Reality is Composed of a Million Little Pieces: Blogs versus Print Media (2008)
Undergraduate: Laura Oleniacz
Faculty Advisor: Jane Brown
Department: Journalism & Mass Communication
In the coverage of social protests, some media scholars have argued that traditional media suppress protests in order to retain their power over subordinate groups. In this view, media are a part of a “system of a power” that works to uphold the status quo of the white middle class through the rational, institutionalized practices of day to day journalism. In contrast, new media have been slated as an “out” for the cycle of exclusion and de-emphasis that characterizes traditional mass media, acting as a social medium. The Internet makes media accessible to all social classes, even those without the societal, economic or political force to affect traditional news media. This study looked at the coverage of two media outlets Le Monde and the Bondy blog to see if the print and blog media differed in their use of source, frame and tone in their coverage of the 2005 Parisian riots, to find out if the new media journalists were able to effectively cover the riots and the views of the protesting group. The study also aimed to discover tangible and effective ways that journalists—from print and new media—reported, wrote about and cover the protests of this minority group. The riots, a the three-week long revolt in which 9,050 vehicles were torched, 2,920 people were arrested and a curfew was set in the capital city, represented an explosion of French ideology for many and revealed the concerns of labor, leadership, discrimination of the people living in France’s largely immigrant suburbs. The riots were also a turning point of the French blogosphere, when many bloggers took to their computers to post accounts of the riots, photos and multimedia. The results conformed to the researcher’s original hypothesis, with Le Monde using more official sources and employing a more negative tone and the Bondy blog using more suburban sources and employing a more positive tone. And while the hypothesis that the Bondy blog would do more thematic reporting—seen as a way to give the riots c