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Towards a better understanding of how radical non-official sources approach media relations: The case of the British anti-war movement

Studies of how non-official challenger sources engage with the media have, for analytical reasons, often distinguished between ‘over-determined’ and ‘under-determined’ explanations of news production processes (Greenberg et al., 2006; Ryan, 1991), and furthermore have tended to assume that activists’ understandings of the workings of the media will largely shape the media relations strategies they pursue. This article, which examines how the local branches of the anti-war movement in Britain assessed and understood the workings of local newspapers, challenges the simple binarism between the ‘over-determined’ and the ‘under-determined’ to present an alternative, intermediate model that I develop here and have labelled the ‘conditional paradigm’. Activists whose understandings of the media chime with the tenets of the ‘conditional paradigm’ conceptualise the pursuit of favourable and advantageous coverage as being dependent upon: a) their own actions and pronouncements – they were, for example, aware of how unruly behaviour and extravagant rhetoric at demonstrations could often lead to negative press coverage; and b) a series of factors largely outside their control, such as the fluctuating levels of interest in their cause and the state of public opinion. The article also presents evidence to suggest that activists’ understandings of the workings of the media – and in particular whether their position could best be described as ‘over-determined’ or ‘conditional’ – bore a complex and merely loose relationship to the extent to which they prioritised their dealings with local newspapers.