Social Movements, Political Goals, and the May 1st Marches: Communicating Protest in Polysemic Media Environments.

On May 1st, 2006, people engaged in marches, vigils and protests across the United States. In addition to attracting significant media coverage, the actions sparked both celebration and criticism in public commentary on immigration. This paper presents a discourse analysis of 297 front pages from daily newspapers in the United States. Four key themes are identified based on our reading of movement literature leading up to the events and existing research on media coverage of political protest: numbers; economy/economics; policy/rights; and law/order. We then construct linguistic representations of these themes and use keyword in context searches across the front pages to identify general trends, as well as contextually situated analysis at the level of the phrase or clause for each theme. Finally, we draw on mediated discourse from both pro- and anti-immigrant sources, illustrating the polysemous character of language and representation in mediated political discourse. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]