Gendered Transformations – Theory and Practices on Gender and Media (European Communication Research and Education Association) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841503665 ISBN 13: 9781841503660

Publisher: Intellect, 2010

Synopsis

TFP brings together international researchers, students and industry professionals dedicated to promoting new research directions and to investigating the relationship between functional programming and other branches of Computer Science. This TFP volume includes some of the latest trends of functional programming, and it is an essential part of any modern programming languages library.

About this title

About the Authors

Cláudia Álvares is associate professor (ECATI) at Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias in Lisbon, Portugal.

Tonny Krijnen is assistant professor at the Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus University of Rotterdam. Her research interests lie with television (production, content and reception), morality, gender and qualitative methods.

Contact: Erasmus University Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Sofie Van Bauwel is an associate professor at the Department of Communication Studies at Ghent University and a member of the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (CIMS). Her main field of interest is gender, sexuality, media, film, television and popular culture.

Contact: Department of Communication Sciences, Research Group CIMS, Ghent University, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, Ghent 9000, Belgium.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Gendered Transformations

Theory and Practices on Gender and Media

By Tonny Krijnen, Claudia Alvares, Sofie Van Bauwel

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84150-366-0

Contents

Preface Liesbet van Zoonen, 
SECTION I: GENDERED POLITICS, 
Chapter 1: Silent Witness: News Sources, the Local Press and the Disappeared Woman Karen Ross, 
Chapter 2: Tracing Gendered (In)visibilities In the Portuguese Quality Press Claudia Alvares, 
Chapter 3: Women's Time Has Come: An Archaeology of French Female Presidential Candidates – From Arlette Laguiller (1974) to Ségolène Royal (2007) Marlène Coulomb-Gully, 
Chapter 4: Gender Analysis of Mediated Politics In Germany Margreth Luenenborg, Jutta Roeser, Tanja Maier and Kathrin Mueller, 
SECTION II: EMBODIED PERFORMATIVITIES, 
Chapter 5: Hollywood, Resistance and Transgressive Queerness: Re-reading Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), The Children's Hour (1961) and Advise & Consent (1962) Frederik Dhaenens, Daniel Biltereyst and Sofie Van Bauwel, 
Chapter 6: Political Blogging: At a Crossroads of Gender and Culture Online? Olena Goroshko and Olena Zhigalina, 
Chapter 7: XXY: Representing Intersex Begonya Enguix Grau Georgia Gaden and Delia Dumitrica, 
SECTION III: GENDERED SOCIALIZATIONS, 
Chapter 9: Reality TV's Contribution To the Gender Differentiation of Moral-Emotional Repertories Tonny Krijnen Elke Van Damme, 
Chapter 11: Media Constructions of Gender In ICT Work Martha Blomqvist and Kristina Eriksson, 
Chapter 12: Looking For Gender Equality In Journalism Sinikka Torkkola and Iiris Ruoho, 
Conclusion Claudia Alvares, Sofie van Bauwel and Tonny Krijnen, 
Index, 
Notes on Contributors, 

CHAPTER 1

Silent Witness: News Sources, the local Press and the Disappeared Woman

Karen Ross

Introduction

In a media environment in which most broadcast news items are around eight seconds long, on the grounds that this is the typical attention span of the average adult, it is perhaps unsurprising that journalists have moved away from traditional forms of political reportage towards an interpretive rather than a 'straight' reporting style. News stories have become less about what was actually said in any given parliament by a particular politician, and more about what the journalist thinks such utterances mean. While selection processes have always played a part when decisions need to be made about what should go on the front page or be included in the evening news on TV, the contemporary news media landscape has seen a real shift in both what actually counts as news and whose voice should be heard. Our contemporary fascination with celebrity means that the views of a pop star on a political issue of the day are given equal weight to those of an elected parliamentarian, all of which are then refracted through a journalistic lens which extracts the most 'entertaining' elements and puts them out as the day's news. While this analysis can be regarded as a little cynical, there is nonetheless a real problem with political news discourse in the twenty-first century given that it persistently seeks out sleaze over substance but, at the same time, continues to prefer elite voices over those of the citizen.

At the time of writing (June 2009), Britain is in political meltdown as waves of MPs resign over the 'expenses' scandal, but the voices raised in alarm about the venality of our elected members are those of journalists, not the citizens whose taxes have actually been hijacked to benefit precisely those people who are supposed to be representing 'us'. It is with this issue of news sources that this paper is concerned. I argue that the media operate a clever sleight of hand by using particular sources in particular ways to frame a story, but without appearing to have any influence whatsoever. This clever strategy is regularly employed so that across the mainstream news media at least, there appears to be a shared understanding of what the issues of the day are and how they should be understood and interpreted. The constant use of elite voices at the expense of the less media-savvy but equally valid commentators who constitute the 'public', means that hegemony is preserved, awkward questions go unasked and a particular view and perspective on the world is maintained.

A cursory glance at any newspaper demonstrates that a majority of mainstream news stories, other than editorials, round-ups and opinion pieces, routinely include either a quotation from a source or some paraphrasing of a source's words (Sundar, 2001). The use of sources is thus an extremely important part of the story's construction and orientation as well as, ultimately, the point of view being supported (see Tuchman, 1972). Crucially, in the wider context of news content and news production, questions of gender and 'class' bias have been consistently raised over recent decades, both in terms of the restricted range of story types in which women and citizens appear (Tuchman et al., 1978; European Commission, 1999; WACC, 2005), but also in relation to women's relatively subordinate positions within mainstream newsrooms (Gallagher, 1995; Meehan & Riordan, 2002; De Bruin & Ross, 2004; Mahtani, 2005). This chapter considers the ways in which gender plays out in, for example, the selection of news sources, and the use of female decision-makers, elite commentators or members of the public. The salience of gender, in terms of a journalist's propensity to use women or men as sources in their work, is also considered. I take a case-study approach by sampling three English regional newspapers whose content is interrogated using a gendered frame analysis as the primary explanatory framework. Issues of gender are often ignored in much of the research which analyses media texts, thereby eliding important differences in the ways in which gender is both performed but also marginalized. I begin by discussing the broader landscape of news discourse before moving on to consider the findings of the larger study upon which this paper draws. I then, finally, reach some tentative conclusions.

The national vs the local: The big guns and the small fry

Over recent decades, the news industry has come under considerable scrutiny and has mostly been found wanting in terms of its contribution to the public understanding of, say, politics, or even in terms of providing a balanced news diet to a hungry audience. There is a clear requirement to exercise judgement over content and voice, simply on the grounds of available space, let alone the commercial imperative to increase market share (of viewers, readers or listeners). It is precisely the mechanisms by which those decisions are made that have formed the basis of much media scholarship about the media's role in framing and agenda-setting (Entman, 1989, 2008; Bennett, 1990; Dearing & Rogers, 1996; Iyengar, 2001; McCombs, 2004). The relatively uncontroversial theory which has emerged from studies of news over recent decades suggests that the 'frames' within which stories work contain particular ideological biases which are presented to the news consumer as simple 'truth' (Eldridge, 1995; Philo, 1999; Hardt, 2004). It is precisely this pretence at neutrality which so exercises media commentators, not least because the public tends to believe that the news really is what has happened on any given day, and does not regard it as a constructed package which is entirely partial. For feminist media scholars, the persistent and almost exclusive framing of women as victims (usually of male violence), eye candy or the mother/sister/wife of a newsworthy man constitutes yet another layer of the news media onion which incorporates patriarchy within the hegemonic practices of mainstream newsworkers (Myers, 1999; Carter et al., 1998; WACC, 2005; Byerly & Ross, 2005; Ross, 2007).

However, much of the work that is focused on news discourse, framing and source selection in Western contexts is based on analyses of mainstream and, predominantly, national media. Yet, there is good reason to believe that local and regional media have a different role to play with the public and could be expected to be less constrained by the demands of 'big' news culture. One of the obvious ways in which local media differ from the nationals is in their specific local appeal, and their ability to take advantage of their very localism to engage readers with news that they really want, which includes stories which feature their neighbours, their community, their local services and, at certain times, their elected representatives. As part of this agenda, the question arises as to the extent to which citizens' voices are heard, in particular, those of the 51 per cent of the population which isn't male.

Who is invited to speak as a commentator on and in the news says vitally important things about who 'counts' in society, and whose voices have legitimacy and status. The hierarchy of news values identified by Gans (1979) 30 years ago, which made clear that some sources were more equal than others, is alive and well in the twenty-first century journalist's toolbox: citizens are simply not as equal as government spokespeople, and women are almost never as equal as men. The infatuation which journalists have with the authoritative male source means there is little room for other kinds of voices, namely those of women, minorities, the general public or challengers to the status quo. This repetitive use of the same kinds of elite voices, the same kinds of gendered perspectives, inevitably leads to a commonsense understanding of 'how things are', thereby regularizing an opinion and making it seem like fact. Even when the discordant or anti-establishment voice is allowed a brief spell in the media sun, these voices are usually the 'acceptable' face of radicalism and are unlikely to stray too far off the path of tolerable dissent. And, if Joe Public struggles to register on the journalistic radar, Joanne Public is almost entirely invisible as a citizen, although she is occasionally asked to speak in her role as mother (Stephenson, 1998; Wykes, 1998; WACC, 2005).

Rationale and methods

The study upon which this chapter is based was principally concerned with two related questions: first, are women and men differently represented as (local) newspaper sources in gross volume and status terms and by story topic? And secondly, does the sex of a journalist influence his or her selection of women and men as sources in their copy? A third interest of this paper lies in identifying the balance of 'elite' sources and those from the general public, again differentiated by gender. In order to explore these questions, I sampled three local newspapers published in the Midlands region of England: the Birmingham Post (BP), the Coventry Evening Telegraph (CET) and the Leicester Mercury (LM). I chose to analyse local rather than national newspapers precisely because the local and regional press claim greater freedom to present local stories of local interest and could thus be expected to use a wider and more diverse range of sources. Given that mainstream journalists will often suggest that they don't source women because they rarely have status authority, we might expect to see more of them used as sources in the local and regional press precisely because they do occupy status roles at a local level, and because we might expect the local press to source more 'community' voices, including those of women.

Given that the literature relating to the national press suggests that public voices are more likely to be sought out during election campaigns, the monitoring period for the case study was chosen to include the build-up to the 2005 British general election, the election campaign period itself and the period immediately after the election in order to identify if this was also the case for the local press. I monitored the press over a ten-week period, choosing one day each week for analysis, using Monday 13 March in the first week, Tuesday 21 March in the second week and so on, continuing until Friday 16 May. This amounted to a total of ten weekdays over the ten-week period. The three newspapers were selected mainly as a convenience sample since I had ready access to all three, but also because they share a broad, regional geographical boundary, serve broadly similar communities and have similar circulations in relation to population size.

As this study is interested in the generality of news stories and their sources, rather than particular types of story or particular categories of source, the first twenty stories in each newspaper were coded in terms of story type, gender of source/s, status of source/s and other variables such as the sex of the reporter. Occasionally, fewer than twenty stories were coded for an individual newspaper because news items ran out early on and were replaced by features, lifestyle or sports sections. For the purposes of this study, I only coded those items which were 'straight' news stories, including 'soft' news, but excluded news summaries, editorials, opinion pieces and letters to the editor. I also filtered out all stories which did not include at least one quoted source, and ignored those which were 'national' rather than 'local' in flavour since the study was only concerned with the local news agenda rather than repeats of national news. A total of 30 newspapers were thus monitored (three newspapers each day over ten monitoring days), a total of 538 articles analysed and 925 individual sources coded.

At this point it is perhaps worth saying a few words about the vital statistics of each of the selected newspapers. The Birmingham Post was first launched (as the Birmingham Daily Post) in 1857 and is now part of the Trinity Mirror group and has a circulation of around 13,000. It is a daily paper published Monday–Saturday and, at the time of writing (autumn 2005), has a female editor, Fiona Alexander. It styles itself as a 'thoughtful' paper — it is the only regional broadsheet in Birmingham — and claims to be more 'cerebral' than its sister paper, the Birmingham Mail: its own publicity says that it has the 'business readership' at its heart. The Coventry Evening Telegraph was founded in 1891 as Coventry's first daily newspaper and is also now a member of the Trinity Mirror Group. It has a circulation of around 58,000 and is an evening paper, published Monday–Saturday. It has an all-male editorial team (editor: Alan Kirby) and a readership profile which is split one-third, two-thirds, ABC1 and C2DE. The Leicester Mercury was first published in 1874 and is now a member of the Northcliffe group. It has a circulation of around 84,400 and is an evening paper, published Monday–Saturday. Its senior editorial team of eleven staff (editor: Nick Carter) includes two women (deputy editor and features) and its readership profile is very similar to that of the Coventry Evening Telegraph.

Findings and analysis

To start with, then, what kinds of stories make it into the local press? As we might imagine, the news agenda is very different to that of the nationals, with 'human interest' stories being far and away the most frequent story category. There was a clear clustering of story types between the three newspapers, suggesting that there is a broadly accepted 'sense' among local journalists of what a local newspaper should contain. Given that the monitoring occurred before, during and after the 2005 British general election, what is perhaps surprising about the breakdown of story categories is the relatively low number of stories that are either about politics in general (nine stories) or the general election in particular (five stories). While we would not expect the local press to be covering national political or election stories to any great extent, it would be reasonable to expect to see something about local campaigns and candidates. Yet, only the Birmingham Post had a sufficient volume of stories about the general election to make this category one of its top five most popular. The Birmingham Post certainly has the feel and style of a broadsheet newspaper, unlike the CET and the LM which are very clearly marked out as local red tops by their use of relatively short articles, the high number of unattributed items and a large number of photographs and advertisements. The Birmingham Post, on the other hand, tends to include longer articles and often covers 'national' stories, which might be one of the reasons for its more 'serious' engagement with politics. If we begin to break down the data a little more, we find that there are clear gender skews both in the status of female and male sources, but also in terms of the kinds of stories in which women and men appear.

What we see from Table 1 is that women are three times more likely to be asked to speak as members of the public than men, and they have a significant presence as education workers and spokespeople for the charitable and voluntary sectors, areas of work which are typically undertaken by women. By contrast, men are twice as likely as women to be asked to speak as representatives of business, three times more likely to speak as local councillors and nearly three times as likely to speak as police officers. But these gender-biased proclivities on the part of journalists are not a consequence of women's absence from these occupations. For example, of 68 local councillors used as sources, 60 were men (89 per cent), despite the fact that in 2004, 29 per cent of all councillors were women, an average which is more or less constant across the three regions in which the sample newspapers are published. Similarly, of 58 police officers used as sources, nine (15 per cent) were women, even though in the West Midlands Constabulary, an area which covers two of the three sample newspapers, 24 per cent of police officers are female. So, additional factors must be determining the selection of particular sources by journalists, such as a persistent choice of the usual (male) suspects, or a simple denial of women's authority to speak.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Intellect
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1841503665
• ISBN 13: 9781841503660
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192
• Editor: Tonny Krijnen, Claudia Alvares, Sofie Van Bauwel