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This article uses unique data to explore individual claims-making on the Terri Schiavo case. We analyze 2,509 e-mails sent to Jeb Bush and 1,182 newspaper stories about the Schiavo case to assess how mass media, claims-makers, and individual experience affect the frames and identities used to support or oppose intervention on Terri’s behalf. We find that the frames individuals use vary according to whether they support Bush’s involvement in the case. In addition, we find that the frames individuals use in their claims-making do not always mirror those discussed in mass media. Specifically, the frequency with which e-mailers discuss particular ideas varies according to the engagement of claims-makers on the issue as well as the complexity of the frame. Finally, we find that some individuals do deploy identities strategically in their e-mails. Opponents of intervention, for instance, use their political identities as Republicans to urge Bush to stay out of the case. Not all identity deployment, however, corresponds with support or opposition to Bush’s involvement on the Schiavo case. Individuals use their familial and religious identities to both support and oppose intervention. We conclude with a discussion of the relevance of these findings for understanding claims-making in the twenty-first century.

Deana Rohlinger, who is professor of Sociology at Florida State University, researches mass media, politics, and political participation in America. I really wanted to challenge readers to think about the complexity of the contemporary media system and how new media alter their interactions, expectations, and experiences for better and worse. Pretty much all of my research includes a comparative dimension so that I assess, for example, how groups mobilizing for and against legal abortion use new and old media differently over time. [Extracted from the article]

Explanations of the past both reflect and influence the way we think about the present and future. Like artists and politicians, social movements develop a “reputation” that includes a capsule history of a movement's origins, goals, and impact. Both popular narratives and scholarly treatments identify four books published in the early 1960s as having spurred important social movements and government action. This “big book myth” provides a simple origins story for social movements, a version of an “immaculate conception” notion of social change. We compare the mythic accounts of feminist, environmental, anti-poverty, and consumer movements of the 1960s to fuller histories of these movements and find consistent distortions in the common big book narratives. Mythic accounts shorten the incubation time of social movements and omit the initiating efforts of government and political organizations. The myths develop and persist because they allow interested actors to package and contain a movement's origins, explicitly suggesting that broad social dynamics replicate idealized individual conversion stories. They also allow actors to edit out complicated histories that could compromise the legitimacy of a movement or a set of policy reforms. These mythic accounts spread and persist because they simplify complicated social processes and offer analogues to the individual process of becoming active, but they may lead us to misunderstand the past and make misjudgments about collective action and social change in the future. We consider those implications and call for more research on the construction of myths about the past.

Political opportunities and threats are important to tactical choices. Yet, scholars have not examined how the political environment affects the tactical choices of social movement organizations in the media arena. In this article, I analyze how political threats and opportunities affect the media strategies and tactics of two reasonably successful and long-lived social movement organizations on opposite sides of the abortion debate, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), from 1980 to 2000. In particular, I examine how political shifts affect the tactics these groups use in response to their allies over time. I find that different social movement organizations respond to political opportunities and threats similarly. In times of political opportunity, groups remain silent on their allies' activities because silence distances their organizations from rancorous public debates and buttresses their political legitimacy. During political threats, groups cooperate with their allies in the media arena but they use public coalition work to advance their own political and media goals. Conceptually, this research broadens how we think about media tactics, which vary far more than scholars currently recognize, and deepens our understanding of coalition work and movement dynamics.