scholarly journals Protecting Teachers or Protecting Children? Media Representations of Vergara v. California

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 163
Author(s):  
Jeanne M. Powers ◽  
Kathryn P. Chapman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
News Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
State Courts ◽  
Media Content Analysis ◽  
Political Spectacle ◽  
Print News ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
State Statutes

Over the past five years, the laws governing teachers’ employment have been at the center of legal and political conflicts in state courts and elections across the United States.  Vergara v. California challenged five California state statutes that provide employment protections for teachers.  Drawing on the theory of political spectacle, we conducted a media content analysis of 42 print news media articles published prior to the court’s decision in June 2014.  Two aspects of political spectacle, the use of metaphor and the illusion of rationality were the most salient and deployed in ways that were more closely aligned with the student plaintiffs’ claims than the statutes’ defenders.  We conclude by highlighting how the framing of these and other similar stories may shape subsequent debates about public education in the United States.

Poor Kids versus Bad Teachers: Vergara v. California and the Social Construction of Teachers

2021 ◽  
Vol 123 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Jeanne M. Powers ◽  
Kathryn P. Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Spectacle ◽  
The Public ◽  
Print News ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
The Social

Background In the past decade, the laws governing teachers’ employment have been at the center of legal and political conflicts across the United States. Vergara v. California challenged five California state statutes that provide employment protections for teachers. In June 2014, a California lower court declared the statutes unconstitutional because they exposed students to “grossly ineffective teachers.” Purpose The purpose of the article is to document and analyze how Vergara was presented in the print news media. It is important to understand how the print news media presents education policy debates to the public, because the print news media shapes the general public's understanding of education and other public policy debates by providing frames and themes for interpreting the issues in question and people associated with them. Research Design Using the social construction of target populations and political spectacle as conceptual lenses, we conducted a content analysis of print news media articles on the Vergara case published between June 2012 and November 2014. We provide a descriptive overview of the full corpus of articles published during this period and a thematic analysis of the 65 unique news articles published in the aftermath of the decision. The latter focuses on news articles because they are intended to provide more objective coverage of the case than opinions or editorials. Findings In the print news media coverage, the word “teacher” was often paired with a negative qualifier, which suggests that Vergara was an effort to change the relatively advantaged social construction of teachers. Similarly, metaphors and the illusion of rationality associated with political spectacle were used in ways that bolstered the plaintiffs’ claims. While Vergara consumed a substantial amount of philanthropic and public dollars, ultimately it did not change the policies that govern teachers’ employment in California. Vergara may have been more successful in shaping the general public's perceptions of teachers and the conditions of teachers’ employment in the period following the trial.

Capturing Cruelty

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shannon T. Grugan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
General Public ◽  
Companion Animals ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Print News ◽  
Nonhuman Animals

AbstractThe news media has long been identified as one of the primary sources for factual crime information for the general public, but not much is known about media coverage of cruelty against nonhuman animals, specifically. This study is a content analysis of media-presented themes in 240 print news articles that reported incidents of cruelty against companion animals in the United States in 2013. Seven thematic presentations of cruelty are identified and include: neutrality, condemnation, sympathy for the animal, drama, advocacy, humor, and sympathy for the offender. These themes are not mutually exclusive, with many articles including aspects of more than one theme. Themes are discussed in detail in regard to expanding the understanding of how specific forms of crime are presented by the news media based in news-making criminology.

scholarly journals Analysis of print news media framing of ketamine treatment in the United States and Canada from 2000 to 2015

PLoS ONE ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. e0173202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melvyn W. B. Zhang ◽  
Ying X. Hong ◽  
Syeda F. Husain ◽  
Keith M. Harris ◽  
Roger C. M. Ho
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Framing ◽  
The United States ◽  
Print News

scholarly journals Writing in the Margins: Mainstream News Media Representations of Transgenderism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J Billard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
News Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Newspaper Coverage ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Daily Newspapers ◽  
Do So

This study examines representations of transgender individuals and identity in mainstream American newspapers in an effort to understand the extent to which the transgender community is legitimized or delegitimized by news media. To do so, 200 articles from 13 of the 25 most circulated daily newspapers in the United States were coded for the presence or absence of Legitimacy Indicators. The study finds that mainstream newspaper coverage of the transgender community is extremely limited. What coverage existed, however, contains a significant amount of delegitimizing language, which it is argued will detrimentally impact both the projected legitimacy of transgender claims in the political arena and public perceptions of the transgender community.

It’s Not About the Game: Don Imus, Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Media

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Cooky ◽  
Faye L. Wachs ◽  
Michael Messner ◽  
Shari L. Dworkin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
News Media ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
The United States ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Media Frames ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Print News ◽  
Women's Participation

Using intersectionality and hegemony theory, we critically analyze mainstream print news media’s response to Don Imus’ exchange on the 2007 NCAA women’s basketball championship game. Content and textual analysis reveals the following media frames: “invisibility and silence”; “controlling images versus women’s self-definitions”; and, “outside the frame: social issues in sport and society.” The paper situates these media frames within a broader societal context wherein 1) women’s sports are silenced, trivialized and sexualized, 2) media representations of African-American women in the U. S. have historically reproduced racism and sexism, and 3) race and class relations differentially shape dominant understandings of African-American women’s participation in sport. We conclude that news media reproduced monolithic understandings of social inequality, which lacked insight into the intersecting nature of oppression for women, both in sport and in the United States.

Representations of Foreign versus (Asian) American Identity in a Mass-Shooting Case

2012 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angie Chuang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Asian American ◽  
News Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Immigrant Services ◽  
Mass Shooting ◽  
Asian American Identity

Scholarship on media representations of Asian minority identity has established that historic constructions of the Other perpetuate a conflation of ethnic with foreign. Previous studies of Seung-Hui Cho and the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings concluded that though Cho was a South Korean national, news media overemphasized his foreign identity, despite his living in the United States most of his life. This study examines newspaper coverage of the 2009 mass shooting at an immigrant-services center in Binghamton, New York, and of perpetrator Jiverly Wong, who immigrated from Vietnam, had lived in the United States for two decades, and was a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Recent Police Killings in the United States: A Three-City Comparison

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela S. Lee ◽  
Ronald Weitzer ◽  
Daniel E. Martínez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Police Misconduct ◽  
Specific Content ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Media

Recent police killings of citizens in the United States have attracted massive coverage in the media, large-scale public protests, and demands for reform of police departments throughout the country. This study is based on a content analysis of newspaper coverage of recent high-profile incidents that resulted in a citizen’s death in Ferguson, North Charleston, and Baltimore. We identify both incident-specific content as well as more general patterns that transcend the three cases. News media coverage of similar incidents in past decades tended to be episodic and favored the police perspective. Our findings point to some important departures from this paradigm. Reporting in our three cases was more likely to draw connections between discrete incidents, to attach blame to the police, and to raise questions about the systemic causes of police misconduct. These findings may be corroborated in future studies of news media representations of high-profile policing incidents elsewhere.

Towards a redefinition of the role of the court interpreter

Interpreting ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly Mikkelson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jury Trial ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
State Statutes

Various federal and state statutes in the United States define the role of the court interpreter with clear and unequivocal rules. This definition is based on the underlying principles of the U.S. legal system, which is derived from the Anglo-Saxon common-law tradition. Consequently, the distinctive features of that system, including the jury trial and the concept of adversarial proceedings, make the function of the court interpreter quite different from that of his/her counterparts in other countries. In recent years, the judiciary has made an effort to enhance the public's access to the justice system, but at the same time, the latest wave of immigration comprises individuals from societies in which cultural norms differ greatly from those of the United States. Moreover, many of these immigrants have received little or no formal education. As a result, judiciary interpreters feel somewhat constrained by the rules that govern their profession when they strive to bridge the cultural and linguistic gap. This paper reexamines the function of the court interpreter in light of these circumstances and an analysis of prevailing practices in other countries, and proposes a new approach to the interpreter's role.

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