Abstract: From 
  Spreading Freedom 
  to WMD's and Back 
  Again: The Shifting 
  Frames of the War on 
  Terror, 2001 - 2006


  Draft: Damsel in 
  Distress or G.I. Jane? 
  Gender, Race, and 
  the Liberation of 
  Private Lynch 

My research agenda centers on attention: how attention gets distributed across issues to define an agenda, how attention gets distributed across frames to define an issue debate, and how attention allocation and framing affect one another and the rest of politics (e.g., opinion, policymaking, judicial decisions).  The causes, dynamics, and consequences of these dual processes are key mechanisms of political attention.  Together, these mechanisms process influential information through the political system and, by doing so, determine what problems get talked about, how they get talked about, and what gets done to solve them.  The puzzle: How these attention mechanisms work. My broad research aim is to test the influence of media attention allocation and framing on the attention allocation and framing processes in other institutional contexts, and vice versa. I describe two examples of this broader work below.

In a working project with Rebecca Glazier, we assess institutional leader-follower patterns by comparing how the President, on the one hand, and the New York Times, on the other, have each framed the war on terror.  Our initial paper, "From Spreading Freedom to WMD's and Back Again: The Shifting Frames of the War on Terror, 2001 - 2006," traces New York Times front-page coverage of the war on terror, documenting the dramatic shifts in framing over time and discussing important patterns of framing dynamics that emerge. In a second paper, "Media (Non)Conformity to Executive Framing of the War on Terror," we use the same coding scheme employed in coding the NYT articles on the war to analyze documents regarding the war from the Presidential Papers archive. We develop specific hypotheses regarding the circumstances under which the media will (and will not) adhere to the frames the President employs and we test these hypotheses using time series analysis of the parallel NYT and Presidential Papers data sets, controlling for factors such as variance in frame type, conflict duration, troop deaths, and public approval ratings.

In a paper with Holloway Sparks, entitled "Damsel in Distress or G.I. Jane?: Gender, Race, and the Liberation of Private Lynch," we demonstrate how media narratives can rely on racial and gender stereotypes to resolve social ambivalence toward important policy issues. We examine media framing during the spring 2003, when the ambush of a U.S. convoy in Iraq resulted in the capture of six U.S. soldiers, including two women: one African American (Shoshanna Johnson) and one white (Jessica Lynch). The capture of these women, and the death of a third (Native American Lori Piestewa) brought American ambivalence regarding women in combat to the fore and thus posed a potentially significant threat to home front support for the war effort. By combining the insights of intersectionality theory with work from American Politics on issue-framing, we demonstrate how the media narratives used to portray these women not only relied on gender stereotypes but were also significantly affected by race and class. We explore the discrepancies in how the media defined each of these three women (and the four male POWs), the gendered and racialized narratives that enabled these discrepancies, and the continuing impact of these narratives on public attitudes toward women in combat.