Media, Collective Action and the Construction of Publicity: A Case Study of an Anti-incinerator Event in Panyu

Existing studies of media-movement interaction have argued that mainstream media tends to illegitimize and trivialize social movements. However, when applied to the newly emerged media-movement interactions in the context of an authoritarian regime, such argument becomes untenable. This study takes an anti-incinerator event taken place in Panyu, Guangzhou in 2009 as its foci of investigation. It examines how local media and the grassroots environmental movement cooperatively negotiated public issues with the government. The concept of publicity and two models of publicity (participatory publicity and visibility publicity) will be introduced. These two models will be used as analytical tools to understand the practice of and the interaction between the media and the movement.;Methodologically, this study adopts multiple methods to trace the process of the event and model the media-movement interaction mechanism. This research constructs the case by analyzing the media texts, together with both oral and written accounts of the journalists and the activists. Content analysis is employed to measure how the media represent the discursive struggles between local residents and local government, as well as how the media frames have evolved during the event. In-depth interviews have been conducted with 20 activists and journalists to explore their intentions, strategies and constraints. Questions were also asked about how they understand and evaluate themselves, each other and the social context.;The primary significance of this study is to explore how the notion of publicity is enriched by the dynamics of the media-movement interaction mechanism within an authoritarian context. The findings demonstrate that both parties have developed an increasingly interactive, equal and co-dependent relationship with one another. First, public discourses surrounding the movement have emerged and survived through the cooperation between journalists and activists. The media has developed diversified reporting angles covering not only environmental issues but also notions of democratic participation that challenged the suppressive official discourse. Second, during the framing process of the movement, the activists have invented an interactive media strategy that helped to break the constraints of journalistic practice within traditional media organizations. Meanwhile, they also adopted new media platforms to directly mobilize for collective action. Third, the journalists have developed a "journalistic repertoire of contention&;The above findings suggest that the notion of publicity constructed by the media-movement interaction in this study could be described as constructive and inconsistent. Against the official discourse, journalists and activists have collaborated on the discursive contention by means of the mediated event. By doing so, the previously marginalized "deviant&...