Media assumptions about a movement shape what they subsequently find.
Evidence
Not that reporters should not have opinions and should not let their clients know what those opinions are. But it is when opinion is metamorphosed into reality that journalism suddenly becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. If you assume that the Iranian revolution was a bad thing because it employed a dramatically unfamiliar (to Western eyes) idiom of religious as well as political resistance to oppose tyranny, then what you will look for, and invariably find, is irrational frenzy. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 274
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Media-created reputations attract members who join a fictional version of a movement — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 74; Media coverage persistently equated protest property damage with police violence — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1548