Love and marriage and local TV news

Abstract

ii This work is dedicated to my Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, and Questioning friends and family, especially my sister Shelly and her wife Tina, and to their simple dream of living a life free of legal and social discrimination iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Words fail to adequately describe the debt of gratitude I owe to the co-chairs of my dissertation committee, Dr. Jane Singer and Dr. Frank Durham. Their guidance, wisdom, support, and mentorship through graduate school and the dissertation process were simply v ABSTRACT In 2010 and again in 2012, a previously overlooked Iowa Supreme Court judicial retention vote, which appears periodically on the back of Iowa's November ballot, became a top political story. The catalyst for this elevated attention was the 2009 unanimous decision by the court in Varnum v. Brien that made Iowa only the third state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage. Conservatives upset over the decision launched a campaign to convince voters to do something they had never done before: vote to remove a sitting Iowa Supreme Court Justice. The effort succeeded in 2010, but failed in 2012. This dissertation looks at how local television news coverage framed the antiretention efforts, how those frames came to be included in the news coverage, and what the news framing suggested about the way social and political power were expressed in this case. This research examined two different kinds of data: television news packages and interviews. The relevant news packages came from three Iowa television stations: one in the western part of the state, one in central Iowa, and one in the eastern part of the state. These stations represented a range of Iowa television market sizes and political demographics. This research took a critical-constructionist framing approach to analyzing the data. This meant considering the way factors such as newsroom culture, professional values, and the influence of outside frame sponsors played a role in how the news was framed. It also meant considering how the power of the hegemonic heteronormative matrix was expressed in each stage of the construction of news stories, as well as expressed through the resulting news framing. The critical-constructionist analyses drew upon theoretical perspectives from the sociology of news, political science, and critical theory literatures. vi