Women politicians in the UK press: not seen and not heard?

This article asks questions about the ways in which female politicians are depicted in press coverage. Previous research has explored the ways in which female politicians are constructed as “other” from the male politician norm, where “men were taken to stand for the whole human population.” Other work has shown that coverage emphasises their appearance or femininity. However, there has been less research on the visibility of women in politics in our media: women not only need to be involved in politics, they need to be seen to be doing political work. Through a content analysis of British press coverage using samples from the last twenty years, we examine the relative visibility of women MPs compared to men, the extent to which their voice is heard, and the context of the coverage. We argue this may well contribute to deterring women from taking part in parliamentary politics.     

The Politician,The Wife,The Citizen,and her Newspaper

Recent dramatic rises in the number of women elected to British parliaments have renewed critical interest in the significance of gender, and ways of theorising and researching women's political representation. However, the central role played by the media in contemporary politics is often neglected in feminist political scholarship. At the same time, the spaces occupied by women in political news journalism and the body politic remain under-explored by media theorists. This article argues that if we are to fully understand the politics of representation and what fairer representation for women might mean, we need to address these neglected dimensions. To make the case, I present an analysis of press coverage of the 1997 British General Election campaign. This seeks to draw together conventionally disparate strands of feminist, political and media theorising in order to highlight the gendered politics of newspaper imag(in)ing, storytelling, and commentary. Improving women's presence in media(ted) political discourse, I conclude, might be one means of strengthening women's symbolic and substantive representation.     

“Dynamic Infertility”

Critical content analysis of eight years' of newspaper coverage of advanced reproductive technologies in Israel demonstrates that the public debate over assisted reproduction is largely characterized by personal narratives that accentuate, on the surface, a discourse of individualism. However, this study claims that beneath the surface, these women's “personal dreams,” are in fact realization of the “national dream” that promotes particular social values and demographic goals. The news coverage was found to promote a process we name “dynamic infertility,” in which women are encouraged not to accept physiological infertility but rather undergo as many fertility treatments as necessary, for as long as it takes, ultimately to bring their genetically related children into the world.     

Public to private and back again: the role of politicians’ wives in British election campaign coverage

The wives of politicians are a longstanding feature of electoral campaign coverage in the UK, and yet until now there has been no systematic study examining their role and mediated representation in political reporting. By drawing upon a sample of 630 newspaper items from five daily newspapers, this article will demonstrate that between 1918 and 2010 the representation of political wives has changed in three main ways. Firstly, their role in the campaign process changed from focusing more on their political function as active campaigners, to becoming more focused on their private lives. Secondly, the coverage has narrowed from focusing on a broad range of politicians’ wives, to being centred almost entirely on the spouses of political party leaders. The final change is that the press reportage of politicians’ spouses has become increasingly negative and critical of their presence on the campaign trail.     

“Flawed Vessels”

The 2008 election was a watershed year in presidential politics, with two prominent women, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, drawing national media attention to gendered themes during the election. This study investigates whether/how the media connected these historic female candidacies to feminism by evaluating the national news media's framing of feminism during the election. Using qualitative media discourse analysis, we analyze how discussions of these two prominent female candidates, as well as Barack Obama, were linked to framing of feminism in the news media. During the 2008 presidential election, the media recast evaluations of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin into a discussion of the status of modern feminism. The news media framed the movement as fractured, highlighting existing conflicts within the feminist movement, while legitimizing post-feminism and choice feminism through the perspectives of the Obama and Palin nominations. The news media also trivialized the movement by emphasizing style over substance in their assessments of whether candidates were (or were not) feminists. The results suggest feminist movement actors and goals may not substantially benefit from greater media attention prompted by increasing numbers of female candidates.     

Media Capital or Media Deficit?

This paper will focus primarily on how women in leadership roles are represented in the media using a feminist critical discourse approach (FCDA). There is a tendency amongst some feminist media analysts to homogenise all media as sexist, but contradictory tendencies are evident, especially with the rise of new media platforms. On the one hand, the news value of “unexpectedness” affords women in prominent leadership roles relatively high media capital. On the other hand, even ostensibly positive coverage can help to reinforce the limited and limiting perceptions of women that circulate in the mediatised public sphere. For instance, the hybridised gendered interactional and rhetorical styles favoured by many women in public sphere roles have led to them being evaluated as inauthentic by mainstream media institutions. This paper will investigate these contradictory tendencies through a focus on case study evidence of dominant media constructions of British, Irish, and US female political leaders. The paper will conclude by considering briefly the use of Twitter, blogs, and other new media platforms by high profile women in politics in order to bypass the persistent interpretative control exercised by some mainstream media institutions.     

Framing the Problem of Sex Trafficking

News media play an important role in explaining the issue of sex trafficking and may influence discourse among the public and policymakers. Understanding the ways that mass media address sex trafficking has implications for the news industry and the global status of women. This study, a quantitative content analysis, analyzed news coverage of sex trafficking in major US newspapers to understand how the issue was framed during a year of coverage. Using Entman's typology to classify the function of frames, the study focused on how news coverage defined the problem of sex trafficking and identified the remedy. The study found that news coverage of trafficking was overwhelmingly framed as a crime issue (episodic not thematic) and proposed no remedies. Most news coverage favored official sources. Survivors of trafficking and their advocates were the least heard-from sources. The authors argue ultimately that if media are to fulfill their watchdog role where trafficking is concerned, a wider range of news frames and sources is needed.     

From first daughter to first lady to first woman president: Park Geun-Hye’s path to the South Korean presidency

This paper examines the role of gender and familial ties in Park Geun-Hye’s political trajectory to become the first female president of South Korea. Even though her entry into politics was heavily indebted to her kinship ties to her father Park Jung-Hee, an authoritarian leader who led South Korea from 1963 to 1979, she has consolidated her position within the party and among Korean voters as a viable, competent politician over the last fifteen years. Analyzing Korean news reports, campaign pamphlets, and her autobiography, this study reveals that Park used stereotypes of women as problem solvers in difficult times to open doors for her political entry. During the presidential campaign in 2012, Park was adept at stressing her positive “feminine” traits, overcoming the perceived weaknesses of female politicians by emphasizing her long political credentials and strengths in diplomacy and national security issues. Park presented herself as the embodiment of both change and experience through her campaign slogan “the well-prepared female president” and the public reacted favorably to the appeal.     

The Discursive Construction of Women Politicians in the European Press

The appointment of the first majority female government in Spain generated a significant amount of coverage in newspapers across Europe, synthesising the multi-faceted debate about the relationship between gender and political leadership. Through the combination of qualitative thematic and quantitative content analysis, this article examines the construction of women politicians across different European nations. By analysing the coverage of the issue in the main newspapers of four European countries (France, Italy, Spain and the UK) in the two weeks after the new Spanish cabinet was appointed, this article explores the values and ideal roles the media assign to female politicians. The article is based on the premise that mediated representations of female politicians can tell us important things about the relations between gender, power and politics. Such representations embody a set of assumptions about how successful women should look, behave and speak, and thus implicitly express judgments on models of femininity. Ultimately, such representations construct heroines and villains that inform our conceptions of women's political participation, thereby encouraging some forms of gendered political discourse and discouraging others. Our research found that while certain discourses celebrate women ministers for their (symbolic) emancipatory value, others judge them by their physical appearance or their performance as wives, mothers, and mothers-to-be.     

Scene of the Crime

The brutal gang rape and murder of a young woman on a New Delhi bus became a media spectacle, flooding the news stream worldwide with articles, commentaries, blogs, and images. Drawing on theoretical insights from transnational feminism and social geography, this analysis focuses on the mediated deployment of space and place as potent signifiers of gender and sexuality in news coverage of the event. Using feminist critical discourse analysis to interrogate the verbal and visual texts in mainstream US news media during the first two weeks of coverage, this analysis found that the American news media invoked archetypes of the Third World as a primitive and undisciplined place populated by savage males and subordinate women, a space in which women's mobility is constrained and where state authority is complicit in rendering women vulnerable to sexual assault due to its incompetence. The study found that through this limited and ethnocentric lens, the US news media reinscribed social geographies of power in terms of sex and gender. The overall tenor of the coverage obscured the incidence of sexual violence in the First World/global North, effectively countermanding transnational feminist praxis and collective action against the worldwide problem of sexual violence against women.     

Gays, lesbians, and the media: a selected bibliography.

The focus of this selected bibliography is on print, aural, and visual resources dealing with gay males, lesbians, and the mass media. Listings were selected on the basis of their perceived value to scholarly researchers and interested members of the more general public. Individual news stories, reviews of specific films or television programs, and coverage of gay males and lesbians in the theatre and arts are not included. While references to popular music were sought, only a few items were located and are included. There were two major obstacles confronted when compiling this bibliography. First, much of the media of the gay and lesbian communities in the United States is not indexed. Second, very few libraries subscribe to many of the more popular and important print resources (e.g., Advocate, Gay Community News) on the topics of focus. Even more inaccessible are regional publications and literature that focus on erotica but often include valuable items on the gay and lesbian communities as well.     

The faces of local TV news in America: youth,whiteness, and gender disparities in station publicity photos

TV news is a visual medium that requires its on-air journalists to look good, but a history of lawsuits and survey research suggests that this burden is spread unevenly. Critics charge that women are expected to look younger and sexier, and minority broadcasters are held to a White standard of beauty. This project investigated the reality behind those complaints by examining the faces of on-air journalists working for local stations in the US according to race, gender, and attractiveness. The resulting content analysis of more than 400 online publicity photos suggests that a certain look dominates for men and for women and that the range of appearance standards is wider for men than women.     

Visibility patterns of gendered ageism in the media buzz: a study of the representation of gender and age over three decades

Abstract

The mainstream media provides a constant flow of visual images of men and women, whether it is via newscasts, billboards, magazines, or television. In media research, these different media types are usually investigated separately. The aim of this study is to analyse the accumulated gender representation of all images that we passively or actively take part in, here defined as “the media buzz.” To capture the representation of gender and age in the media buzz, this study focuses on images from one day in the most circulated media within Sweden: news, feature stories, fiction, and advertising. The empirical data is drawn from three different decades—1994, 2004, and 2014. Overall, the study indicates there to be a general male/female balance in terms of numbers. However, when turning older, both men and women become almost invisible, even though older men are more visible than older women. Older persons rarely reach the news and they are more likely to be found in advertising and feature material. The work presented here suggests that the structures of visibility and the clusters of gender-age representation in the media foster stereotyping. The media buzz not only contributes to ageism, but is also still distinctly gendered.     

The Witch and the Warrior

This study used frame analysis to explore gendered frames and archetypes in the news coverage of two mass shootings, in which both suspects were White, middle-class university professors: Amy Bishop at the University of Alabama and George Zinkhan at the University of Georgia. Three people were killed in each of the shootings, but the amount of coverage on Bishop exceeded by about four times the amount of news about Zinkhan—a difference whose magnitude can hardly be explained only by the circumstances of the shootings. Although the female professor committed murder in a professional setting, due to dissatisfaction with a career outcome, the coverage focused on her personal life and alleged psychological instability, in line with the archetype of the “Female Monster.” By contrast, the coverage of Zinkhan's crime, committed in highly personal circumstances—the murder of his wife and two men at a picnic—fit a patriarchal, Othello-like archetype of a man embroiled in a crime of passion, and focused mostly on his successful career, lacking an investigation of past abusive behavior that may have preceded the murder. The news coverage serves to exemplify the societal discourse on women and men who kill.     

The effect of media sexism on women’s political ambition: evidence from a worldwide study

This paper presents results from one of the first global studies on the relationship between media sexism and the share of candidates for the lower chamber of national parliaments who are women. Data on media sexism come from the Global Media Monitoring Project, the most reliable worldwide source for media coverage from a gender perspective. The data on share of female political candidates come from the Inter-Parliamentary Union. The results show that that there is, even when controlling for the number of women in parliament, electoral system, gender quotas, level of human development, level of women’s rights, freedom from corruption, and media access, a significant relationship between media sexism—measured as (i) the share of all news subjects that are women and (ii) the share of all news subjects portrayed in the function of experts who are women—and the share of women candidates for parliament: the higher the level of media sexism, the lower the share of women candidates. The theory discussed zooms in on a bystander effect: We hypothesize that sexist portrayals of women in the media stifle ambition among women who, in a less sexist media environment, would be willing to stand as political candidates.     

Covering Clinton (2010–2015): meaning-making strategies in US magazine covers

With a trailblazing political career, Hillary Clinton has been the focus of media attention for decades. This study examines 21 US magazine covers of the former First Lady and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate from 2010 through 2015—prior to her official bid for presidency—to investigate what these depictions of Clinton say about her and the relationship between gender, power, and politics. Based on a visual discourse analysis, we found that Clinton is presented as power-hungry, emasculating, and a surreptitious politician, with these magazine covers both overtly and subtly warning citizens about her authenticity and ambition. Such coverage reinforces misogynistic representations that disadvantage female politicians.     

Determinants of Life Satisfaction Among Immigrants from Western Countries and from the FSU in Israel

This study examines the integration of immigrants via their satisfaction with life in the new country. While most studies on immigrant integration have focused on objective integration parameters such as education, occupation and salary (e.g., Borjas in Friends or strangers: the impact of immigrants on the US economy. Basic Books, New York, 1990), subjective parameters have traditionally received less attention. However, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that subjective perceptions carry considerable weight in the social-integration process of immigrants (McMichael and Manderson in Human Organ 63(1):88–99, 2004; Massey and Redstone in Soc Sci Q 87(5):954–971, 2006). The study group consists of Jewish immigrants who arrived in Israel during the past two decades from two different regions of origin: Western countries, and the Former Soviet Union (FSU). All of these immigrants are generally highly educated and skilled, but they came to Israel from different societies and contrasting motives. The objective of this study is to learn about the integration of these immigrants via their satisfaction with life in Israel and to understand the factors that explain it, taking into account the differences between the immigrant groups. The findings, based on the 2007 Ruppin representative survey data (The data for this study was obtained with the support of the Israeli Ministry of Immigrant Absorption.), point to significant differences between the two immigrant groups under discussion. Western immigrants are more satisfied with their lives in Israel than FSU immigrants and have higher scores in most of the independent variables tested. The multivariate analyses for predicting an immigrant’s life satisfaction reveal that those reporting the greatest satisfaction are women, religious, with a high standard of living, with no academic education, and stronger Israeli identity (personal and as perceived by others). In addition, different variables play a role in predicting the life satisfaction for each immigrant group. This knowledge may be of service to Israeli policymakers dealing with the immigration and integration of highly skilled immigrants in Israeli society.     

Discursive manoeuvres and hegemonic recuperations in New Zealand documentary representations of domestic violence

This article examines the production and promotion of A&;E's Rollergirls (2006), a US docu-soap featuring the Texas Roller Derby Lonestar Rollergirls (TXRD), the league that revived roller derby as a sport for female amateurs. Focusing on the representation of TXRD skaters in Rollergirls, as well as A&;E's promotional campaign for the series, this analysis is contextualized in relation to the role of female athleticism in contemporary US commercial culture. Relying on practices long used to trivialize women sports figures, Rollergirls' portrayals of TXRD skaters suggest ambivalence towards female athleticism as well as a desire to contain the gender-bent and sexually agential performances at the heart of women's roller derby. In addition to revealing the challenges television producers face in the representation of female athletes and other nonconformist women, the research offered here hopes to expand feminist television criticism beyond its conventional focus on fictional texts while also broadening feminist studies of sports media, which have centered primarily on news coverage.     

The Japanese Women's Liberation Movement and the United Red Army

This article examines how the Japanese women's liberation movement responded to the news coverage of the United Red Army Incidents in 1972. The United Red Army was considered to be Japan's most violent domestic revolutionary sect. The United Red Army's misguided use of “revolutionary violence” in 1972 was devastating for Japanese leftist radicalism. The Japanese women's liberation movement was a political formation that emerged in 1970 in the wake of the Anti-Vietnam War and student movements of the late 1960s. In contrast to how the United Red Army received condemnation from across the political spectrum, from the right to the far-left, I focus on how these activists supported and identified with the women of the URA as an expression of their feminist politics. Through my analysis of the alternative media produced by these Japanese feminists and their multi-faceted support for the women in the URA, I argue that their intervention constituted a feminist praxis of critical solidarity and provides an illuminating feminist response to political violence.     

Creating a Monster

The United States Democratic primary campaign of 2007–8 witnessed widespread misogynistic and anti-feminist portrayals of Senator Hillary Clinton across all types of media. In particular, Clinton was regularly depicted as monstrous and/or cyborgian, collapsing the boundaries between male and female, human and animal, and organism and machine. Such portrayals indicate a gender crisis in contemporary American culture which intensifies when women attempt to enter positions of power in the public arena. Research has shown that television, radio and print media coverage of American political candidates has consistently relied on gender stereotypes that undermine the campaigns of women politicians. However, portrayals of female candidates in online media remain largely unexplored. This paper discusses the implications of online media for women's political campaigns and for the democratic process itself. Through an analysis of digital imagery, I argue that simulations of Clinton circulating on the Internet during the primaries sought to produce a political reality in which Clinton's bid for the White House could be rendered improper and unnatural. In so doing, I suggest the continuing potential of online media to produce detrimental representations of female politicians.