the goal of creating public attention is to divide the elite
                              and to strengthen the opposition among the decision makers (Wolfsfeld
                              1997, 27). As Tarrow observes, protests are most successful when they
                              provide a political incentive for elites within the decision-making arena
                              to advance their own policies and careers.
                                Protest politics and information politics mutually reinforce one an-
                              other. On the one hand, protests create an opportunity for information
                              politics: once a movement has obtained a certain amount of public vis-
                              ibility, it can successfully deploy its information strategy. Meyer and
                              Tarrow (1998, 18) point out that today the organizational and techni-
                              cal preconditions for the information strategy are less restrictive and
                              that already relatively undeveloped organizations can pursue an effi-
                              cient information strategy. Given the selection bias of the media in favor
                              of controversy and conflict, providing controversial information about a
                              given issue constitutes a promising strategy complementing the mobiliz-
                              ing for protest events. Conversely, in order to be successful, protests also
                              presuppose a credible information policy. Thus, Greenpeace carefully
                              researches and collects required information and then works on coming
                              up with alternative solutions before it launches its protest campaigns.
                              During the campaigns, this background information is then offered to
                              journalists (Hamdan 2000, 71).
                                In order to get the media’s attention, challengers need to be able to
                              produce events with a certain news value. The news value of a protest
                              event, in turn, is above all a function of the originality of an event (its
                              surprise effect), of the number of participants and of their radicalism
                              (Rochon 1990, 108; Koopmans 1995, 149–52). In addition, embedding
                              the protest event into a more general political attention cycle plays a key
                              role. Thus, McCarthy, McPhail, and Smith (1996, 494) have shown in
                              adetailed analysis of the demonstrations in Washington, DC that in
                              addition to the size of the demonstrations, their timing (“being in the
                              right place at the right time in a media attention cycle”) is crucial for the
                              reporting on the event. This means peaks in the media attention cycles


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