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Protracted conflicts are common and complex, and differ from other types of disputes because of their ongoing escalation, non-negotiable issues, unsuccessful interventions, and passage of time. Prior research on this topic lacks good operationalizations of these features. This not only makes it difficult to compare research on how journalists and media portray such conflict but also challenging to analyze such phenomena. Hence, this study develops codes for features of protracted conflict and then applies those to the case of the news coverage (n = 148) of the 2008–2009 negotiations between the Screen Actors Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Results demonstrate the applicability of these features to describe news coverage of a labor management conflict setting, illustrate how these features vary over time and show how features are interrelated, to reveal two underlying dimensions of the particular conflict (temporal context and resolution flexibility) and possibly protracted conflicts in general.

This study examines coverage of the 2008-2009 negotiations between the Screen Actors Guild and the Alliance for Motion Picture and Television Producers, through 148 articles published in the Hollywood Reporter, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times. News coverage tended to focus on actions, strategies, and procedures; unions' actions against management, rather than management's actions against unions; intra- and inter-union conflict rather than conflict within management; and economic consequences only in a broad sense. © 2014 AEJMC.