ABSTRACT
Movement activists are media junkies. “Advocates of causes,” Edelman reminds us, “are an avid audience for the political spectacle” (1988: 6). Along with other political actors, they eagerly monitor public discourse, using it along with other resources to construct meaning on issues they care about. Media discourse provides them with “weekly, daily, sometimes hourly triumphs and defeats, grounds for hope and for fear, a potpourri of happenings that mark trends and aberrations, some of them historic.”
