“France's (Kinder, Gentler) Extremist”: Marine Le Pen, Intersectionality, and Media Framing of Female Populist Radical Right Leaders

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 438-470
Author(s):  
Alexandra Snipes ◽  
Cas Mudde

AbstractAlthough the populist radical right is generally seen as a particularly masculine and misogynist phenomenon, several of its parties have female leaders. The most prominent is Marine Le Pen, president of the French National Rally (formerly the National Front) and unofficial leader of the European populist radical right. Using insights from intersectionality theory, we posit that Marine Le Pen, as a female populist radical right politician, faces qualitatively different media coverage than both her female and her radical right counterparts. In this study, we analyze her media framing in two French (Le Figaro and Le Monde) and two U.S. (New York Times and Wall Street Journal) newspapers, focusing on the application of gender and populist radical right frames. We find that the “harder” populist radical right frame dominates the “softer” gender frame in all four newspapers, but, paradoxically, the combination of the two frames leads to overall less biased coverage of Marine Le Pen compared with both other female and other populist radical right politicians. In the conclusion, we discuss some of the consequences of the findings for the broader study of female politicians, most notably, theories of intersectionality and the double bind for women in leadership.

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (03) ◽  
pp. A02 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Giordano ◽  
Yi-Lin Chung

Despite low public knowledge of synthetic biology, it is the focus of prominent government and academic ethics debates. We examine the “NY Times” media coverage of synthetic biology. Our results suggest that the story about synthetic biology remains ambiguous. We found this in four areas — 1) on the question of whether the field raises ethical concerns, 2) on its relationship to genetic engineering, 3) on whether or not it threatens ‘nature’, and 4) on the temporality of these concerns. We suggest that this ambiguity creates conditions in which there becomes no reason for the public at large to become involved.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (03) ◽  
pp. 599-621 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Zulli

Research on female politicians suggests that women face a double bind. Female politicians must embrace their femininity but not be too feminine, and they must demonstrate masculinity without deviating from gender norms. Hillary Clinton has often struggled with this balance, which has resulted in conflicting and inconsistent portrayals of her in the news. To examine the extent of this coverage, this study provides a longitudinal analysis of Clinton's personal and professional media coverage in the New York Times. A content analysis of news coverage of Clinton from 1969 to 2016 shows that she has largely not been bound to gender labels, gender traits, or mentions of physical appearance. In addition, Clinton was not overly discussed as a novelty or norm challenger. These findings contradict previous literature, demonstrating a potential trend away from using gender as a descriptor for or limitation to female politicians.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174804852098744
Author(s):  
Ke Li ◽  
Qiang Zhang

Media representations have significant power to shape opinions and influence public response to communities or groups around the world. This study investigates media representations of Islam and Muslims in the American media, drawing upon an analysis of reports in the New York Times over a 17-year period (from Jan.1, 2000 to Dec. 31, 2016) within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis. It examines how Islam and Muslims are represented in media coverage and how discursive power is penetrated step by step through such media representations. Most important, it investigates whether Islam and Muslims have been stigmatized through stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination. The findings reveal that the New York Times’ representations of Islam and Muslims are negative and stereotypical: Islam is stereotyped as the unacclimatized outsider and the turmoil maker and Muslims as the negative receiver. The stereotypes contribute to people’s prejudice, such as Islamophobia from the “us” group and fear of the “them” group but do not support a strong conclusion of discrimination.


2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 845-874 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Hawdon ◽  
James Hawdon ◽  
Atte Oksanen ◽  
James Hawdon ◽  
Atte Oksanen ◽  
...  

Abstract Although considerable research analyzes the media coverage of school shootings, there is a lack of cross-national comparative studies. Yet, a cross-national comparison of the media coverage of school shootings can provide insight into how this coverage can affect communities. Our research focuses on the reporting of the school shootings at Virginia Tech in the U.S. and Jokela and Kauhajoki in Finland. Using 491 articles from the New York Times and Helsingin Sanomat published within a month of each shooting we investigate how reports vary between the nations and among the tragedies. We investigate if one style of framing a tragedy, the use of a “tragic frame,” may contribute to differences in the communities’ response to the events.


2021 ◽  
pp. 073953292110501
Author(s):  
Noam Tirosh ◽  
Steve Bien-Aime ◽  
Akshaya Sreenivasan ◽  
Dennis Lichtenstein

This comparative study examines framing of migration-related stories (focused on media coverage of World Refugee Day [WRD]) between four countries, and framing developments over 18 years, specifically if (and how) the 2015 peak “refugee crisis” altered news coverage of refugee issues. Elite newspapers, the New York Times (USA), the Times of India, Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Germany) and Haaretz (Israel) were content analyzed. Newspapers gave only sparse attention to WRD itself, but WRD was a “temporal opportunity” to discuss migration that increased coverage. But the 2015 peak refugee crisis had little effect on coverage over the long run.


1998 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 560-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dolores Flamiano

This article analyzes the emergence of media discourses on contraception from 1915 to 1917, focusing on coverage in the New York Times, The New Republic, and Harper's Weekly. Considered legally obscene and unfit for public discussion, contraception first made headlines as a result of Margaret Sanger's birth control activism and ensuing legal troubles. After the New York Times covered Sanger's activities, several magazines began to publish articles on the contraception debate. This early coverage of birth control emphasized its scientific and social utility, virtually ignoring controversial issues of gender, sexuality, and power.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luisa Massarani ◽  
Luiz Felipe Fernandes Neves

The search for an effective solution to control the COVID-19 pandemic has mobilized an unprecedented effort by science to develop a vaccine against the disease, in which pharmaceutical companies and scientific institutions from several countries participate. The world closely monitors research in this area, especially through media coverage, which plays a key role in the dissemination of trustful information and in the public’s understanding of science and health. On the other hand, anti-vaccine movements dispute space in this communication environment, which raises concerns of the authorities regarding the willingness of the population to get vaccinated. In this exploratory study, we used computer-assisted content analysis techniques, with WordStat software, to identify the most addressed terms, semantic clusters, actors, institutions, and countries in the texts and titles of 716 articles on the COVID-19 vaccine, published by The New York Times (US), The Guardian (United Kingdom), and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil), from January to October 2020. We sought to analyze similarities and differences of countries that stood out by the science denialism stance of their government leaders, reflecting on the severity of the pandemic in these places. Our results indicate that each newspaper emphasized the potential vaccines developed by laboratories in their countries or that have established partnerships with national institutions, but with a more politicized approach in Brazil and a little more technical-scientific approach in the United States and the United Kingdom. In external issues, the newspapers characterized the search for the discovery of a vaccine as a race in which nations and blocs historically marked by economic, political, and ideological disputes are competing, such as the United States, Europe, China, and Russia. The results lead us to reflect on the responsibility of the media to not only inform correctly but also not to create stigmas related to the origin of the vaccine and combat misinformation.


2021 ◽  
pp. 2336825X2110529
Author(s):  
Alexander Alekseev

The article explores how the European populist radical right uses references to rights and freedoms in its political discourse. By relying on the findings of the existing research and applying the discourse-historical approach to electoral speeches by Marine Le Pen and Jarosław Kaczyński, the leaders of two very dissimilar EU PRR parties, the Rassemblement National and the Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, the article abductively develops a functional typology of references to rights and freedoms commonly used in discourses of European PRR parties: it suggests that PRR discourses in Europe feature references to the right to sovereignty, citizens’ rights, social rights, and economic rights. Such references are used as a coherent discursive strategy to construct social actors following the PRR ideological core of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. As the PRR identifies itself with the people, defined along nativist and populist lines, rights are always attributed to it. The PRR represents itself as the defender of the people and its rights, while the elites and the aliens are predicated to threaten the people and its rights. References to rights in PRR discourses intrinsically link the individual with the collective, which allows to construct and promote a populist model of ethnic democracy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Lewandowsky ◽  
Michael Jetter ◽  
Ullrich K. H. Ecker

Abstract Social media has arguably shifted political agenda-setting power away from mainstream media onto politicians. Current U.S. President Trump’s reliance on Twitter is unprecedented, but the underlying implications for agenda setting are poorly understood. Using the president as a case study, we present evidence suggesting that President Trump’s use of Twitter diverts crucial media (The New York Times and ABC News) from topics that are potentially harmful to him. We find that increased media coverage of the Mueller investigation is immediately followed by Trump tweeting increasingly about unrelated issues. This increased activity, in turn, is followed by a reduction in coverage of the Mueller investigation—a finding that is consistent with the hypothesis that President Trump’s tweets may also successfully divert the media from topics that he considers threatening. The pattern is absent in placebo analyses involving Brexit coverage and several other topics that do not present a political risk to the president. Our results are robust to the inclusion of numerous control variables and examination of several alternative explanations, although the generality of the successful diversion must be established by further investigation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 255-275
Author(s):  
Yiqin Ruan ◽  
Jing Yang ◽  
Jianbin Jin

Biotechnology, as an emerging technology, has drawn much attention from the public and elicited hot debates in countries around the world and among various stakeholders. Due to the public's limited access to front-line scientific information and scientists, as well as the difficulty of processing complex scientific knowledge, the media have become one of the most important channels for the public to get news about scientific issues such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs). According to framing theory, how the media portray GMO issues may influence audiences’ perceptions of those issues. Moreover, different countries and societies have various GMO regulations, policies and public opinion, which also affect the way media cover GMO issues. Thus, it is necessary to investigate how GMO issues are covered in different media outlets across different countries. We conducted a comparative content analysis of media coverage of GMO issues in China, the US and the UK. One mainstream news portal in each of the three countries was chosen ( People's Daily for China, The New York Times for the US, and The Guardian for the UK). We collected coverage over eight years, from 2008 to 2015, which yielded 749 pieces of news in total. We examined the sentiments expressed and the generic frames used in coverage of GMO issues. We found that the factual, human interest, conflict and regulation frames were the most common frames used on the three portals, while the sentiments expressed under those frames varied across the media outlets, indicating differences in the state of GMO development, promotion and regulation among the three countries.


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