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Garnering coverage across the political spectrum is a major challenge for burgeoning social movements. The #MeToo movement stands out due to the volume of attention it generated. Yet, it is unclear how news media across the partisan spectrum covered the movement using different sexual violence language markers, latent topic, and word choices and which accusations and events drove media attention. To examine this, we used Media Cloud to extract 17,877 news articles from nine media outlets across the political spectrum, containing specific n-grams or co-occurrences of (1) "metoo," (2) "sexual misconduct," (3) "sexual harassment," and (4) "sexual assault" from October 2017 through February 2018. The analyses first examined whether language and attention differed across the ideological news ecology and then turned to time-series modeling of these discourses to examine what drove press coverage and structural topic modeling (STM) and term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) analysis to understand latent topics and language usage. Findings reveal that (1) left-leaning media dedicated more relative attention across all topics—#MeToo, sexual misconduct, sexual harassment, and sexual assault—relative to centrist and right-leaning media. Moreover, across the right, left, and centrist media, the language markers "misconduct," "harassment," and "assault" decreased over the study period, while the mentions of #MeToo movement increased during the same period; (2) stories relating to entertainment and those accusing politicians, especially those belonging to the party in power at the Federal level, seemed to be by far the strongest driver of news media attention; and (3) we further observed partisan differences in topics of news coverage and language usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ways in which Indian folk narratives are reinterpreted and appropriated within an Indian American school context to serve as inventional resources in rhetorical texts that support the reflection upon the potential for social change. More specifically, the appropriations of the Hindu folk heroine Savitri are traced as she is transfigured within (I) a liberal feminist retelling of the tale by Madhur Jaffrey and (2) a diasporic reframing of this story as exhibiting a sort of "Girl Power" by a student at the School for Indian Languages and Cultures (SILC) through a pictorial representation that functions as a piece of visual rhetoric. It is argued that these representations are characterized by a "critical play" that treats Savitri as a hermeneutic resource for rhetorical invention in order to advance multifaceted arguments about gender roles for women in India and South Asian American contexts. This work was inspired by my observations that SILC teachers and students sometimes used storytelling practices and performances for rhetorical purposes--to address exigencies in their communities, build constituencies, to assert diasporic identities, or to articulate social concerns. This rhetorical work was evident in stories that were intended to appear "traditional," as well as those in which traditional elements were critically and eclectically transformed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the strategic and sometimes subversive appropriations of Wisconsin Folklore by citizens at the 2011 Wisconsin labor protests. These protest events critically played with the ethos of "progressive Wisconsin" and created, for a time, plural political spaces that seriously challenged mainstream discourses and allowed citizens to speak and listen to one another in the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]