Media-Movement Relations in the Anti-Austerity Movement in Portugal and Their Consequences

The anti-austerity movement in Portugal has two major advantages with regard to communication of aims and images compared to many earlier social movements in Portugal. 1) Skilled activists: most groups of the anti-austerity movement had one or more activists with a formation in design, public communication, film-making or other professions related to external communication. Thus, most of the communication is highly professionalized. 2) Personal contacts to the mainstream media: As Portugal is a small country, individual contacts and personal overlapping between journalists and activists is more likely. Moreover, many journalists were affected by the crisis and open to the movements´ claims. But are these advantages really that powerful? Recent studies show that highly professionalized information might backfire on social movements because they are expected to be less professional and more spontaneous and emotional. With regard to journalists we might put into question the impact of the rather precarious or jobless journalists that were closer to the activist groups and keep in mind that a large part of those journalists actually reporting about the movements were conservative non-activists in secure job positions. In this paper we analyse the interplay between web based movement communication and communication by the mass media with focus on if and how these apparent advantages in communication impacted mass media communication and social movement practices in the interaction with the mass media. Our paper is based on interviews and participant observation of activists groups between 2011 and 2013, on the analysis of web based communications and traditional mass media analysis (protest event and claims analysis of the years 2010 to 2015).