Framing Processes and the Celtic Television Campaigns

Abstract

Speakers of Welsh, Irish and Scots Gaelic have expressed a demand for television services in their respective languages since the mid-sixties. This demand however, has manifested itself in very different forms in each linguistic community. In this article, frame alignment, the newest strand of social movement analysis developed by advocates of resource mobilization, is used to account for these differences. The tactical repertoires which the collective actors established to achieve their demands are compared and the frames which each campaign group drew on to contextualize their campaigns are examined. The analysis suggests is that a similarity in the framing process can help to account for the congruence in tactics between the Welsh and Irish campaign groups in the early stages of the Irish campaign.