Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: In this paper, I test the hypothesis that media coverage of women gradually has transformed from one focused upon women in general to one focused upon women as mothers. This hypothesis is tested through content analysis of the news coverage of women in the New York Times and the Washington Post in the presidential election years of 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004. I found that the number of references to mothers in the context of presidential elections has increased over the course of six election cycles. I also found that the number of references to women in the context of presidential elections has decreased only minimally. Instead, the quality of the discussion of women by the press has shifted notably from one focused upon their womanhood to one focused upon the motherhood of women voters. Based on these findings, I explore the implications upon our understanding of the political behavior of women and the interests of women, mothers and not.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: This paper analyzes the iconology of black female images of success, and the semiotic meaning created from the interaction of cover images, headlines, and color. As a mass circulation magazine with an economically and geographically diverse readership, Ebony is a valuable record of African American identity and class formation between 1980 and 2005.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In 1970, baseball star Curt Flood sued Major League Baseball in an effort to change the game’s free agency rules. With few exceptions, those who have written about Flood’s case agree that sportswriters of the era were overwhelmingly unsupportive of Flood. The author researched hundreds of newspapers and magazines, and has concluded that the belief that the majority of sports columnists considered Flood’s lawsuit “a traitorous undertaking,” as one author put it, is false.

Publication Type: Abstract
Abstract: Policymakers have long been interested in identifying the number of people lacking health insurance, the consequences of uninsurance for access to health care, and the potential cost of covering the uninsured. Household surveys provide the primary source of information about the uninsured, but many validation studies find some respondents misreport insurance status. Reporting errors may lead to inaccurate estimates of the number of uninsured and bias estimates of the effects of insurance on access, use, and costs. Using data from the 1996 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), we investigate what can be learned in the presence of arbitrary health insurance reporting errors about (a) the gap between the insured and uninsured in the use of health services and (b) the impact of universal insurance coverage on the use of services. We exploit information from insurance cards, policy booklets, and follow-back interviews with employers and insurance companies to construct validation data for a nonrandom portion of the sample. There are 18,851 nonelderly in the 1996 MEPS, and about two-thirds of them have evidence from at least one source validating their reported insurance status. Extending the theoretical literature on nonparametric bounds and treatment effects, we formally characterize the identification problem and assess the identifying power of a variety of verification, monotonicity, and independence assumptions. Molinari’s (2002) “missing treatments” bounds are tightened when there is information about the potential degree of reporting error within the subpopulation without validation data. For some results, we estimate rates of false negatives and false positives on a small subsample whose employers responded to the follow-back interviews and use them to extrapolate potential rates of reporting errors to the third of the sample that does not have validation data. Under a set of relatively strong nonparametric assumptions, we preliminarily estimate that coverage the uninsured would increase the proportion of the population using health care in a month by no more than 2.5 percentage points for adults (an 11% increase) and by no more than 0.8 percentage points for children (a 4.8% increase).

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In South Africa, the national broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) broadcasts television news in different languages. This paper examines and analyses differences in how two of these news services, the English and Nguni services, reported Zimbabwe during a three month period in 2004. Somewhat surprisingly, only just over half of the news broadcasts were carried on both services and even then, editing and voice over choices produced subtly or markedly different effects.
Discussions with various television producers at the SABC allow us to understand the managerial and cultural changes within the organisation that have given the different stations such a measure of autonomy. The paper concludes by suggesting that Bourdieu’s work on intellectual and professional fields might be the most rewarding way of understanding these changes.