NEWS AS A POLITICAL RESOURCE - MEDIA STRATEGIES AND POLITICAL IDENTITY IN THE US WOMEN MOVEMENT, 1966-1975

This paper discusses news as a political resource for social movements. Specifically, the paper elaborates a conceptualization of news as a discursive resource, and suggests a dialogical model for media-movement relationships. The paper then uses this framework to investigate the interactions with news media of U.S. women's movement groups. It describes how the two ''branches'' of the women's movement understood news differently and developed quite different and specific strategies which are called media pragmatism and media subversion. The study raises questions not only about what kind of resource news might be, and to whom it might be available, but also about the forms of Knowledge that can be distributed widely in a society saturated with media ''logics.''