caa a22 4500 397524455 CHVBK 20180308164641.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161202e19951101xx s 000 0 eng 10.2307/3097041 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)oxford-10.2307/3097041 Mulcahy Aogán Arizona State University Claims-Making and the Construction of Legitimacy: Press Coverage of the 1981 Northern Irish Hunger Strike [Elektronische Daten] [Aogán Mulcahy] This paper examines the media's role in the claims-making process, specifically as this relates to the construction of legitimacy. The 1981 Northern Irish hunger strike was a claims-making activity in which paramilitary prisoners sought to construct themselves as legitimate political actors rather than "terrorists.” To challenge the assumptions of the criminalization policy that characterized paramilitary organizations as terrorists who lacked popular support, the prisoners contested parliamentary elections and ultimately starved themselves to death. A qualitative content analysis of coverage of their claims in the Irish Times, the London Times, and the New York Times shows that, while the three papers offered criticisms of the criminalization policy, they did not present the prisoners' claims as legitimate. The paper concludes that local media and cultural understandings of such events may provide sufficient support to sustain these understandings, even in the presence of negative coverage in national media. © 1995 Society for the Study of Social Problems, Inc. Politics and Social Movements nationallicence Social Problems Oxford University Press 42/4(1995-11-01), 449-467 0037-7791 42:4<449 1995 42 socpro https://doi.org/10.2307/3097041 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.2307/3097041 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Mulcahy Aogán Arizona State University NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Social Problems Oxford University Press 42/4(1995-11-01), 449-467 0037-7791 42:4<449 1995 42 socpro Metadata rights reserved CC BY-NC-4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-oxford