alright, so i bothered to look up the david shor article:
I show empirically that disruption seeds mainstream news agendas and that tactics influence the types of issue frames adopted by media.
Protests are typically contentious events in which media have considerable latitude to emphasize a range of interpretations (Davenport 2009). For example, both nonviolent and violent protests often involved illegal acts that could be described in terms that suggest either civil disobedience or criminal behavior. Similarly, no bright line distinguishes nonviolent and violent disturbances. Many nonviolent events were suffused with violence initiated by police and white civilians, while many events that escalated to protester-initiated violence often began as relatively peaceful, nonviolent affairs. This ambiguity allows for reporting to vary even for factually similar situations. Framing theory suggests that as journalists compose news stories, they rely on recurring organizing ideas and themes that structure how the public makes sense of a story and, often, imply particular public policies
Around the world, subordinate group activists confront powerful dominant groups and face difficult choices about whether and how to assert their interests. Strategies like nonviolent disruption can grow sympathetic coalitions but may also result in humiliation, injury and death at the hands of police, soldiers and vigilantes. More nationalist-oriented strategies like responding to police violence in- kind can directly counter repression and capture the attention of elites but risk alienating potential allies and provoking even greater social control. In the 1960s, African American activists and thinkers deliberated over both strategies. Ella Baker (2003) and Bayard Rustin (1965) helped organize nonviolent civil disobedience while Malcolm X argued, “I don’t even call it violence when it’s self- defense, I call it intelligence” (1969, 313). A substantial body of work in political science suggests we should expect no meaningful political consequences to follow subordinate group agitation. The results of this article suggest that statistical minorities in stratified democracies can overcome structural biases to influence and frame the news, direct elite discourse, sway public opinion and win at the ballot box. For subordinate groups in democratic polities, though, tactics matter. An “eye for an eye” in response to violent repression may be moral, but this research suggests it may not be strategic.
so it seems like it anticipates some of robinson’s complaints, but doesn’t really have an answer for them. what the technocrolibs are forgetting here is that robinsons point is that the decision on the part of the media to frame riots in a certain way is a morally negligent one and should be countered. which itself might be dumb and a bad use of resources, but it’s not an indictment against statistical research. the criticisms seem to be zeroing in on the choice to label it “bad science” rather than the normative upshot of the passage. it might still be “bad science”, whether for all the normal reasons you’d expect something to be bad science (data manipulation/selection, invalid inferences; none of which any of the interlocutors has bothered to follow up on)
or because ‘science’ in this domain has a certain irreducible normative element that shor neglected to account for (the argument here would be one of robinson having a thick vs the voxers having a thin understanding of what knowledge production in the social sciences is supposed to be).
again, these people are prob just talking past each other
