Framing Family Planning

Given the population explosion and high rate of maternal and infant mortality prevalent in many developing countries, family planning has been promoted as method of controlling the population growth and stemming the occurrence of these birth-related deaths with the mass media as the major campaign tools. This study examined the coverage of family planning-related news in selected Nigerian online newspapers from September 2017 to April 2019, measuring the presence of eight news frames. A quantitative content analysis of the stories revealed that family planning news frequently fell within the attribution of responsibility frame and solution frame. However, it was observed that not enough media attention was given to address misconceptions about family planning, and stories prompting readers to take action on family planning significantly outnumber stories that provided help-seeking information necessary to take such actions. The results provide important insights of how family planning news is reported in Nigerian newspapers.

Does The Betting Industry Price Gender? Evidence from Professional Tennis

This research addresses the importance of gender in the pricing process of the sports betting industry. Specifically, we investigate the impact of gender in the prices that bookmakers offer for tennis matches. Despite widespread evidence of gender bias both in the practice of the sport and its media coverage, tennis is one of the sports that has done most to achieve equality. The analysis of 51,881 tennis matches reveals that betting firms quote higher prices for women's matches than for men's, even when considering uncertainty due to the surprise factor and the media attention. The separate analysis of two bookmakers strengthens the evidence for the role of media attention as a source of gender-related information asymmetry.

COVID-19 surveillance in Israeli press: Spatiality, mobility, and control

In March 2020, Israel passed emergency regulations authorizing its internal security agency to track citizens’ mobile phone geolocations in order to tackle the spread of COVID-19. This unprecedented surveillance enterprise attracted extensive media attention and sparked a vigorous public debate regarding technology and democratic values such as privacy, mobility, and control. This article examines press coverage of Israel’s surveillance of its citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic by four leading news sites to identify and map the frames that informed their reports. Based on a thematic analysis, our findings point to supportive and critical constructions of mobile phone location-tracking and organize them within two scapes: personal; and international. These attest to the collective imagining of intimacies and public life, respectively. We draw on the case study to articulate mobile phones as devices that reduce movement into manageable mapped information and individuals into controllable data. Mobile phone location-tracking during the COVID-19 pandemic is understood as turning mobility into order and control.

Protesters at the news gates: An experimental study of journalists’ news judgment of protest events

Media attention is a key political resource for protesters. This implies that journalists are a crucial audience to which protesters seek to appeal. We study to what extent features of protest, of journalists, and of news organizations affect journalists’ news judgment. We exposed 78 Spanish journalists to vignettes of asylum seeker protests. Four features were systematically manipulated: protesters’ worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (WUNC). The experiments scrutinize the extent to which journalists consider a protest newsworthy (presence) and the likelihood that a protest is featured on a newspaper’s front page (prominence). Our results show that in terms of media presence, high turnout is key. Highly unified protesters, in contrast, are considered less newsworthy. Regarding prominence, strongly committed demonstrators more easily make it to the frontpage. Individual characteristics of journalists have no direct effect on news judgment. Journalists’ editorial status and ideological (outlet) placement only moderate the effect of some of the protest features, although in terms of front-page placement a more potent adversary versus ally effect is distinguished.

Women’s Cricket in India

Raadhika Gupta’s essay steps into cricket deploying a gender lens locating women’s cricket squarely within the larger, ‘masculine’ world of cricket where it essays a disruptive path. Despite occupying an outsider status, several factors have pushed for women’s inclusion within cricket, with implications of such changing gender dynamics within the sport for gender equality in the wider field of sport and society. The possibilities of transcending exclusion is suggested through early training, local support, more match opportunities, common governing and similar compensation structures, and media attention. These and other societal forces can act as a strong equalizer in social relations.

A 500,000-Person Experiment Evaluating the Impact of Geographically-Targeted, High-Payoff Vaccine Lotteries

Lotteries have been shown to motivate behavior change in many settings. However, the value of large-scale, geographically-targeted lotteries as a policy tool for changing the behaviors of entire populations is a matter of heated debate. In mid-2021, we implemented a pre-registered, city-wide experiment in Philadelphia to test the effects of three, high-payoff (up to $50,000) geographically-targeted lotteries designed to motivate adult residents of Philadelphia to get vaccinated against COVID-19. All Philadelphia residents ages 18 and older were eligible for inclusion in each drawing but, if selected, could not accept a prize unless they had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. In each drawing, residents of a randomly selected “treatment” zip code received half of the 12 lottery prizes (boosting their chances of a win to 50-100x those of other Philadelphians). This experimental design makes possible a causal estimate of the impact of vastly increasing people’s odds of winning a vaccine lottery. We estimate that the first treated zip code, which drew considerable media attention, may have experienced a small bump in vaccinations compared to control zip codes: vaccinations rose by an estimated 61 per 100,000 people (an 11% increase). Pooling results from all three zip codes treated over the course of our six-week experiment, however, we do not detect any overall benefits. This unsustained effect may be because media attention waned, salience of the lottery declined, or attitudes about vaccination became increasingly entrenched over time. Further, our 95% confidence interval provides an upper bound on the overall benefits of treatment in our study of 9%. Given that lotteries of this scale cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement, the lack of a substantial benefit from this experiment strengthens the policy case for other, more impactful ways to encourage health behavior change.