Search

Because of a series of editorial apologies for neglecting coverage of the civil rights movement, this article examines coverage of the 1963 Birmingham campaign in five prestige dailies to explore the social construction of news and the relationship between news organizations, their subjects, and their audiences. This study considers survey data that indicated regional attitudes toward civil rights and found coverage did not always reflect the views of a paper's readers. Southern newspapers tended to discredit movement leaders and their agenda, as well as to emphasize law enforcement's preparedness, while northern and western papers were sympathetic to the movement. The study specifically considers why a midwest paper was hostile to the movement in contradiction to its readers' pro-integration attitude.

There is growing interest in the social sciences in the concept of social capital and the role it plays in facilitating collaborative and collective actions. Within political science, it is the work of Robert Putnam which has dominated social capital research. This paper argues that the 'Putnam-school' approach is lacking in two main respects. First, the role played by public authorities in the creation of social capital is neglected. Second, the implications for governance cannot simply be read off from associational activity and 'stocks' of social capital. The concept of the political opportunity structure is offered and adapted to develop a framework for social capital analysis. Original empirical material from Birmingham is drawn upon and compared to earlier studies of the city in order to support and illustrate the arguments of the paper.

The decision in Yarbrough et al. v. City of Birmingham in 1989 resulted in Birmingham, Alabama, changing its nine-member city council from at-large to district elections to preserve minority (white) representation. Implementation of this court order produced the descriptive representation it was designed to attain but did not improve citizen perceptions of the quality of representation. It produced other changes in the conduct of city politics. Council candidates altered their campaign strategies to make themselves appear more sensitive to district-level concerns. Districts do not yet seem to have stimulated either turnout or greater competition in council elections., When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Thornburg v. Gingles (478 U.S. 30, 1986) decision, single-member districts (SMDs) drawn along racial lines became the standard remedy for underrepresentation of [...]