http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/05/living/feat-google-doodle-nellie-bly-karen-o/
Volume 43, Issue 10, August 2011, Pages 2519–2533
Women, Power and the Media
Women's place at the Fourth Estate: Constraints on voice, text, and topic
Abstract
In
this paper I examine the position of women as news reporters and
editors – as journalistic authors and animators – in relation to their
male counterparts, and consider changes in news coverage as their
numbers increased in the newsroom over the past 50 years. I compare
profession-internal guidelines which encapsulate gender ideologies
pervasive in the larger culture – starting with a popular 1959 career
guide – alongside journalistic genre forms, using as specific examples
‘women's pages’ and ‘page one’ in the New York Times. The
change from a backgrounded position on the ‘women's pages’ to greater
visibility in more prestigeful news contexts is indexed through
macropragmatic factors such as byline (who is entitled to be recognized
by name) and story topic (what counts as salient in the journalist's
world), both of which can be viewed in terms of their nonreferential
index value within the community of journalists. Profession-internal
critiques suggest that despite increased opportunities for women over
time, the place of women at the Fourth Estate is still limited – and the
discourse-level evidence supports that, affording a potential
explanation for more global gender disparities in news media coverage.
Keywords
- Journalism;
- Gender;
- News discourse;
- Cultural attitudes;
- Textual conventions;
- Story topic;
- Byline
- Correspondence
address: Linguistics Department, School of Languages, Linguistics and
Film, Arts Building, Queen Mary University of London, 327 Mile End Road,
London E1 4NS, UK. Tel.:
+44 0 20 7882 8294.
Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Colleen Cotter
is a senior lecturer (associate professor) in Linguistics at Queen
Mary, University of London. Her research areas include news media
language, endangered languages (Irish), language in use, and the
ethnographic, sociocultural, and performative dimensions of discourse
and language style. She was a daily newspaper reporter and editor in the
US before studying Linguistics at the University of Sussex (MA) and
University of California-Berkeley (Ph.D.). She taught full-time in
Linguistics and Journalism departments in California and Washington, DC,
before relocating to London. Her book, News Talk: Investigating the
Language of Journalism (Cambridge University Press) was published in
2010.
