Social Movements in the Media Age:on the Changing Frames of the Anti-Bian Campaign

Of the central concern in the research is the inter-relationship between the mass media and the Anti-Bian Campaign, which was initiated in early August 2006 and went into a decline in mid-October, discussing both the way how mass media, as a core system of ideology, interact, compete, and collide with social movements in terms of the control power of public sphere, and in which aspect the two entities bear their own vulnerability as well as the effects they pose in historic process. n order to discover the courses of interaction between the protesters and the stream media, the research methods of mobilization analysis and media frame analysis are adopted to illustrate how “active” newspapers and “active” movements could have affected each other, and how the antagonism among different newspapers could have led to the current political environment. Besides, the way in which media interpret social movements is set to be the main theme to reveal how media frames shape the images of the movement and even re-build the movements with or without awareness. Based on the chronological order of the event, there are three stages: the Preparing Period, the Drama Period, and the Conflicting Period, in the attempt of clarifying the news routine and its changes during the stages, moreover, of catching readers’ attention on them.n conclusion, the major influences which media put on the movement are examined: media mobilizing, movement accelerating, movement radicalizing, and frame shifting. In addition, the “media-movement” inter-relationship also narrows down the followers’ background and contributes to “916 counter-movement” and the inertia of the political structures, particularly the ruling party DPP and the opposite party KMT. Of the theory building, the research has made an effort to combine mobilization analysis with media frame analysis to demonstrate the impact of media’s narratives upon politics and the power structure behind them. Finally, the research, while working on a local case study to put into practice, aims to depict the social circumstances in Taiwan after the first time “party-shift” by extracting and examining some essential factors. Most of all, ready to be addressed are the power, the nature, and the limit of media, as well as the risk, the temptation, and the opportunities that social movements could have in our media age.