Mainstreaming America and media hegemony: How network television news has constructs the meanings of the industrial toxic waste movement

This dissertation examines media treatment of oppositional challenges to the power center. It investigates how NBC news covered the toxic waste movement between 1981 and 1997. This movement posed a threat to the Reagan Administration's antienvironmental stance for capital accumulation in the early 1980s. Later more radical Environmental Justice Movement, comprising primarily of people-of-color and poor working class, challenged the established economic and political order demanding a structural social change.;Theoretical insight for this study comes from the Gramscian theory of hegemony. Here, the media play crucial role in manufacturing social consent, propagating dominant worldviews and thereby sustaining the legitimacy of the establishment.;In this study, I interviewed (a) environmental journalists; (b) officials of the Environmental Protection Agency, and; (c) mainstream and oppositional environmental movement organizations to identify competing discourses of toxic waste.;Textual analysis of NBC news reveals that during the Reagan years the media defined and redefined issues of toxic waste according to the changes in the larger struggle between the administration and its adversarial groups (including the Congress and various environmental groups). When the Congress confronted the administration by conducting an investigation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the media highlighted technical procedures rather than political substance, such as close tie with business. Later when the president made a partial concession to the increasingly powerful Congress, media shifted to the "doubtful government" frame in which the activities of government were cast with suspicion and criticism. However, the media coherently focused on the failure of individual environmental officials rather than the pro-industry orientation of the administration as the cause of the toxic waste problems. When covering the Environmental Justice Movement that emerged in 1987, the media initially trivialized the Movement by highlighting its "bizarre" images. Furthermore, they consigned the environmental cause to deviance by appealing to the "law and order" frame. Subsequently as the Movement broadened its power base, the media began to selectively accept toxic waste as an issue of narrowly defined "racial discrimination." More radical discourses which attribute toxic waste to class, race and fundamental power inequity in society were, however, conspicuously absent from media framing.