Issues in Using News Accounts in Process Analysis of Protest Episodes

We use examples from the widely-publicized Jena Six case to highlight several issues in using news accounts in process analysis. News stories offered different narratives that included and excluded different events and offered different causal connections that reflected the standpoints and interests of different actors. Media coverage itself and outreach to news reporters were significant events that were omitted from news accounts of event sequences. The media cascade was a probabilistic outcome that could not in general be repeated through the same sequence of prior event. Two seemingly irrelevant events may have affected the outcome, one that facilitated a connection between a journalist and bloggers and another that apparently competed for attention from national activists and media. NOTE: Preprint of a forthcoming chapter in Lorenzo Bosi and Stefan Malthaner, editors, Processes of Collective Action, Temple University Press.