Occupy Wall Street in alternative and mainstream media : A comparative analysis of the social movement’s framing in the media

Abstract: The thesis provides an analysis of the different ways the Occupy Wall Street was presented by OccupyWallSt.org ( the movement’s own media source), and The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today from July 2011 up to the end of June 2012. This was done by using Entman’ theory of media framing together with Castells’ network theory of power. The former provided a way of addressing the different types of frames that mainstream media utilize, while the latter offered an understanding of how power is built through the media processes. Additionally, Castells’ theory described another type of media frame which is mostly used by alternative media, the counter frame, which could successfully be applied to study the content that the social movement decided to provide about itself.The study first employs a quantitative approach by using Crawdad, a centering resonance analysis (CRA) software. This provides a reliable pool of data that was then analyzed by using the above theories. Additionally, in order to check the reliability of the qualitative conclusions, a statistical test was done for the overall top centers resulting from the CRA.