Assignment #4: Media coverage and the Social Movement of US National Labor Union
Media has always been a powerful tool of information distribution within the society. Information plays crucial role for the organized protests in order to spread its main ideas and aims. That is why protesters that took part in the social movement of US national labor union used multiple mass protests in order to attract the attention of mass media. Protests are the most effective kind of tactics to gain great media and social attention. It is easier to communicate with the audience and to attract its attention by separating it to three main groups: activists, authorities and bystanders, and media here are regarded as the most effective measure to establish effective communication (Meyer, 2007). Therefore, it can be said that the series of protests organized by the representatives of American labor unions successfully attracted media attention and became well-known in the United States and abroad.
The successful communication between the protesters and media is the spreading of the movements’ ideas and aims among the big number of people. The most suitable example of the success of media usage is high popularity of “Occupy Wall Street” protests that aimed to blame financial and labor exploitation. This protest was one of the brightest protests of the US labor union that attracted attention of the serious among to people in the different parts of the world. The high popularity of “Occupy Wall Street” is an example of cost-effectiveness of media as the main tool used by protesters throughout the history of the labor union movement. However, the impact of media has gone through the series of changes, such as the enlargement of size of the main media houses. In the past, they used to be comparatively small and therefore they were prone to pressure of the people in power. Nowadays, things have seriously changed as contemporary media houses are much bigger and their number increases every year. Therefore, it became extremely hard to gag the media (Meyer, 2007). Moreover, today protesters can choose from the different types of media that attract the attention of different social groups.
Another aspect of media is alternative media. It appears to be extremely useful in cases where mainstream media is not interested in focusing on the information connected with the movement (Meyer, 2007). Here, the key role plays social media. It can be extremely effective when facilitating the social movement in order to spread the messages within global society. Moreover, social media can also be connected with the mainstream media and therefore it stimulates the spreading of the information about the movement within this media channel. Here, the best example that demonstrates high effectiveness of social media is Arab Spring. The series of social protests have been organized though social media that attracted people’s attention and gave protesters additional support. Therefore, social media can help protesters to organize the shift of power within the country, although its high effectiveness resulted in the emergence of new security systems within the regulatory bodies of the country.
The fact that media has always been able to stimulate the emergence of serious social movements is supported by the work of Wolfsfeld and Gamson (Wolfsfeld, Gamson, 1993). Mass social movements have always been strongly connected with social media that were able to attract and affect big number of people as the ability to attract people is the key to profitability of the media houses. The more people are attracted by media house, the bigger is the final profit (Wolfsfeld, Gamson, 1993). This fact is followed by the willingness of big commercial unities to order advertisements in the media houses. Advertisement is one of the main sources of revenue for the media houses and therefore they try to establish certain mechanisms sans strategies that will give them ability to become attractive to as big audiences as possible (Meyer, 2007).
Generally, the manner of representing the information within the media is seriously biased. This is because media houses try to attract more people and therefore they have to choose information and the reporting manner they use. This results in the fact that some pieces of information cannot be covered. This is regulated by the chief editor of the particular media house that has to formulate the general nature and area of content that will be spread to the audience (Meyer, 2007). This determines the media platform of the media house and the audience that has to be attracted. The key role of one person is followed by fact that chief editors can sometimes be put under pressure in order to ban certain information or to ignore issues that can harm certain political party or state authority. Such processes are always done behind the back of the society, but they still have serious effect on public through the defining the content of the popular media houses (Wolfsfeld, Gamson, 1993).
The creation of certain privileges for concrete social movements within the media plays a serious role in the contemporary society. Social mobilization and attraction of the new supporters gained through the use of social media is the main reason for big social movements to use it. However, the popularity of such movements can be connected with the absence of potential threat towards the national security system within the country (Meyer, 2007).
Such movements, as US national labor union movement attracted people in order to fight against exploitation and to protect human rights and freedoms are potentially attractive to the large social masses. Therefore, they are usually spread though the media in order to attract more people to the particular media house. This shows strong connection between social movements and media.
References
Meyer, D. (2007). The politics of protest: social movements in America. New York, NY: Oxford.
Wolfsfeld, G., & Gamson, W. (1993). Movements and media as interacting systems. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 114-125.
