Striking News: Discursive Power of the Press as Capitalist Resource in Gilded Age Strikes

Abstract

Does mass media discourse influence material outcomes of contentious social movement events? The authors address this enduring puzzle by developing a discursive power resource theory of the press that centers press coverage valence of strikes within the coemergence of the labor movement and mass commercial print media. Employing unique data and probability models, the authors examine the impact of negative coverage in three forms (lagged context, contemporaneous context, event focused) from two leading New York newspapers (Sun and Times) on strike outcomes during Gilded Age class contention. They find compelling evidence that negative coverage amplifies the likelihood of strike failure by disproportionately serving as a contention resource for capital. Evidence also suggests form, press political perspective, and movement intensity contingencies in how press influences work. The authors highlight theoretical implications for the role of media in social movement outcomes, power resource theory, soft repression in class formation, the public sphere, and corporate media.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.