Abstract
The animal rights movement is a serious challenge to current agricultural practices. Agriculture's response, in part, depends on how successfully it can mobilize its natural constituency, farmers. However, theories of the mainstream press suggest that the mainstream press generally covers events, rarely reports or adopts the perspective of alternative movements, rarely includes mobilizing information, and suggests that routine social structures can, should, and will contain the movement. Hence, current theory indicates that the mainstream press does not act to mobilize the general public. However, very little research has examined how specialized presses, such as the farm press, respond to movements. The study reported here was based on an analysis of 406 articles from ten farm magazines. The findings suggest that the farm press acted more as an advocacy press than does the mainstream press. Collectively, the farm press articles included as many positions pieces and stories explaining animal rights as an issue as they did event stories. The articles reported, and countered, the positions of the animal rights movement; suggested that routine social structures might not contain the animal rights movement; called for agriculture to mobilize; and included specific recommendations concerning how agriculture should mobilize.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aiken, William H. 1984. “Ethical Issues in Agriculture.” InEarthbound (ed.), Tom Regan. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 247–288.
Altheide, D.L. 1985. “Impact of Format and Ideology on TV News Coverage of Iran.”Journalism Quarterly 62:346–351.
—— 1974.Creating Reality: How TV News Distorts Events. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
Blain, Michael. 1989. “Power and Practice in Peace Movement Discourse.”Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change Vol. 11, 197–218.
Busch, Lawrence, and William B. Lacy. 1983.Science, Agriculture, and the Politics of Research. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Chang, Tsan-Kuo. 1988. “The News and U.S.-China Policy: Symbols in Newspapers and Documents.”Journalism Quarterly 65:320–327.
Coats, C. David. 1989.Old MacDonald's Factory Farm: The Myth of the Traditional Farm and the Shocking Truth About Animal Suffering in Today's Agribusiness. New York: Continuum.
Cohen, Stanley, and Jock Young, eds. (1981).The Manufacturing of News: Social Problems, Deviance, and the Mass Media. 2nd ed., London: Constable.
Connell, Ian. 1980. “Television News and the Social Contract.” InCulture, Media, Language, (eds.), Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis. London: Hutchinson & Co., 139–156.
Donnelley, Strachan and Kathleen Nolan. 1990. “Special Supplement: Section I. Ethical Theory and the Moral Status of Animals.”Hastings Center Report. 20:4–8.
Edelman, Murray. 1964.Politics as Symbolic Action. New York: Academic Press.
Epstein, Edward J. 1973.News from Nowhere: Television and the News. New York: Vintage Books.
Fishman, Mark. 1982. “News and Nonevents: Making the Visible Invisible.” InIndividuals in Mass Media Organizations: Creativity and Constraint Vol. 10 (eds.), James S. Ettema and D. Charles Whitney, 219–240. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
——. 1981. “Police News: Constructing an Image of Crime.”Urban Life, 9:371–394.
——. 1980.Manufacturing the News. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Gans, Herbert J. 1979.Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. New York: Vintage Books.
Gitlin, Tod. 1980.The Whole World is Watching. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Glasgow University Media Group. 1982.Really Bad News. London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative Society Ltd.
——. 1976.Bad News. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hall, Stuart. 1972. “The Determinations of News Photographs.”Working Papers in Cultural Studies 3:53–87.
Hall, Stuart, Ian Connell, and Lidia Curti. 1977. “The ‘Unity’ of Current Affairs Television.”Working Papers in Cultural Studies 9:51–94.
Hall, Stuart, Chas Chritcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. 1981. “The Social Production of Mugging: Mugging in the News.” InThe Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass Media 2nd rev. ed. (eds.), Stanley Cohen and Jock Young, London: Constable, 335–367.
Halloran, James D., Philip Elliott, and Graham Murdock. 1970.Demonstrations and Communication: A Case Study. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Herman, Edward S. 1982.The Real Terror Network. Boston: South End Press.
Herman, Edward S. and Noam Chomsky. 1988.Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books.
Jensen, Klaus B. 1987. “News as Ideology: Economic Statistics and Political Ritual in Television Network News.”Journal of Communication 37:8–27.
Lang, Kurt and Gladys E. Lang. 1968.Politics and Television. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.
McAdam, Doug, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald. 1988. “Social Movements.” InHandbook of Sociology (ed.), Neil J. Smelser. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 695–737.
Marx, Karl. 1963.The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers.
Mason, Jim and Peter Singer. 1980.Animal Factories. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.
Mencher, Melvin. 1989.Basic News Writing. 3rd ed., Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Brown Publishers.
Merrill, John C. 1987. “Good Reporting can be a Solution to Ethics Problem.”Journalism Educator 42:27–29.
Meyer, Philip. 1987.Ethical Journalism. New York: Longman.
Miliband, Ralph. 1969.The State in Capitalist Society. London: Basic Books.
Molotch, Harvey and Marilyn Lester. 1975. “Accidental News: The Great Oil Spill as Local Occurrence and National Event.”American Journal of Sociology 81:235–260.
Regan, Tom. 1983.The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Reisner, Ann. 1991. “Comparing Ethical Concerns of Agricultural and General Journalists.”Journal of Applied Communications 75:42–48.
——. 1990a. “Course Work Offered in Agricultural Communications Programs.”Journal of Applied Communications 74:18–25.
——. 1990b. “An Overview of Agricultural Communications Programs and Curricula.”Journal of Applied Communications 74:8–17.
--. 1988. Agricultural Journalists Ethics Survey. Unpublished data. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Robbins, Williams. February 25, 1986. “Surge in Sympathy for Farmer Found: Half of Public Supports Rise in U.S. Aid, Poll Indicates (Poll Finds Most Americans Cling to Ideal of Farm Life).”New York Times A1, A22.
Rubin, David M., and Constance Cummings. 1989. “Nuclear War and Its Consequences on Television News.”Journal of Communication 39:39–58.
Shoemaker, Pam. 1982. “The Perceived Legitimacy of Deviant Political Groups: Two Experiments on Media Effects.”Communication Research 9:249–286.
Sigal, Leon V. 1973.Reporters and Officials: The Organization and Politics of Newsmaking. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath.
Singer, Peter. 1990.Animal Liberation. New York: Random House.
——. 1979.Practical Ethics. London: Cambridge University Press.
Snow, David A., E. Burke Rochford, Jr., Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford. 1986. “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation.”American Sociological Review 51:464–481.
Strodthoff, Glenn G., Robert P. Hawkins, and A. Clay Schoenfeld. 1985. “Media Roles in a Social Movement: A Model of Ideology Diffusion.”Journal of Communication 35:134–153.
Thrift, Ralph R., Jr. 1977. “How Chain Ownership Affects Editorial Vigor of Newspapers.”Journalism Quarterly 54:327–331.
Tuchman, Gaye. 1978.Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. New York: The Free Press.
Walter, Gerry and Ann Reisner. 1990. “Survey Finds Critical Development Gaps in Opinion Formation and Values Clarification on Soil Conservation by Agricultural Freshmen.”NACTA Journal 34:50–53.
van Dijk, Teun A. 1988a. “Semantics of a Press Panic: The Tamil ‘Invasion.’”European Journal of Communication 3:167–187.
van Dijk, Teun. 1988b.News as Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publications.
Additional information
Ann Reisner is an assistant professor of agricultural communications and a fellow at the Program for the Study of Cultural Values and Ethics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her primary interest area is agriculture, communications, and values and she has written numerous research articles in this area. She is also co-editor of this special issue on communications.
The author wishes to thank Richard Haynes, Jeff McMahan, Gerry Walter, Suzanne Wilson and several reviewers for helpful comments on this paper. The project was partially supported by the Program for the Study of Cultural Values, The College of Agriculture Experimental Station, and a grant from the Vice-Chancellor's Office.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Reisner, A. An activist press: The farm press's coverage of the animal rights movement. Agric Hum Values 9, 38–53 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02217625
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02217625