ABSTRACT
News outlets often frame social movements as outside the political and social mainstream. The emergence of the liberal-leaning Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests in 2011 dovetailed with conservative-leaning Tea Party (TP) may have complicated the simultaneous cable news coverage of the movements. This chapter examines how nightly cable news programming compared and contrasted these movements in coverage. It employs both quantitative content analysis of cross-cable news coverage and qualitative semantic network analysis of the key themes emanating from coverage on Fox News in particular. The findings highlight how conservative media legitimation of the TP was based on classic protest paradigm delegitimation frames toward OWS and introduces the concept of inverse echo framing to describe how this was accomplished.
