Gender, Politics, News

A Game of Three Sides

Karen Ross

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781118561645, 9781118561591
• eBook ISBN: 9781118561621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Gender, Politics, News: A Game of Three Sides explores the role of gender in the broader processes of political communication

• The only contemporary book focusing on the relationships between gender, politics, and news media which takes a global perspective
• An analysis of political journalism as a practice and the development of the field in terms of gendered workplace cultures
• Offers a solid framework for understanding women's political representation, including real world case studies of women's campaigns for the top political job across a range of different geographies and contexts
• Coverage of hot-button issues, such as political scandal and the role of new and social media in politics and elections, makes this a highly relevant and current work with resonances for a wide audience

1
Introduction

Since the beginning of time – well, since American women got the vote in 1920 – the slightest upward tick in the number of female lawmakers has inspired excited predictions that women politicians are on the verge of taking over. People always seem to think a small group of women is bigger and more influential than it is…

(Mundy 2014: n.p.)

In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman which set out a moral and philosophical argument about why women and men should enjoy the same rights. That work was a brave and foundational text whose arguments have been taken up and considerably extended by generations of feminist theorists. In it, Wollstonecraft identified the numerous ways in which sex inequality was manifest in society, naming patriarchy and sex‐based discrimination as primary culprits in a world dominated by men intent on retaining power and control. Although feminism has no single or agreed definition, it is broadly seen as an ideological and political standpoint which has the practical goal of ending discrimination against women and enabling them to take an equal place in society with men.

Much feminist/political/communication work considers politics and the media, both separately and entwined, as two of the primary terrains on which the campaign for sex‐based equality has been and continues to be fought most actively. Feminist media theory uses a nuanced language and set of analytical terms to interrogate the media and their messages. Political communication is narrowly defined here to mean how politicians communicate with the public (via mediated channels of message delivery) and how politicians and the political process more generally are represented by the media. Framing analysis has been a particularly helpful tool in interrogating news discourse for its gender bias, identifying historical and geopolitical trends through a feminist framework which seeks to understand why we get what we get. In general terms, the triple whammy of trivialization, marginalization, and commodification serves to produce political coverage which too frequently disavows the potency of women as credible political actors and undermines democracy by withholding information about them from the public during election campaigns. Of course, this is not always and everywhere the case and the last few years have seen increasing numbers of women achieve the top political job. However, many would argue this has been in spite of rather than because of mainstream news media, although the novelty argument suggests that women can sometimes attract more media playtime than men, though even here, more is not always desirable: all publicity is not always good.

Fear of women’s rule is, arguably, a key factor in understanding men’s dominance of the political stage and every time the proportion of women looks to rise even slightly – even though few Western legislatures (apart from Scandinavia) can boast more than 20 percent of women in their chambers – the knee‐jerk response is vociferous complaints about a take‐over by the monstrous regiment of women. When women unseat men as party leader, their acts are seen as treacherous rather than the cut and thrust of “normal” political maneuvering and attract widespread media attention. If a woman’s act of usurping male authority not only wins her the party leadership but also the top job, or at least puts it within her grasp, the coup takes on a ground‐breaking connotation, as happened with Helen Clark and Jenny Shipley (New Zealand), and more recently Julia Gillard (Australia). Such extraordinary events play out in the media as political melodrama, allowing metaphors of war to animate the performance of power and inveigling gender to act as proxy for emasculation, provoking male‐wails of despair. In her analysis of TV news coverage of Helen Clark’s coup, Trimble (2014) argues that she was persistently cast as a cold, heartless villain and her conspicuous and unashamed transgression of gender norms was evidence of the threat she posed to the dominant social and political order. This kind of (melo)dramatic scripting of stories involving women political leaders both highlights and reinforces normative assumptions about political power and leadership, both of which are coded as exclusively male.

In a modern democracy such as that fondly imagined to exist in the so‐called civilized West in the twenty‐first century, most journalists would suggest that they write and broadcast in the public interest, that they serve an important function in holding governments accountable and reporting on the actions of those whom we elect to serve in our name. But as news media move ever further and faster towards mere infotainment, so their ability or even interest in reporting politics in any meaningful way goes at equal velocity in the opposite direction. The rhetoric of impartiality which the news media have always insisted lies at the heart of their practice has never been as pristine as journalists have claimed, but the relationship between journalists and politicians has become increasingly complex and intertwined. Obviously, for both sets of professional actors, there is a necessary interdependence, since journalists need something to write about and politicians need to get their messages across to the public. “Sources, particularly those in government, are the lifeblood of news” (Perloff 1998: 223). The media, and television in particular, ventilate the realpolitik, with presidents and prime ministers announcing important policy decisions not in the Senate or the Commons but in the TV studio, live to camera and directly to us in our homes or on our phones. Actually, in the mid‐twenty‐teens, many are now tweeting out first.

The perpetuation of a hegemonic worldview of male dominance is regularly witnessed in both fictional and factual programming strands, and the ways in which women (particularly, but also other disadvantaged groups) are represented in the media send important messages to the public about women’s place, women’s role, and women’s lives. If it has become a commonplace to argue that news media regularly and routinely perform an affirmatory function in reinforcing dominant norms and values to the public, it still bears repeating. The sad frustration is that after more than 25 years of documenting the media’s representation of women (see also Tuchman et al. 1978; Root 1986 for an even longer timeline), I see so little change. Importantly, part of the endurance of gender stereotypes in news discourse can be related directly to the culture of newsrooms themselves, microcosmic environments which constitute sites of considerable contestation about gender and power (Steiner 1998; Gallagher 2001; de Bruin and Ross 2004). While women have penetrated media organizations to a significant degree over the past two or three decades, they have rarely managed to secure the editorship of major dailies or become CEOs of major broadcast channels.

When asked, women politicians themselves are clear that a specifically gendered news discourse does exist when journalists report on the political activities of women (Ross 2002). Aspects of their corporeal presentation, their hairstyle, their clothes, and their domestic arrangements are routinely incorporated into what should be straightforward stories on policy but where subjects are routinely framed as women first, and then, maybe, as politicians. When 101 Labour women were elected to the British Parliament in 1997, the front page headlines figured them as “Blair’s Babes.” Although some of those women have argued in retrospect that doing the “Blair picture” was perhaps unwise, they were unprepared for the media response: their considerable victory was trivialized instantly, not just by that possessive apostrophe, but through their sexualized figuring as “babes.” Women have been elected to the top political job as presidents and prime ministers, but still their abilities to lead a country are questioned, still the media ask, can she really do it? When Angela Merkel was seeking election as Germany’s Chancellor in 2005, the media’s response was depressingly sexist:

…another problem for the campaign, however, was Merkel herself. Despite the orange posters and the theme song Angie from the Rolling Stones, there was not much rock ‘n’ roll in the Merkel camp. Its flag‐bearer was mocked as a frumpish former academic unable to connect with ordinary people…

(Campbell Templin 2005: n.p.)

Judith Butler (1990) has argued persuasively not simply that gender is a performance and that we are all performers, but that over time, normative renditions of femininity and masculinity become so routinized and accepted that they become social “fictions” (and I would add, social “facts”), which society then expects to see played out, stereotypes of what passes as appropriate behavior for women and men. For their part, the media perpetuate these gender stereotypes, deploying a set of regulatory controls which attempt to “fix” women in their proper place, including women politicians.

This book is primarily about power, patriarchy, and culture, about the immensely tricky relations which exist between politics, gender, and media, between women and men, between politicians and journalists. I discuss the many and various ways in which those relations are played out, in election contexts and in the everyday cut and thrust of political reportage, using a feminist media interpretive lens to reveal and interpret the frames that are routinely operationalized in news about women and politics and the politics of gendered news. We can make sense of much of the media’s vilification of Hillary Clinton by considering not only the concentration of media ownership in the hands of a very few players who are closely aligned to the conservative right, but also by recognizing that the same harassment and taunts of “noisy virago” were leveled against the Suffragettes more than 100 years ago (Rake 2006) in the pages of the establishment press. Some commentators suggest we are now living through an age of third‐wave feminism (with some going as far as to say we are now enjoying a fourth or even fifth wave), which appears to appropriate the postmodern turn in promoting an “anything goes as long as we’re enjoying ourselves” ethos. However, I must say that, personally, I cannot accept the legitimacy of a position which calls itself “feminist” but which is so avowedly self‐absorbed and politically bankrupt, so my own position and the lens through which I interrogate the substance of gendered political communication is more in the tradition of second‐wave feminism, which seeks equality through social transformation, simultaneously recognizing the significant battles won but also the goals yet to be achieved.

In the chapters that follow, I focus primarily on the ways in which political women (and men) are represented in and by news media. I argue that, notwithstanding the more general slide towards infotainment, easy‐chew news, and the priapic imperative, politics is still regarded as jobs for the boys, literally, despite the success of women’s global campaigns to become president or prime minister, so that women continue to be seen at best as a novelty, at worst as aberrations, in media discourse. In a number of elections where women were competing for the highest political office, their personal lives became the topic of intense scrutiny, every detail examined for signs of deviancy or scandal, especially if they were unmarried or childfree (McGregor 1996; Comrie 2006; van Zoonen 2006; Trimble and Treiberg 2010). As I write this, Hillary Clinton is busy winning Democrat nominations to be the US presidential candidate, but a regular feature of so many news reports is her campaign outfit, her hairstyle, and whether Bill is in tow. Whilst the media’s tabloid turn means that all politicians are more vulnerable to the trivializing interests of journalists (see also Juntunen and Väliverronen 2010), women’s more limited media coverage results in an over‐determined focus on the personal over the political. Understanding quite why journalists seem so out of step with the views of the public whose voting behavior suggests a more sophisticated appreciation of women’s political potential is not straightforward and a simple complaint of sexism is insufficient, although obviously contributory. What seems clear is that gender‐differentiated coverage of politicians is a global phenomenon and a variety of factors are in play, including the circulation and routinization of gender‐based stereotypes, the male‐ordered nature of many newsroom environments, and the reliance on the “usual suspects” as sources and subjects for news discourse. While this is not everywhere the case and some women politicians do seem to receive gender‐neutral and sometimes even positive coverage, this is not the general trend.

In Chapter 2, I consider feminist theories of both politics and political communication, arguing that not only is the personal also political, but that the political is always gendered. Out of second‐wave feminism, political commentators such as Joni Lovenduski and Pippa Norris (1996), Judith Squires (1999), and Valerie Bryson (2003) were all using a sharply feminist‐critical lens to explore what it meant to talk about gendered politics, the implications of men’s dominance in and of the political sphere, how (and if) women politicians can and do influence both policy and political processes, and how democracy can be transformed with the greater involvement of women in both formal and informal politics. Drawing on feminist ideas, this more explicitly political body of work generated a set of theoretical concepts and definitions which reworked political theory with a gendered face, bringing a more thoughtful analysis to the very meaning of politics, democracy, and citizenship. Disentangling sex (biology) from gender (social construction) and differentiating among institutions (organizations which make decisions), processes (how decisions are made), and policies (outcomes of decision‐making) enabled a clearer understanding of where women fit into the larger socio‐political picture and, importantly, revealed the gaping hole that was (and is) the gender deficit. Identifying the logic of politics demonstrated how an absence at one end – lack of women at the institutional level (as elected representatives) – is very likely to have consequences at the other end, that the concerns of women citizens are less likely to be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Women and Politics
• 3 Women in the Boyzone
• 4 Women, Politics, and Campaign Coverage
• 5 Girls on Top? Winning and Losing the Political Crown
• 6 Behind Every Great Man (or Occasionally Woman)
• 7 Scandalicious
• 8 Conclusions
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement