All the Right Movements?: Mediation, Rightist Movements, and Why US Movements Received Extensive Newspaper Coverage

Under which conditions do social movements receive coverage by the mainstream news media? News coverage matters for movements for political, cultural, and organizational reasons, but only rarely have scholars analyzed the coverage of movements comparatively and at the movement level. To address the question, we apply a political mediation model of the influence of movements to professional news media, using ideas from the social organization of the news perspective. From this model, we hypothesize four main multicausal paths to extensive coverage for movements. These involve the joint occurrence of two specific movement characteristics—disruptive capacities and extensive organization—and two specific political contexts—unified partisan regimes and enforced policies. Working from scholarship that argues that rightist movements have different determinants, we also devise hypotheses for their coverage. These hypotheses are appraised through qualitative comparative analyses on an updated Political Organizations in the News data set. The latter includes information on all the coverage of national US movement organizations in four major national newspapers across the twentieth century. These analyses provide extensive support for the mediation model and support claims that rightist movements have separate and in some ways more difficult routes to extensive news coverage.