Neutralizing Protest

This paper examines how US TV news on abortion-related protest forecloses possibilities for democracy and political action. Representing abortion-related activism as a battle, news segments portray activists, correspondents, and viewers as villains, witnesses, and victims in a tale of a nation decimated by civil war. While activists describe their work militaristically, the news's war is not the war that activists describe. News discourse represents activists as threatening the American family/community/nation. Applying Hannah Arendt's and Mary Douglas's work shows how the news eclipses public spheres by mapping a pollution narrative onto those who threaten myths of national homogeneity and proper citizenship. Keywords: AgonismAbortionNewsNational IdentityDemocracy Notes 1. On representation as "war," see, for example, CBS Evening News, 24 April 2004; CNN Saturday Night, 24 April 2004; CNN Live Sunday, 24 April 2004; NPR Weekend Edition Saturday, 24 April 2004; on more comprehensive agenda, see, for example, NBC Sunday Today, 24 April 2004; CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, 25 April 2004; CNN Sunday Morning, 25 April 2004. 2. David Morley, Home Territories: Media, Mobility, and Identity (London: Routledge, 2000). 3. James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 1988); Barbie Zelizer, "When Facts, Truth, and Reality Are God-Terms: On Journalism's Uneasy Place in Cultural Studies," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1 (2004): 100-19. 4. Marion Meyers, "African American Women and Violence: Gender, Race, and Class in the News," Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (2004): 95-118. 5. See, for example, Edward Jay Epstein, News from Nowhere: Television and the News (New York: Random House, 1973); Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); and Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978). 6. Daniel C. Hallin, "Network News: We Keep America on Top of the World," Watching Television: A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture, ed. Todd Gitlin (New York, Pantheon Books, 1986). 7. Jimmy L. Reeves and Richard Campbell, Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 8. Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching; William A. Gamson, Talking Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Andrew Rojecki, Silencing the Opposition: Antinuclear Movements and the Media in the Cold War (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Lauren Danner and Susan Walsh, "'Radical' Feminists and 'Bickering' Women: Backlash in U.S. Media Coverage of the United Nation's Fourth World Conference on Women," Critical Studies in Media Communication 16 (1999): 63-94. 9. See for example, Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993); Robert L. Ivie, "Evil Enemy Versus Agonistic Other: Rhetorical Constructions of Terrorism," The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 25 (2003): 181-200; Gerard A. Hauser and Amy Grim, ed., Rhetorical Democracy: Discursive Practices of Civic Engagement: Selected Papers from the 2002 Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004). 10. Ivie, "Evil Enemy Versus Agonistic Other," 187. 11. Robert L. Ivie, "Rhetorical Deliberation and Democratic Politics in the Here and Now," Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5 (2002): 277-85. 12. Morley, Home Territories. 13. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 79. 14. Lisa King, "A Politics of the Everyday: Identity and Normalizing Power," PhD dissertation, University of Illinois, 2001. 15. Arendt, The Human Condition, 57. 16. Craig Calhoun, "Plurality, Promises, and Public Spaces," Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed. Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 237. 17. Bonnie Honig, "Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity," Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995). 18. Hanna F. Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 19. For example, Arendt, The Human Condition; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitaliranism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966). 20. "Authentic" and "unique" may be misleading; despite her use of such terms, identity arises from action for Arendt. Identity is not 'given'-rather, it arises from certain kinds of practices. 21. Nancy Fraser, "Communication, Transformation and Consciousness Raising," in Calhoun and McGowan, Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, 166-75; Honig, "Toward an Agonistic Feminism." 22. For example, Faye Ginsburg, "Saving America's Souls: Operation Rescue's Crusade Against Abortion," Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance, ed. M.E. Marty and R. S. Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 557-88; David Meyer and Suzanne Staggenborg, "Movements, Countermovements and the Structure of Political Opportunity," American Journal of Sociology 101 (1996), 1647. 23. James Risen and Judy L. Thomas, Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War (New York: Basic Books, 1998). 24. Shanto Iyengar, News That Matters: Television and American Opinion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 25. For analyses of public discourses on abortion, see Celeste M. Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Faye D. Ginsburg, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); and Marsha Vanderford, "Vilification and Social Movements: A Case Study of Pro-Life and Pro-Choice Rhetoric," Quarterly Journal of Speech 75 (1989): 166-82. 26. NBC, 30 March 1991 27. NBC, 24 August 1991. 28. CBS, 6 July 1991. 29. ABC, 13 July 1991. 30. CBS, 5 August 1991. 31. NBC, 30 March 1991. 32. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 33. For example; Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Press, 1995); on banal nationalism, see Danner and Walsh, "'Radical' Feminists and 'Bickering' Women." 34. John Langer, "Truly Awful News on Television," Journalism and Popular Culture, ed. P. Dahlgren and C. Sparks (London: Sage, 1992). 35. Reeves and Campbell, Cracked Coverage. 36. Maggie J. Patterson and Megan W. Hall, "Abortion, Moral Maturity and Civic Journalism," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1999), 91-115. 37. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 38. Epstein, News From Nowhere: Television and the News; Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching; Tuchman, Making News. 39. Arendt, The Human Condition, 39. 40. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger Press, 1966). 41. Descombes quoted in Morley, Home Territories, 17. 42. David Barsamian, "Listening In: An Interview with Susan Douglas," Z Magazine 14 (January 2001): 36-42. 43. Patterson and Hall, "Abortion, Moral Maturity and Civic Journalism." Additional informationNotes on contributorsGinna Husting Ginna Husting is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boise State University

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