Conservatives and the Tea Party

Joshua M. Scacco, David A. Weaver, and Eric C. Wiemer

News outlets often frame social movements as outside the mainstream of political and social life. Scholars have dubbed this marginalization as the “protest paradigm” (Chan & Lee, 1984), and its implementation has fractured along with the American media system (Boykoff & Laschever, 2011; Lee, 2014). For instance, research suggests that the political ideology' of a news outlet influenced coverage of the conservative-leaning Tea Party (TP) protest movement in 2009-2010 (Weaver & Scacco, 2013). The extent to which this ideological news pattern continued when the liberal-leaning Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests emerged in 2011 remains an unexplored possibility.

The emergence of OWS protests in 2011 dovetailed with strong TP influence on conservative politics that may have complicated the simultaneous cable news coverage of the movements (Skocpol & Williamson, 2012). This chapter examines how nightly cable news programming compared and contrasted both movements in their coverage. It takes a multi-methodological approach to investigating coverage of the TP and OWS movements across cable news outlets in general and Fox News coverage in particular. This approach is chosen for two reasons. First, while it is apparent that traditional news outlets marginalized OWS (Gottlieb, 2015; Xu, 2013), it is less clear whether ideological fracturing of the protest paradigm extended to OWS coverage (Boykoff & Laschever, 2011; Lee, 2014). Second, how Fox News treated both the TP and OWS simultaneously in its coverage warrants additional focus given the general orientation of conservative ideology' toward activism. In their study of cable news coverage of the TP, Weaver and Scacco (2013) found that Fox News neither marginalized the movement nor legitimized it by covering its issues of interest. This chapter examines what Fox News focused on with the TP when the outlet had the opportunity to compare and contrast the movement to the liberal-leaning OWS.

It does so by first offering a brief overview of news coverage of protest movements, including how cable news outlets may have treated both the TP and OWS. Then, it reviews the nature of conservative ideology and political activism— keying in on the potential tensions inherent in protest and conservative thought that may manifest in nightly cable coverage of both movements by Fox News. Further, it offers a multi-methodological approach using both quantitative content analysis of cross-cable news coverage and qualitative semantic network analysis of the key themes emanating from coverage on Fox News in particular. The findings highlight how conservative media legitimation of the TP was in part based on using classic protest paradigm delegitimation frames toward OWS and engaging in, what is explored more in this chapter, as inverse echo framing.

Media Framing of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Movements

News media often rely on consistent patterns of social movement-related coverage. By selecting particular facets of protest activities and making certain meanings apparent, media elites frame social movement engagement (Entman, 1993). In this manner, frames become imbued with institutional power and assist in mediating citizens’ perceptions of protest movements (McLeod & Detenber, 1999). Moreover, this coverage—and its interplay with public discourse—is often crucial for the viability of protests (Gamson & Wolfsfeld, 1993).

Yet, news coverage of protest movements often deemphasizes the motivations that may legitimize protests to the broader public (e.g., public policy causes) in favor of actions and behaviors designed to highlight deviance (Smith, McCarthy, McPhail, & Augustyn, 2001). The concept of the protest paradigm emerged in a study of newspaper coverage of protests in Flong Kong (Chan & Lee, 1984). Since then, scholars have applied this lens to examine how American news coverage contains a robust status quo bias against social movements when media marginalize protest activities and privilege institutional, established voices (Boyle, McCluskey, Devanathan, Stein, & McLeod, 2004; Boyle, McCluskey, McLeod, & Stein, 2005; Dardis, 2006; Di Cicco, 2010; Donohue, Tichenor, & Olien, 1995; Gitlin, 1981; Jha, 2007; McLeod & Detenber, 1999; McLeod & Hertog, 1992). Patterns of highlighting deviant cues in coverage—such as calling attention to the physical and mental characteristics of protesters, lawlessness and violence of events, and the citation of public opinion against protesters—contribute to the newsworthiness of protests (Dardis, 2006; McLeod & Detenber, 1999; McLeod & Hertog, 1992).

Although research on the protest paradigm has offered important insights on patterns of protest-related media coverage, studies often consult legacy media operating under an objectivity model (Schudson, 1995). More so than in past eras, media frames operate in a competitive and fragmented media environment complete with partisan-tinged outlets (Coe et al., 2008; Iyengar & Hahn,

2009). Scholarship has begun to address the extent to which the protest paradigm extends to a fragmented, more ideological news environment. The emergence of the TP in early 2009 serves as a critical test case.

Formed in reaction to President Barack Obama’s economic policies aimed at halting the “Great Recession,” the TP protested against a unified Democratic government, higher taxes and government spending, as well as the expansion of government into the private health-care sector (Clement & Green, 2011; Kar- powitz, Monson, Patterson, & Pope, 2011; Perrin, Tepper, Caren, & Morris, 2011). The TP saw remarkable success in the 2010 congressional midterm elections, with exit polls showing that 40% of voters supported the movement and a number ofTP-aligned candidates elected to Congress (A Clear Rejection, 2010). One study of cable news coverage of the TP movement found that coverage aligned with a cable outlet’s partisan branding—MSNBC was more likely to marginalize protesters compared to Fox News and CNN (Weaver & Scacco, 2013). Yet, that research also found that marginalization and legitimation patterns did not necessarily “mirror” each other. When it came to the legitimation of protest cause in the case of the TP, the average number of issue mentions in a given story was similar between the two partisan-oriented networks. One striking possibility for these findings involves how Fox News’ full-throated defense of the TP simultaneously left legitimating motives for the protests unstated.

The entrance of the left-leaning OWS movement into the public sphere in mid-to-late 2011, soon after the rise in prominence of the TP, offers an opportunity to examine how OWS was framed in reference to the TP, both across cable news outlets in general and Fox News’ coverage specifically. OWS was a movement that responded to the perceived effects of deregulation and government policies and built tent encampments near Wall Street in New York City, a practice that spread to other cities around the United States. The three primary motivators of the movement were (1) rising economic inequality, (2) government public policy perceived to favor the wealthy, and (3) the general economic conditions in the wake of the “Great Recession” (Kohut, 2011). OWS used social media extensively to recruit, coordinate activities, circumvent traditional media, and act as a counter-public (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013). Initially, print organizations such as the New York Times and the Washington Post ignored the movement. When OWS did begin to receive media attention, however, news accounts linked the movement to lawlessness, performative aspects, holding ineffective goals, disapproval on the part of members of the public, and negative impacts on the nearby community (Gottlieb, 2015; Xu, 2013). This coverage aligned with previous accounts of legacy-based news’ approach to left-leaning protest movements and protests in general.

If relatively “neutral” news organizations were likely to marginalize OWS (Lynn & Williams, 2016), overtly partisan cable television outlets should have done so in a more apparent manner even when comparing it to the TP (DeLuca, Lawson, & Sun, 2012). Cable outlets have a powerful economic incentive to market ideologically infused content to audiences who seek it out (Levendusky, 2013). These audiences were split in their attitudes about OWS, with individuals exhibiting right-wing authoritarian attitudes more likely to disapprove of left-wing (OWS) than right-wing (TP) protest activity (Crawford & Xhambazi, 2015). By contrast, less authoritarian Americans were more likely to disapprove of right-wing movements (TP). Partisan cable news sources thus had a potential audience incentive to cover OWS in divergent ways. This research and the protest paradigm suggest that media frames of OWS should follow a similar pattern. Namely,

(Hi): Evening programming on MSNBC (liberally aligned) will use legitimating devices to justify the existence of OWS more so than the conservative Fox News.

H2: Evening programming on Fox News will use marginalization devices against OWS more than programs on MSNBC.

As a counterpoint, coverage of OWS from partisan-branded cable news with more neutrally branded media outlets such as CNN and the Associated Press (AP) is also examined. Baum and Grading (2008) suggest that more ideological media engage in filtering practices that ultimately leave out substantive information in favor of partisan arguments, an occurrence observed in Fox News’ coverage of the rise of the TP (Weaver & Scacco, 2013). Should this also have been the case with OWS, neutrally branded media would be expected to have focused on issues that motivated the movement compared to partisan cable sources.

H3: Neutrally branded outlets (the AP and CNN) will focus on the issue positions of OWS more than ideologically branded outlets (Fox News and MSNBC).

Conservatism and the Treatment of Political Activism

As an outlet branded to attract ideological conservatives, Fox News presents a possible conundrum for how it would position OWS in relation to the TP. On one hand, the outlet was in a unique position to legitimize the TP in part by using the movement as a foil against OWS. Yet, the protest-oriented roots of the TP also may have created tensions for conservative evening programming. Standard scholarly accounts emphasize conservative activism for presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and libertarian issues in the 1960s and 1970s (Klatch, 1999). More recent historical scholarship has shown that there was significant interplay between the so-called media activists and citizen mobilization as early as the 1950s (Hemmer, 2016). Despite this, the popular perception would seem to be that conservative causes have not grown into large-scale protest movements. Sociological research indicates that being more conservative reduces the likelihood of engaging in political activism (Corrigall-Brown, 2012). Moreover, ideological conservativism is not a natural handmaiden of political activism. Such tensions are qualitatively investigated in this research.

As a general principle, conservatism can be conceptualized as a motivated social cognition, a belief system that is largely linked to management of fear and uncertainty (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003). Ideological conservatism has been linked with constructs such as right-wing authoritarianism (RWA; Altemeyer, 1998), social dominance orientation (SDO; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), and need for closure (NFC; Webster & Kruglanski, 1994). RWA and SDO in particular are good examples of constructs that are correlated with conservatism and are meaningful for understanding how Fox News may have treated the TP vis-a-vis OWS.

RWA emphasizes resistance to change generally and passive submission or deferential posture toward authorities ([ost et al., 2003, p. 346). This posture theoretically best aligns with the theory of the classic media protest paradigm, which emphasizes media marginalization against protest, especially protest that challenges the “status quo” (Boyle et ah, 2004, 2005; McLeod & Detenber, 1999). The status quo for subscribers to a more RWA broadly represents traditional capitalist underpinnings in economic affairs and limited relationships between the government and the economy. Right-wing authoritarianism aligns with the classic media protest paradigm not only because political protest is, by definition, disruptive and un-submissive but because much activism in the United States has historically been of the left-wing variety (Corrigall-Brown, 2012; Klatch, 1999).

Conversely, SDO emphasizes domination of some groups over others (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999) or an inclination to act against members of out-groups. The notable context-specific element that cuts across TP was opposition to the economic politics of the then President Barack Obama, as well as Obama himself on racial grounds ([ost et ah, 2017; Leone & Presaghi, 2018; Rafail & McCarthy, 2018; Skocpol & Williamson, 2012). It may very well be that TP targets, such as Obama and congressional Democrats, were precisely so because there was a perception that the target represented a fundamental threat to conservative values that underpin the status quo. Indeed, this sentiment is also reflected in scholarship showing how supporters of TP scored significantly higher than supporters of OWS on the need to share reality with like-minded others (Jost et ah, 2017, p. elO; see also Fiennes, Nam, Stern, &Jost, 2012).

The inflection point of these social psychological orientations hinges on the concept of the status quo so central to the protest paradigm. As protest represents some challenge to the status quo, conservative activism faces unique challenges. At the broadest level, then, system justification theory emphasizes ideological and cognitive support for the status quo and inequality—a general dampener for political activism. Yet, conservatives may support (and participate) activism if a target or out-group threatens a perceived status quo. The dividing line for conservative activism may be taking actions that “conform to the norms of the existing social system and those that violate existing social rules” (van Stekelenberg &

Klandermans, 2013, p. 887; see also Wright, Taylor, & Moghaddam, 1990). In this sense, the relatively restrained nature of the TP protests reflected the ideological orientation of its participants and supporters.

Given that activism driven by substantive conservative concerns must meet a higher threshold for support/participation compared to left-leaning protests, it follows that mobilizing the TP required an effective mass mobilization device (see DiGrazia, 2014). Fox News and other conservative media were able to take advantage of the fact that many in the TP were implicitly and explicitly linking Obama (and fellow congressional Democrats) with social out-groups (Skocpol & Williamson, 2012; see also Tajfel & Turner, 2004), thus providing a sub-system target that may have lowered the acceptability for activism. Certainly, not all consumers of right-wing media engaged in overt protest, but the lowering of the threshold provided a measure of psychological cover to support those that did.

These tensions may have been manifest in conservative programming at Fox News when evening commentary positioned the TP in relation to OWS. Although Fox provided a baseline of support and protection for TP activism in the early Obama administration (Weaver & Scacco, 2013), this support may be complicated in the face of left-wing activism. This chapter further investigates how Fox News compared and contrasted the TP to OWS in a manner that would make it amenable to a conservative audience potentially wary of political activism but supportive of efforts to challenge progressive-leaning politics.

Research Question: How did conservative news elites at Fox News compare and contrast the political activism of the TP and OWS?

Method

Content Analysis

To compare coverage of OWS across news outlets (H1—H3), the cable news content most seen by the viewers was selected. The top two most-watched programs on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC were identified during the prime time 8:00 to 11:00 p.m. Nielsen data showed that from the period following the Republican ascendancy in the House of Representatives (February 2, 2011) through the day after OWS’s much publicized May Day protests (May 2, 2012), the top programs were Piers Morgan Tonight (CNN), Anderson Cooper 360° (CNN), The O’Reilly Factor (Fox News), Hannity (Fox News), The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC), and The Ed Show (MSNBC).

The sample frame reported here consists of all program transcripts during this time frame that discussed both OWS and the TP. Thus, these transcripts served as the population of interest. AP stories that met the same criteria from this time frame were also included. Using the Lexis-Nexis Academic database as the sampling frame, 107 cable transcripts and 35 AP stories constituted the population. Because of the relatively small number of stories within the population, a census content analysis was conducted. The search terms used in Lexis-Nexis included “Tea Party” AND “Occupy Movement” OR “Occupy Wall Street.” A census analysis does not necessitate statistical tests, so differences are noted based on substantive significance.

Unit of analysis and reliability. Individual broadcasts and AP stories constituted the unit of analysis. The whole text was selected because formatting differences between cable transcripts and AP articles would have otherwise allowed for a greater repetition of frames in the cable broadcasts if left unchecked. AP articles contained fewer words compared to the cable transcripts; cable broadcasts also feature hosts and pundits that repeat specific frames. By analyzing the whole text, one-to-one comparisons among outlets could be conducted. Two trained coders analyzed between 15% and 20% of the cable and the AP articles during three reliability iterations. Lower reliabilities were reconciled by revisiting the articles and coding procedures until acceptable reliabilities were attained (Krippendorff, 2012). All content analytic codes reported achieved a minimum reliability of 0.70, with 73% of the codes attaining a Krippendorffs alpha of 0.80 or higher.

Content analysis and codes. Content codes were derived from past scholarship examining news coverage of protests (Dardis, 2006; McLeod & Detenber, 1999; McLeod & Hertog, 1992). Table 4.1 shows the codes used in this study.

TABLE 4.1 Content Analytic Coding Categories

Codes pertaining to legitimation (issue mentions) were developed to capture a given issue’s association with OWS (e.g., taxes too low). Marginalization devices likewise followed the pre-existing literature on the protest paradigm. For both the legitimation and marginalization frame sets, additive indices for each story in the census were calculated to measure the degree to which stories captured these two sets of options.

Thematic Analysis

To assess the research question regarding the tensions that may have animated Fox News’ coverage of both the TP and OWS, this study built on the aforementioned content analysis with a thematic analysis of the network’s discourse in the broadcast transcripts of The O’Reilly Factor and Hatwity from February 2, 2011, to May 2, 2012. To first establish a basis for thematic analysis, a semantic network analysis through text mining was conducted. Text mining is a method that takes a corpus of words (e.g., transcribed speeches or interviews) and identifies and examines the structures within that corpus of text (Diesner & Carley, 2004; for more on text mining, see Lambert, 2017). Structuring texts allows scholars to identify meaning through the various relationships particular words and phrases have with one another. Overall, 38 news broadcast transcripts from Fox News that mentioned both the TP and OWS were used as the corpus of text. A text mining software, AutoMap, was used to preprocess the texts for analysis. Preprocessing involves the systematic removal of noise words, numbers, symbols, and any metadata present in the transcription of news broadcasts, such as the copyright information for the transcript, the document type, or the file length. A custom thesaurus also was used to replace all iterations of a word to match one uniform version (e.g., all iterations of rally, such as rallies, rallied, and rallying, were transformed into “rally”). These steps produced a semantic co-reference list of relevant concepts and conversations where words are considered paired if they appear within five words of each other (Carley, 2001; Carley, Columbus, Bigrigg, Diesner, & Kunkel, 2010).

Next, an overall semantic network containing the preprocessed text was constructed using a network visualization tool, NodeXL (Smith et al., 2010). Individual networks were then created to view relationships of words specific to both the TP and OWS. A TP network was created using five main words transformed to include all iterations of each word (i.e., tea party, protest, movement, rally, and demonstrate) and all words connected to these central words in the overall network. Similarly, a second network was created for OWS using the same words (i.e., occupy, wallstreet, protest, movement, rally, and demonstrate) to evaluate similarities and ditferences between the two movements in question. In each network, NodeXL produced a metric to measure the extent to which a word serves as a “bridge,” or the amount of times a particular word appears on the shortest path from one word to another in a network (Hansen, Shneiderman, & Smith, 2010, p. 40). This metric is betweenness centrality. A high betweenness centrality metric indicates that a particular word plays a large role in connecting many words with many other words. Table 4.2 contains the top 25 semantic coreferences and their associated betweenness centralities for each of the networks examined.

Using the semantic network analysis, the Fox News transcripts were reviewed through the conceptual framework of the protest paradigm and the potential tensions exhibited toward political activism. The co-references in the semantic network, including betweenness centrality measures, served as anchors for which to understand potential themes. For instance, the appearance of the words “violent” and “crazy” indicated that behavioral indicators were important while “government” and “issues” pointed toward policy discussions in the TP and OWS networks. These themes were then positioned in the context of the Fox News broadcasts to check for the validity of initial assumptions. With the initial themes

TABLE 4.2 Semantic Network Co-Reference List and Associated Centrality Scores

serving as sensitizing concepts to orient the analysis (Patton, 2015), the transcripts were analyzed using emergent category designation, a qualitative approach where latent theory is used to form categories (Erlandson, Harris, Skipper, & Allen, 1993). The researchers separately classified broadcast excerpts, collaboratively discussed the fit of cases, and then assigned category labels. Tensions in comparisons of the TP and OWS were noted surrounding three themes: policy issues, behavior, and politics.

Results and Discussion Cross-Media Treatment of OWS

HI states that MSNBC would be more likely than Fox News to discuss the issues animating OWS. Across the five areas in the coding scheme (displayed in Table 4.3), MSNBC discussed the issues of taxes and debts/deficits by a 2:1 margin over Fox News and did so at a substantively meaningful level for wealth (n = 37 and n = 20, respectively). Likewise, Fox News had the lowest average number of issue mentions per story (M = 0.95, SD = 1.04) and MSNBC the highest (M = 1.53, SD = 1.12), with CNN (M= 1.38, SD = 1.17) and with the АР (M = 1.03, SD = .92) falling in between. Thus, there is strong evidence in favor of Hypothesis 1.

TABLE 4.3 Prevalence of Occupy Frames by Source

Note, t = MSNBC to Fox News stories at 2:1 ratio or greater, 1+ = Fox News to MSNBC stories at 2:1 ratio or greater.

The second hypothesis posits that Fox News would marginalize OWS more than MSNBC. Of the eight frames examined, Fox News used components of the marginalization frame at a 2:1 ratio five times (dress, idiots, waning influence, astroturf, and eyewitness accounts). Fox News averaged the highest number of marginalization devices at 3.8 (SD = 1.9), while MSNBC had less than half of that (M = 1.73, SD = 1.73). These results support H2.

A more complex picture emerges with respect to Hypotheses 3, which anticipated that the relatively mainstream sources of CNN and AP would neither overly marginalize nor overly legitimate the movement in accordance with traditional norms of objectivity and balance. Of the five issues examined, both CNN and the AP were equal to Fox News in three cases, indicating MSNBCs particular emphasis on legitimation. With the issue of debts, CNN did fall between the two cable networks while the AP registered fewer stories than Fox News. The picture is reversed when it comes to the issue of wealth inequality, with the AP falling between the two partisan networks.

Turning to marginalization frames, the picture is decidedly mixed. Of the eight such frames, both CNN and AP were between the two cable networks only twice (idiots and astroturf). In five other instances, both sources exhibited a lower tendency to use the frame than MSNBC (spectacle, fracture, waning influence, counter-demonstrators, and violence), suggesting that MSNBC’s invocation of these frames was in part an effort to combat messages projected by opponents of the movement. In two instances (dress and eyewitness accounts), one source was at or below MSNBC and the other was between the two cable networks. In sum, there is mixed support for H3.

The analyses here do suggest that OWS was maligned by Fox News and legitimated by MSNBC, as would be expected by the literature (Lee, 2014; Weaver & Scacco, 2013). The results present several patterns indicative of the continued fracturing of protest treatment across different media outlets.

Examining the findings for the neutrally branded news outlets (CNN and AP), the efficacy of examining traditional notions of the protest paradigm in the context of a fragmented media environment is evident. These more neutral outlets mention marginalizing devices (which prior research would observe as well), but this pattern deviates sharply when compared against more ideologically branded outlets (which prior research could or did not address). The AP, in particular, emphasized the dress, childlike qualities, and spectacle of OWS protests more so than CNN. However, print-based content called attention to personalized cues that might have been visually available in television programming. Placed in the context of a partisan cable news environment, these mentions pale in comparison to the marginalization engaged in by Fox News and match fairly close to the coverage MSNBC gave OWS as well. This pattern confirms that perceived deviant behavior is newsworthy to more traditionally aligned news outlets (Dardis, 2006; McLeod & Detenber, 1999; McLeod & Hertog, 1992), used as fodder by ideological opponents, and as a consequence must be combatted by ideological compatible sources.

When attention is turned to MSNBC, the results illustrate the guard dog function the network’s evening programming played for OWS. It used fewer marginalization devices than Fox News while also legitimizing OWS more than neutrally branded outlets and Fox News. Even when it did use marginalization devices, MSNBC seemed to have done so in an attempt to combat attacks. In mentioning the attacks by conservative sources, MSNBC played a similar role to what Fox News initially did with the TP in 2009 and 2010 (Weaver & Scacco, 2013). However, the comparisons in coverage end here. By mentioning OWS’s issues and political concerns, MSNBC legitimized their cause in the public sphere. This legitimization finding diverges considerably from how Fox News treated the TP in 2009 and 2010. Fox News’ coverage of the TP during this time period, similar to its coverage of OWS during the time examined in this study, filtered out policy issues.

The findings then for Fox News’ treatment of OWS are unsurprising given the context of the protest paradigm and the ideological leanings of OWS—the network’s evening programming leaned heavily on marginalization frames and left potential legitimating motives unaddressed. Yet, the content analytic results only examine how OWS was constructed in broadcasts where the TP also was mentioned, an important limitation of this study. The original intent was to directly compare framing of OWS with that of the TP. Given the time period when OWS protests were occurring, substantive mentions of TP issues and motivations were rarely present. This characteristic of these broadcasts rendered systemic coding of TP mentions undesirable and precipitated a need for follow-up qualitative analyses looking specifically at how potential tensions in Fox News’ coverage manifested in construction of belli movements. Future research could confirm the content analytic results herein with full, separate samples of programming focused on OWS and the TP during this time frame.

Fox News' Treatment of OWS and the TP

Turning specifically to Fox News’ treatment of OWS and the TP, this research aimed to examine the tensions between support for political activism and support for a status quo economic system under attack from ideological opponents. Thus, this chapter’s research question asked how conservative news elites compared and contrasted the political activism of the TP and OWS. A first step in this endeavor was tracking the use and connectedness of activism terms in the semantic networks. Activism-related language, including “protest” (occurring 172 times), “movement” (79), “demonstrate” (36), and “rally” (13), was used frequently in discussions of OWS and the TP. The analysis of how protest operated in the networks for each movement, however, offered initial evidence of differential treatment.

The betweenness centrality of the word “protest” in the OWS network (45,137.99) was greater than that in the TP network (40,280.96). Related words such as movement, demonstrate, and rally also had greater betweenness centrality scores in the OWS network compared to the TP (see Table 4.2). These scores indicate that activism-related cues were more central to how Fox News discussed OWS than these cues were to mentions of the TP. The differences were noted for follow-up qualitative examinations in the broadcast transcripts.

The use and connectedness of activism terms points toward two possibilities, which were examined further in the thematic analysis. For starters, the timeliness of OWS protests may have elevated protest actions in relation to the dated protest actions of the TP. By this time period in 2011 and 2012, the TP had transitioned to a predominantly political entity with established representation in Congress and special interest organizations. Although the excerpts reported herein account for some of these event-based descriptions of activism, the explicit comparisons/ contrasts made in the Fox News broadcasts point toward a second possibility: the general reticence of a conservative network to label the TP as a protest-oriented movement. Indeed, system justification is often inversely related to activism and, crucially, activists for conservative causes may not even perceive of themselves as protesters even though they are, in fact, engaging in classic protest behaviors (Corrigall-Brown, 2012). This possibility furthered the analysis for tensions in this regard. A qualitative examination of the transcripts revealed how the meaning of activism with regard to each movement was (re) constructed and contested around issues, behavior, and politics.

Issues. Fox News only occasionally mentioned the policy issues that animated the TP. For instance, the semantic network analysis flagged just one issue area— government. The issue has a larger betweenness centrality than in the OWS network, which indicates an intensity and importance of the word in the overall TP semantic network. When the evening programs discuss issues with regard to government, the hosts or guests attempted to anchor these issues with markers of legitimacy. Bill O’Reilly summed up TP advocacy about “less government, less spending, and more local control. That’s certainly a legitimate point of view. Andrew Jackson had it. So why would any American hate the Tea Party?” (O’Reilly, 201 la). O’Reilly echoed this point 10 days later when he constructed the original aims of the TP “demonstrating for smaller government and responsible spending” (O’Reilly, 2011b). Similarly, a guest on Sean Hannity’s program around this time framed a righteous anger from the TP “over government overreach, government interfering in people’s lives, keeping them from keeping their hard-earned dollars” (Hannity 2011a). The issues of concern to the TP were narrow, historical, emotional, and largely within the contours of traditional conservative orthodox (see Skocpol & Williamson, 2012). As will be illustrated later in the discussion of how politics animated construction of the TP, the means by which Fox News tied the TP to conservativism and Republicanism presented a double-edged sword for legitimation. Although this made the TP’s policy aims appear to be mainstream, extracting the movement’s aims from establishment politics became more difficult in legitimizing its presence as separate from Republican politics.

The tidiness by which Fox News programming constructed TP concerns melts away when discussing the issues of interest to OWS. The top 25 most central nodes in the semantic network do not include a single policy issue. Here, the Fox News evening programs illustrate the tension between acknowledgment of genuine concern (thus providing legitimacy) and marginalization. Sean Hannity constructs this tension in an interview with the then businessman Donald Trump on October 18, 2011. Hannity sympathizes—and by proxy legitimizes—the issues of OWS before integrating conservative messaging on government. “Some of the anger I think is justified, high debt, record deficits, high unemployment, lack of opportunity, but it seems that they [OWS] want more government as the answer. Is anger at bailouts? Which I agree with.” Trump responds to Hannity’s question by slamming the bailouts, saying “Now, the banks did get bailed out, so whether you like that or you don’t like it, they got bailed out by this country, but they’re not loaning monies” (Hannity, 2011a). Both Hannity and Trump follow up this acknowledgment by pivoting to a common tactic of marginalization toward OWS that its anger and concerns are misdirected.

When marginalizing the issues that concerned OWS, Fox News took two related approaches: acknowledge the concerns but construct them as misdirected and delegitimize the concerns altogether. The story of the misdirected movement was told by describing demonstrators as “uninformed” and “barely coherent” (Hannity, 2011b), as well as “misguided but . . . also sincere” (O’Reilly, 2011a). The then Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain on Hannity encapsulates this sub-theme that OWS protests should be directed at the White House (Obama administration) and not bankers:

I said that they should be protesting in front of the White House because Wall Street did not produce the failed economic policies. Wall Street did not spend $1 trillion really or if you want to start at S787 billion, almost a trillion dollars of failed economic stimulus.

Hannity, 201 lc

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter had a similar message for Bill O’Reilly two weeks later: “In point of fact, these people are not against Wall Street. They are walking right past George Soros’ house and protesting outside Rupert Murdoch’s apartment” (O’Reilly, 2011c). For Coulter, OWS’s issues were not only misdirected but highly ideological—a similar footing used by commentators on Fox News to tie OWS to President Obama, congressional Democrats, and progressive interest groups. Sean Hannity even went so far as to cite public opinion against OWS’s directed aims—a common protest marginalization approach documented with mainstream news outlets (Lee, 2014; McLeod & Detenber, 1999; McLeod & Hertog, 1992).

Meanwhile, as the lunatic left-wing fringe continues to condemn rich people .. . it seems that the rest of America does not agree. According to a recent Gallup poll, a staggering 64 percent of Americans blame Washington, only 30 percent say big financial institutions are at fault.

Hannily, 201 Id

The discursive construction of being misdirected not only implies a lack of sophistication and intelligence on the part of OWS protesters but also places them opposite a public majority as the ignorant other.

In other instances, Fox News—in an echo of the coverage that MSNBC gave the TP (Weaver & Scacco, 2013)—engaged in protest delegitimation toward the group’s issue profile. O’Reilly accused OWS of “basically wanting] to blow up the entire capitalistic system to achieve so-called income equality, simply put, they want socialism” (O’Reilly, 2011a). Hannity saw “class warfare” emanating from their messages (Hannity, 2011a, 201 lb) and claimed that “they want statism over free markets. So, they really don’t like freedom. But they empower the government to take everybody’s money” (2011b). Ann Coulter went one step further than Hannity by linking OWS’s advocacy of income inequality to nefarious aims of economic disruption. “As for [income| inequality, it’s—it’s a red herring [sic] to talk about inequality, the Politburo lives pretty well in the Soviet Union. Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro live very, very well. The question is freedom or big government” (O’Reilly, 2011c). The reductionism of this argument places OWS opposite freedom using a bevy of devil terms—socialism, statism, and warfare. By positioning OWS as a threat to an economic status quo, Fox News may have lowered the threshold for acceptance of conservative activism among some members of its audience.

Behavior. Although this census of cable news segments contains more or less simultaneous discussion of the two movements, the primary thrust of the conversations center around OWS rather than TP. This pattern masks a delicate dance as noted earlier in the discussion of issues; a similar dynamic is at play with regard to behavior, broadly conceived within the traditional protest paradigm. The semantic network analysis exhibits that more importance is placed on negative behaviors with respect to TP rather than OWS. The betweenness centrality for words like “violent” and “crazy” is higher in the TP semantic network than in the OWS semantic network. However, returning to a qualitative examination here is important to help make sense of the patterns that are revealed through our semantic network analyses. Interestingly, Fox News prioritizes commentary on protest behavior for OWS, yet these protest behavior terms still appear heavily in the TP semantic network. As discussed later, this is a result of the desire for Fox

News to deploy inverse echo framing of the TP vis-a-vis OWS as a mechanism to state what the TP does not represent.

The key difference with behavior lies in Fox News’ ability to juggle the twin appeal of marginalizing OWS and highlighting the virtues of the TP. As seen in the semantic network analysis, a more traditional marginalization in the form of extremity is used in reference to OWS. O’Reilly expressed on October 21, 2011, that the movement is not “an economically based protest anymore. It has been hijacked by the radical left. And ... a lot of these radical people will destroy property and hurt you for whatever reason.” Hannitv also makes comments about OWS protesters being “filthy, dirty, smelly people that can’t find work” (Han- nity, 201 le). Examples such as these fall well within the bounds of the traditional protest paradigm. Compared to most passages, however, this is relatively simple messaging.

When movements collide in right-wing media, it provides an opportunity to invoke an inverse echo frame by accusing ideologically opposite movements and their associated allies of rank hypocrisy. An inverse echo frame is, then, predominantly about (1) deflecting or rejecting any real or perceived negative qualities of oneself or in-group by (2) emphasizing the presence—real or imagined—of those same qualities in an out-group. Ultimately, the tactic may inadvertently reinforce the initial in-group issue on some nominal level. For example, this approach was evident on Fox News when Columbia University Professor Mark Hill asserted racism was the reason for a lack of black participants in the TP. O’Reilly’s echo was framed by teasing viewers with “a segment coming up. . . [on] anti-Semitism with Bernie Goldberg where this Occupy Wall Street crowd is saying all this business” (O’Reilly, 2011a).

A common vector of argumentation in the transcripts is that elements of the news media—and even some of the guests themselves—argue for some form of issue-based equivalency between the two movements, one that is strongly countered using the inverse framing technique. Hannity presents a video clip of the then President Barack Obama stating that similarities between the TP and OWS stem from a frustration with government and with their institutions (Hannity, 201 Id). Despite the eventual refutation from Hannity regarding Obama’s claims of equivalency, presenting these viewpoints reinforces the notion that TP and OWS are equivalents and their values are echoed in one another. It also functions as an opportunity for Hannity to explicitly separate the TP from OWS by stating, “Well, actually Mr. President, the two groups couldn’t be more different, among a million other painfully obvious distinctions” (201 Id). A few weeks earlier, Ann Coulter employed this same inverse echo frame on Hannity’s program, noting that

[in] the typical liberal street protests against bankers in Seattle . . . they use

the flagpoles as weapons and started smashing windows. . . . [A]t the Tea

Parties, they wanted to use flagpoles to fly the American flag and [t]here is no violence to the Tea Parties.

Hatmity, 2011b

This pattern holds whether the inverse frame explicitly mentions TP issues or not. Hannity guest Katie Pavlich ofTownHall.com rhetorically asked,

[WJhen [was] the last time you heard a Tea Party member say we should behead people [?] You can’t think of any because it didn’t happen . . . 700 [OWS] people have been arrested. I mean, when have you seen that at a Tea Party rally?

Hannity, 2011b

The behavior aspect of the dual movement coverage by Fox News adheres very closely to the traditional protest paradigm, which is what might be expected given the story segments are largely focused on the OWS events that allow Fox News to shore up the sagging salience of TP among its viewers. Rarely, however, is a movement divorced from broader politics as evidenced later.

Politics. Another striking contrast between the movements involves the broader electoral and political implications. Traditional protest news coverage emphasizes protest movements episodically by marginalizing protest events and the accompanying animating causes. But when opposing ideological movements can be contrasted simultaneously, hosts have an opportunity to amplify what they see as the broader political ramifications. O’Reilly did so when he pointed out, “Now, I don’t see the protests, Wall Street people putting anybody into any office at any time, so therefore, I think the Tea Party is much, much more powerful than this” (O’Reilly, 201 Id). This scope-broadening dynamic is not merely one of long-term electoral prospects but the movements’ placement in the broader political ecology.

During the peak of OWS activity, the biggest wave(s) of electoral TP success had passed and the future of OWS was uncertain. As a consequence, it became necessary for Fox News hosts to find a broader set of political factors that could undermine OWS in the long run. The most common tactic was to tie OWS to unpopular political figures and associated political out-groups, as Hannity did when saying, “It’s the same coalition which makes up the Democratic Party when you think about it. Special interest groups, you got environmentalists are there” (Hannity, 2011b). Along similar lines, while Obama was an animating source of mobilization among the TP (Skocpol & Williamson, 2012), the president also became a convenient source of marginalization by Hannity when he pointed out OWS’ “class warfare rhetoric ... to what extent do they get this message, from Obama Democrats, because they have been obviously hyping it” (Hannity, 2011b). The positioning of OWS alongside progressive out-groups may have hyped threats to the economic status quo and, as a result, lowered the threshold for activism among some conservatives in the Fox News audience.

An emphasis on the role of elite Democrats and other progressive donors (e.g., George Soros) mentioned in several other segments is an echo of the astroturf frame—a process of asserting the presence of a faux grassroots—commonly used by MSNBC to malign the TP in early 2009 (see Weaver & Scacco, 2013). However, the frame is not equivalent across movements and cable networks. Although the role of conservative elites in TP ascendency was cast in more conspiratorial, organizational terms, the anti-OWS messages were cast more in terms of basic out-group associations, as Hannity did in stating that “President Obama and his left wing friends in Hollywood has been busy praising the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protesters” (Hannity, 2011c). Fox News routinely used out-group tropes to marginalize OWS and potentially make activism among conservatives more palatable, especially when such outgroups are explicitly political in nature (i.e., Obama, Democrats; see Skocpol & Williamson, 2012; Tajfel & Turner, 2004). How the evening programs handled the emerging divisions in the conservative base— divisions that continue to animate contemporary Republican politics—illustrates the initial struggles Fox News had appending and then separating the TP from the establishment Republican Party.

There are important moments when Fox News did express concern about the potential for the TP to undermine the Republican Party. Hannity, in particular, emphasized these concerns repeatedly during the Republican presidential primary season in 2012. On one show, Hannity asked a guest “ [I]s the rise and fall of a lot of the candidates, is it becoming Romney versus maybe the Tea Party? Because it seems like Mitt Romney still has to struggle to explain over and over again” (Hannity, 201 Id). This sentiment, and others like it, was consistent with concerns over fracture in the Republican Party and recent scholarship emphasizing Fox News’prioritization of the party’s electoral and political goals over those of the TP (Rafail & McCarthy 2018; Weaver & Scacco, 2013). These conversations later inspired present concerns about splits in the Republican coalition between supporters of Donald Trump and the conservatives who have opposed him (see Ward, 2018).

Finally, a common vehicle across many of the segments was repetition of the long-running theme of liberal media bias. The data reveal that the centrality of the term media to the TP semantic network is over 400 times more prevalent compared to the OWS network in which media was essentially not central at all. O’Reilly demonstrates this when he concluded,

“Many of us here at FNC, are skeptical of the far-left demonstrators themselves and their media sympathizers. . . . Tea Party is peaceful and wants to work within the system and not tear it up. . . . Did the media support that effort? Of course not. It demonized the Tea Party as racist and insensitive to the needs of the poor.

O’Reilly, 2011b

O’Reilly’s sentiment has not been fully supported in published research; studies have shown that at least some nonpartisan cable channels and other sources did discuss the substantive concerns of the TP, albeit along with inclusion of some marginalization frames (Boykoff & Laschever, 2011; Weaver & Scacco, 2013). Charges of liberal media bias—a common refrain in Fox coverage (Hemmer, 2016)—appeared routinely in the data and appeared to be a tool that Fox News personalities employed to critique OWS as a threat aligned with powerful out-group interests and shore up salience and legitimation of the TP.

Conclusion

To date, most research on the protest paradigm has focused on events associated with one specific end of the political spectrum and relied on content analyses of legacy media (e.g., print news outlets such as the New York Times or Washington Post). This chapter has examined coverage of two groups motivated by differing ideologies and has relied on texts from both CNN and AP as well as partisan programming from Fox News and MSNBC. The key findings address how Fox News simultaneously marginalized OWS and bolstered TP legitimacy by engaging in inverse echo framing—news coverage that (1) highlighted perceived media hypocrisy, (2) called attention to double standards in marginalization of movements, and (3) countered attempts by OWS activists and allies to cast equivalency between the two movements.

In the context of classic framing theory (Entman, 1993), iiwerse framing is a dual, dynamic process of simultaneously reducing the salience of negative ingroup cues while heightening salience of that same cue in association with outgroups. Future scholarship could consider whether this framing technique existed in other periods of history when other ideologically distinct movements simultaneously occupied the public sphere.

Further, the findings presented here are instructive for recent trends in negative partisanship in American politics, where individuals report intensively negative feelings toward the political opposition (see Abramowitz & Webster, 2016; Iyengar & Krupenkin, 2018). There is some evidence this trend may be more pronounced among ideological conservatives (Edsall, 2018). Although Fox News marginalized OWS in a manner consistent with how mainstream news outlets have historically treated protest movements, its simultaneous construction of inverse echo framing with the TP may have failed to positively legitimate the conservative cause among segments of the public. Scholars have observed that “out-group anger and contempt rather than self-directed positive affect inspire future collective action” (van Stekelenberg & Klandermans, 2013, p. 898). Whether this type of ideological coverage leads to an affective boom, but later participatory bust, merits attention in the contemporary political and media environment.

Discussion Questions

• 1. The authors point to possible inverse echo framing in news coverage outside of politics. Where else might someone come across inverse echo framing in the news?
• 2. How might standards of newsworthiness be similar and different across ideological cable news outlets?
• 3. What might be the democratic implications for how news media cover protest and social movement organizations?

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