Reporting Conventions: Journalists, Activists, and the Thorny Struggle for Political Visibility

This article draws upon 134 in-depth interviews with activists and journalists in an effort to reconcile the extensive activism taking place in the shadows of presidential campaigns with its near invisibility in the news. In his classic work, Todd Gitlin (1980) demonstrated that activists become newsworthy only by submitting to the "implicit rules of news making" (p. 3). This research supports his finding, but demonstrates that unbeknownst to activists, coverage of political outsiders is governed by a set of rules quite different from (and often diametrically opposed to) those employed in routine news-gathering. Taking cues from news creation practices that go on daily between journalists, parajournalists, and subjects, activist groups work assiduously to prepare members to fit the needs of political reporters. They bend over backwards to be media-friendly, which they perceive as professional, quotable, and credible, but ironically these studied attempts to conform to the norms of routine political reporting make them less appealing to journalists. While journalists may attend eagerly to elected officials' press conferences and official statements, they demand authenticity, particularly in the form of emotion and spontaneity, from outsiders—the very attributes activists work to erase in their media trainings. In the end, the activist groups fail to obtain coverage, not because they can't conform to the rules of news making, but because they are following the wrong rules. This article maps the contradictory sets of norms at play in the negotiation over news, and shows how they work together to create nearly insurmountable cultural boundaries for political outsiders.