News, Gender and Power

Stuart Allan, Gill Branston, Cynthia Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134699544
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

How do gender relations affect the practice of journalism? Despite the star status accorded to some women reporters, and the dramatic increase in the number of women working in journalism, why do men continue to occupy most senior management positions? And why do female readers, viewers and listeners remain as elusive as ever?
News, Gender and Power addresses the pressing questions of how gender shapes the forms, practice, institutions and audiences of journalism. The contributors, who include John Hartley, Pat Holland, Jenny Kitzinger and Myra Macdonald, draw on feminist theory and gender-sensitive critiques to explore media issues such as:
* ownership and control
* employment and occupation status
* the representation of women in the media
* the sexualization of news and audience research.
Within this framework the contributors explore media coverage of:
* the trial of O. J. Simpson
* British beef and the BSE scandal
* the horrific crimes of Fred and Rosemary West
* child sexual abuse and false memory syndrome
* the portrayal of women in TV documentaries such as Modern Times and Cutting Edge.

Part I THE GENDER POLITICS OF JOURNALISM

DOI: 10.4324/9780203010631-1

INTRODUCTION

DOI: 10.4324/9780203010631-2

In July 1889, a British trade newspaper published a report on the growing prominence of women reporters. It announced the ‘invasion of Fleet Street’s sanctity [by] journalistic damsels everywhere taking their place at the reporters’ table, or hurrying up to the offices about midnight with their “copy” – chiefly Society news’.¹ If, from the vantage point of today, the use of this type of language to describe the work of female newsworkers is so anachronistic as to be almost amusing, this is not to deny that many of the gendered inequalities it inadvertently identifies are still with us in the 1990s.

Neatly pinpointed in this quotation are a number of themes which inform the chapters presented in this section of the book. In the first instance, for example, there is the notion of female journalists invading the sanctity of the newsroom – today it is still a predominantly male domain of work, the dynamics of which are largely shaped by patriarchal norms, values and traditions. Recurrently it is the case, as several of the following contributions document, that women are being denied an equal place at the reporters’ table. Similarly, the pejorative connotations of the phrase journalistic damsels, echoes of which are arguably discernible in the use of quotation marks around the word copy above, highlight sexist assumptions about women’s professional capacities as journalists. These assumptions, moreover, appear to be contingent upon a hierarchical division between the ‘hard’ news (serious and important) to be covered by male journalists and, in marked contrast, the Society or ‘soft’ news (trivial and insignificant) reported by female journalists. There is little doubt, of course, which type of news is to be understood as being consistent with the ethos of Fleet Street, and which type threatens its proclaimed journalistic integrity.

It is precisely this issue of the gendering of news across a ‘hard’/’soft’ division which is addressed by Patricia Holland in her chapter, ‘The politics of the smile: “Soft news” and the sexualisation of the popular press’. She begins by pointing out that in Britain during the 1880s and 1890s, when popular newspapers first sought out a mass readership, they needed to be acceptable to women readers. Hence the newspapers became feminised with ‘soft’ as well as ‘hard’ news. This process of ‘feminisation’, she argues, was a move which aimed to boost the sales of the papers, but it also opened a more democratic, public space for the discussion of issues of concern to women. Following Rupert Murdoch’s transformation of the Sun in the 1970s, the popular tabloids became sexualised with the use of explicit sexual material. The image of the ‘Page Three’ girl became the symbol of a readership divided on sex and gender grounds. Holland contends that sexualisation came to structure news stories as well as entertainment items. The discursive use of a woman’s body, underpinning the view of the world presented by the ‘downmarket’ tabloids, makes radical, democratic content less possible. Although women continue to contest the masculine definition of the Page Three image, their public participation is called into question when a sexualised difference remains as a constant potential discipline on their actions. In this way, then, Holland seeks to problematise the democratic status of sexualised news in publications like the Sun.

Several related questions regarding the gendering of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ news typfications are taken-up by Liesbet van Zoonen in her chapter, ‘One of the girls?: The changing gender of journalism’. More specifically, she argues that journalism as a profession is undergoing important changes as the relative power of female journalists improves. At issue is the extent to which market-driven journalism both depends on and exploits topics and angles usually associated with ‘femininity’, such as ‘human interest’, emotions, audience needs and desires, and sensationalism. This type of journalism, van Zoonen suggests, seems to be more open to women and their supposedly particular journalistic rôle conceptions than ‘traditional’ news journalism. Theoretically, this means that the usual link between media professionals and media texts is turned around. That is to say, it is not the number of women or men in journalism that determines what the news looks like – as is suggested in many feminist studies on journalism – but it is the nature of the genre which allows for a masculine or feminine style of journalism. She argues that this style, in turn, is not necessarily tied to men and women, nor does it necessarily signal a feminist improvement of current newswork practices.

John Hartley’s chapter, ‘Juvenation: News, girls and power’, seeks to problematise several of the key presuppositions which tend to inform discussions about the media politics of gender. On the basis of evidence of ‘juvenation’ in the news media, he argues that power in this context is not a helpful concept, and that gender is not the site of most intense semiotic activity in the 1990s. It follows, in his view, that ‘power’ needs to be rethought in terms of readership, ‘gender’ in terms of age (juvenation), and the relations between journalism and the public as teaching. From this position, he proceeds to suggest that journalism, both broadsheet and tabloid, gathers populations into readerships, and it teaches social identities and civic proprieties, using young girls as a newly significant semiotic and political figure. It is Hartley’s contention that the news media rely on positive juvenation to appeal communicatively to their readership, but at the same time they use the figure of the young girl negatively, as a marker of the boundary between ‘Wedom’ and ‘Theydom’. While ‘the young girl’ has entered history, he argues, stories display features that treat children as a ‘virtual internal colony’.

‘Gender, privacy and publicity in “media event space”’ by Lisa McLaughlin examines several pertinent issues in relation to news coverage of the O.J. Simpson case as both a ‘mass’ phenomenon and a spectacle of particularity. Following an evaluative appraisal of Habermas’s (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, she turns to consider the recent critiques of feminist scholars attempting to document the exclusions constitutive of the normative and historical dimensions of the ‘public sphere’. In her view, coming to an understanding of the Simpson case and other contemporary mediated events requires integrating the concerns of Habermas and his feminist critics in such a way as to foreground concerns about how differences are produced, circulated and managed through the judging, selecting, ordering and framing practices of the mass media. Reconciling these two lines of critique, she contends, offers an opening for new insights into the deleterious effects of media spectacle on both privacy and publicity. McLaughlin’s analysis of the spectacular representation of domestic violence in the Simpson murder case reveals that the problem was narrowly constructed as a couple of events in the life of a woman, rather than as a profoundly gendered, ongoing form of violence against women.

A historical perspective is provided by Janet Thumim’s chapter, ‘“Mrs Knight must be balanced”: Methodological problems in researching early British television’. In focusing on the formation of the television institution in Britain, she takes us back to the period of 1955–65, the beginning of which is marked by the launch of the independent television network (ITV) as a commercial rival to the BBC. Attention first turns to three memos from the BBC archives which, she argues, resonate with questions about the early formation of the television institution and about the thorny and complex question of women and ‘the feminine’ in this period. There follows a discussion of the BBC Talks Department and the growth of news and current affairs coverage, with particular reference to the gender hierarchy apparent in this prestigious area of broadcasting. A detailed discussion of the BBC current affairs programme Panorama follows, in which she speculates on the problematics of gender politics both during this period and for today’s feminist scholar operating with the benefit of hindsight. Throughout the chapter, Thumim draws attention to the particular problems of access and of method confronting the researcher.

Myra Macdonald’s chapter, ‘Politicizing the personal: Women’s voices in British television documentaries’, examines how women’s voices are incorporated in television documentary. Of particular importance, in her view, is the need to assess the relevance to television aesthetics of feminist reworkings of the concept of ‘experience’, and the conditions these propose for successfully politicising the personal. Three modes of presenting women’s voices in documentary are identified and evaluated: the ‘confessional’, the ‘case study’ and ‘testimony’. Macdonald then proceeds to show that only the mode of ‘testimony’ actually succeeds in unsettling the conventional boundaries between the personal and the political, namely by drawing attention to the movement between the ontological and the epistemological. Testimony also undermines the traditional gendering of these terms, she argues, as well as providing a basis for challenges to the rigidity of documentary’s wariness about the legitimacy of subjectivity as evidence.

Part I of the book concludes with Stuart Allan’s chapter, ‘(En)gendering the truth politics of news discourse’. In attempting to contribute to current discussions about the gender politics of news ‘objectivity’, he highlights for exploration what may be termed, after Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘the dialogics of truth’. Allan argues that a gender-sensitive engagement with Bakhtin’s conceptual project encourages a sustained reconsideration of many of the ostensibly ‘common sensical’ precepts underpinning conventional journalistic procedures for dealing with conflicting truth-claims. To this end, a number of the rationales informing different feminist assessments of the heuristic value of Bakhtin’s writings are addressed so as to accentuate the basis for a critique of ‘monologic’ notions of truth as they inform journalistic appeals to ‘objectivity’. Allan then proceeds to elaborate a Bakhtinian approach to the news account as a gendered site of dialogic interaction, one which is inextricably caught-up in matrices of definitional power. In this way he aims to help facilitate further efforts to investigate the ideological inflection of truth in news discourse precisely as it appropriates ‘the world out there’ into an androcentric constellation of ‘impartial facts’.

Note

1. This quotation is cited in Hunter (1992: 688); additional discussions of the working practices of female journalists in the early days of the British and US news media include: Bateson 1895; Banks 1902; Beasley and Gibbons 1993; Carpenter 1946; Fry 1929; Furman 1949; Grieve 1964; Hardt and Brennen (eds) 1995; Head 1939; Henry 1993; Knight 1937; Leslie 1943; Marzolf 1977; Mills 1990; Ross 1936; Schlipp and Murphy 1983; Sebba 1994; Steiner 1992, 1997a; Steiner and Gray 1985.

1 THE POLITICS OF THE SMILE

‘Soft news' and the sexualisation of the popular press

Patricia Holland

DOI: 10.4324/9780203010631-3

‘What makes a woman smile?'

The Sun newspaper aims to make women smile. Where it has total control, in the photographs which give its pages such graphic impact, its success is, literally, spectacular. Smiling women appear on the news pages and the celebrity pages. They appear in the glamour pictures; the pictures of royalty and of television personalities; in the pictures of ordinary people whose everyday lives have brought them good fortune, and, above all, they appear on Page Three. The woman who proudly displays her breasts is almost always smiling.

The Sun gave a decisive twist to the very meaning of a popular paper when, following its purchase and re-launch by Rupert Murdoch in 1969, editor Larry Lamb set about exploiting entertainment values with unprecedented panache. He based the paper’s appeal on irreverence, scandal, ‘saucy’ humour and sex. Above all he introduced the daily image of a half clad woman. The Page Three ‘girls’, ‘those luscious lovelies you drool over at breakfast time’ (Sun 20 September 1982) became a shorthand reference for all the paper stood for.

Popular newspapers seek to amuse as much as to inform, to appeal to the emotion as much as to the intellect. The smile has been established as part of a package which continues to reach out to real women and men in an invitation to buy the paper and engage with its informal address. Increasingly over the twentieth century the aim of the popular press has been to ‘tickle the public’ with entertainment values. Matthew Engel took the title of his book on the history of the British popular press from an anonymous verse that went round Fleet Street in the nineteenth century:

Tickle the public, make ’em grin,

The more you tickle the more you’ll win.

Teach the public, you’ll never get rich,

You’ll live like a beggar and die in a ditch.

(Engel 1996: 17)

From the 1880s and 1890s, the introduction of lightweight features and all types of trivia, including the domestic, as well as a move to a ‘softer’ more ticklish type of news, has been seen as a feminisation of the new mass-circulation press, brought about by its desire for a broad appeal. In seeking out a mass audience, there was a need to recognise women as an influential segment of the potential readership, and the feminine had long been identified with the popular and accessible. But the changes i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Fulltitle Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Setting new(s) agendas: An introduction
• PART I The gender politics of journalism
• Introduction
• 1 The politics of the smile: ‘Soft news’ and the sexualisation of the popular press
• 2 One of the girls?: The changing gender of journalism
• 3 Juvenation: News, girls and power
• 4 Gender, privacy and publicity in ‘media event space’
• 5 ‘Mrs Knight must be balanced’: Methodological problems in researching early British television
• 6 Politicizing the personal: Women’s voices in British television documentaries
• 7 (En)gendering the truth politics of news discourse
• PART II The gendered realities of news
• Introduction
• 8 Newsroom accounts of power at work
• 9 Mass communication and the shaping of US feminism
• 10 ‘Mad cows and Englishmen’: Gender implications of news reporting on the British beef crisis
• 11 The gender-politics of news production: Silenced voices and false memories
• 12 Gender and the agenda: News reporting of child sexual abuse
• 13 When the ‘extraordinary’ becomes ‘ordinary’: Everyday news of sexual violence
• 14 A family affair: The British press, sex and the Wests
• 15 Crimewatch UK: Keeping women off the streets
• Bibliography
• Index