ABSTRACT
Newspaper and television news reports are crucial to defining the important issues of the day. The production of this ‘news’ is not a neutral or ‘objective’ process. Analysts highlight the way in which media reporting is structurally circumscribed by patterns of ownership in media industries and influenced by ‘news values’, ‘hierarchies of credibility’, ‘journalistic routines’ and dominant cultural assumptions (Golding and Murdock 1991; Hall et al. 1978; Schudson 1989; Tuchman 1978c). It has also been pointed out that the contents of press and television news are a product of competition between diverse sources and struggles within media organisations themselves (Ericson et al. 1989; Schlesinger 1978; Miller et al. 1998). However, the gender-politics of these processes are routinely ignored. Terms such as ‘gender’, ‘feminism’ or ‘women’ (and indeed ‘men’) are absent from the indexes of many key mainstream texts about source strategies and the operations of news organisations. 1 At the same time this issue has attracted relatively little feminist theorising. With a few exceptions, such as van Zoonen, feminist academics have tended to focus on ‘feminine’ genres such as soap opera or magazines. In addition, the most influential feminist work has examined men and women as subjects of representation or as audiences rather than as initiators or reporters of media events (Herzog 1941; Press 1991; Radway 1985). This has left an important lacuna in understanding the operation of gender-politics in mass communication processes.
