Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Socially, economically and medically marginalized, and existing in a generally hostile legal environment in the US, the lives of transgender men and women are frequently vilified in news accounts of their murders. One study (MacKenzie and Marcel, forthcoming) found a disturbing pattern of sexualizing female transgender murder victims, blaming them for deceiving their killers, and justifying the “transgender panic defense,” successfully used by William Palmer, the killer of transwoman Chanelle Pickett in Watertown, Massachusetts in 1994 to win conviction on lesser charges and minimal jail time, despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt.
The intervention of transgender activists, who protested such coverage and formed the Transgender Day of Remembrance after the 1997 murder of transwoman Rita Hester to honor the lives of murdered transgender people, had a positive effect on the coverage of subsequent transgender murders in several news markets. This paper examines coverage of the 2001 slaying of F. C. Martinez, a 16-year-old transgender youth by Shaun Murphy. It assesses the extent to which previously established protest actions and activist interventions with journalists affected this coverage. It explores new tactics developed by activists in the Martinez case and angles of coverage which emerged from them, including recognition of Martinez’s Navajo heritage and the Navajo concept of two-spirit people as a socially-integrating understanding of the non-Navajo concept of transgender. It concludes by assessing the impact of activism and coverage from the Martinez case on reporting of the subsequent murder of transwoman Gwen Araujo, also sixteen, in California in October 2002.

Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: No other contemporary newspaper in the United States has faced such changes in its reading public as those that have confronted The Miami Herald during the past five decades. In 1960, Hispanics were only 5 percent of Dade County�s population. By the year 2000, they accounted for 57.3 percent of the population, and Cubans remaining a slight majority over other Latino groups. And as the Hispanic population within the United States continues to grow, Miami represents an important case study for understanding how forces working externally and internally to news organizations�sweeping demographic change, shifts in political power, transformations in media economics and organizational restructuring, among other hypothesized variables�can affect content. How has The Herald chosen to interpret the issues for its dramatically metamorphosing publics? How has this coverage changed over time, in terms of trends and patterns? What were the critical moments for content change? Superficially, one would expect coverage of issues of import to the nascent Cuban-American community to increase, as that group swelled both in terms of numbers and political power. But the nuances of such change deserve careful examination, something not the subject of previous scholarly research. What was happening within the organization, at the same time massive changes were occurring in the greater Miami area? This paper presents a content analysis of Herald coverage of Cuba, Cubans, and issues of import to the Cuban community, from 1959-2007 in order to present an instance of institutional and organizational transformation that can serve in comparison as other communities continue to experience change.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper is Chapter 7 of a projected ten-chapter biography of U.S. Senator Mel Martinez (R.-Florida), tentatively titled Immigrant Prince: Mel Martinez and the American Dream. Elected to the Senate in 2004, Martinez is the nation�s first Cuban-American senator and the only naturalized citizen in the U.S. Senate. In 2000, President Bush named him Secretary of Housing & Urban Development. Only two years earlier, this former Democrat won his first election to public office, becoming mayor of Orange County, Florida. In their many campaign appearances together, President Bush frequently described his Cabinet secretary as proof that the American Dream worked, telling how Martinez escaped from Castro�s Cuba, alone at age 15, on the Pedro Pan program, a CIA-funded, Catholic Church-run initiative that spirited teenage boys and girls out of Castro�s Cuba in the early 1960s. This chapter shows the value of a historical approach to political science, more specifically, of interview-based biographical research, for demonstrating the link between people and policy. A subsequent chapter explores Sen. Martinez�s leadership role in congressional action on immigration reform.