The “image bite,” political language, and the public/private divide

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 336-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Kaufer ◽  
Shawn J. Parry-Giles ◽  
Beata Beigman Klebanov

Voice-overs with muted images, often known as the “image bite,” have become an increasingly used but understudied format of political language by the television news media. Because the media can use images to fit many contexts and purposes of commentary, the media images are susceptible to continuous de-contextualization and re-contextualization. Drawing from theories of feminist critical discourse analysis and gender performance as well as scholarship on the public/private divide, we examine the commentary of one U.S. television news organization’s (NBC) re-contextualization of the same stock footage of Hillary Clinton over 10 newscasts spanning 20 months from August 1998 to June of 2000. NBC re-enforces the public/private binary in conventional masculine terms. Yet it also worked, at times, to unify the binary when covering Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate campaign; on those occasions at least, NBC revealed the potential erosion of gender stereotypes and a small but still significant role for human agency in the study of gender ideology.

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 47
Author(s):  
Ruth M. López

This article addresses television news coverage of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act of 2010, which would have created a path to legal residency for thousands of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Considering the role that news media play in socially constructing groups of people, through an analysis of English- and Spanish-language evening television news coverage of the DREAM Act of 2010, the author examined discursive practices used to represent undocumented youth in both dehumanizing and humanizing ways. The author discusses the implications of these types of discourses for education policy understanding by the public and education stakeholders.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alcina Pereira de Sousa ◽  
João Silva

AbstractThe present article offers a contrastive analysis of articles published online by two media outlets of two different countries (Portugal and the USA) dealing with science, technology and interrelated topics. In so doing, the goal is to explore the role played by gender dynamics in the pragmatic strategies which underlie the communication of scientific knowledge to the wider audiences by the mainstream media. The multi-layered interpretative approach centred on corpus-based (critical) discourse analysis and visual semiotics adopted in this paper, it is argued, allows for a more holistic understanding of the role played by the media in the perpetuation of power imbalance and gender stereotypes among their readership(s), better understood here as discursive communities, and their everyday communicative practices. It is further suggested that an analysis of how knowledge is mediatized can offer ways into understanding wider cultural patterns and values.


MedienJournal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Li Xiguang

The commercialization of meclia in China has cultivated a new journalism business model characterized with scandalization, sensationalization, exaggeration, oversimplification, highly opinionated news stories, one-sidedly reporting, fabrication and hate reporting, which have clone more harm than good to the public affairs. Today the Chinese journalists are more prey to the manipu/ation of the emotions of the audiences than being a faithful messenger for the public. Une/er such a media environment, in case of news events, particularly, during crisis, it is not the media being scared by the government. but the media itself is scaring the government into silence. The Chinese news media have grown so negative and so cynica/ that it has produced growing popular clistrust of the government and the government officials. Entering a freer but fearful commercially mediated society, the Chinese government is totally tmprepared in engaging the Chinese press effectively and has lost its ability for setting public agenda and shaping public opinions. 


2020 ◽  
pp. 095792652097721
Author(s):  
Janaina Negreiros Persson

In this article, we explore how the discourses around gender are evolving at the core of Brazilian politics. Our focus lies on the discourses at the public hearing on the bill 3.492/19, which aimed at including “gender ideology” on the list of heinous crimes. We aim to identify the deputies’ linguistic representation of social actors as pertaining to in- and outgroups. In addition, the article analyzes through Critical Discourse Analysis how the terminology gender is represented in this particular hearing. The analysis shows how some of the conservative parliamentarians give a clearly negative meaning to the term gender, by labeling it “gender ideology” and additionally connecting it with heinous crimes. We propose that the re-signification of “gender ideology,” from rhetorical invention to heinous crime, is not only an attempt to undermine scientific gender studies but also a way for conservative deputies to gain more political power.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yating Yu ◽  
Mark Nartey

Although the Chinese media’s construction of unmarried citizens as ‘leftover’ has incited much controversy, little research attention has been given to the ways ‘leftover men’ are represented in discourse. To fill this gap, this study performs a critical discourse analysis of 65 English language news reports in Chinese media to investigate the predominant gendered discourses underlying representations of leftover men and the discursive strategies used to construct their identities. The findings show that the media perpetuate a myth of ‘protest masculinity’ by suggesting that poor, single men may become a threat to social harmony due to the shortage of marriageable women in China. Leftover men are represented as poor men, troublemakers and victims via discursive processes that include referential, predicational and aggregation strategies as well as metaphor. This study sheds light on the issues and concerns of a marginalised group whose predicament has not been given much attention in the literature.


Author(s):  
Patrícia Rossini ◽  
Jennifer Stromer-Galley ◽  
Ania Korsunska

Abstract While the debate around the prevalence and potential effects of fake news has received considerable scholarly attention, less research has focused on how political elites and pundits weaponized fake news to delegitimize the media. In this study, we examine the rhetoric in 2020 U.S. presidential primary candidates Facebook advertisements. Our analysis suggests that Republican and Democratic candidates alike attack and demean the news media on several themes, including castigating them for malicious gatekeeping, for being out of touch with the views of the public, and for being a bully. Only Trump routinely attacks the news media for trafficking in falsehoods and for colluding with other interests to attack his candidacy. Our findings highlight the ways that candidates instrumentalize the news media for their own rhetorical purposes; further constructing the news media as harmful to democracy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 109-138
Author(s):  
Kelly L. Winfrey ◽  
James M. Schnoebelen

Women gained the right to vote nearly 100 years ago, but it was not until 1980 that political scholars and practitioners began paying much attention to the role of women in elections and it was the so-called “Year of the Woman” in 1992 that sparked increased scholarly attention on women as political communicators. A record number of women, 117, ran for the U.S. Congress in 1992, but the number of women running and serving has been slow to increases since that time. One reason may be the unique challenges gender poses for female political communicators. Over three decades of research has proven gender stereotypes and expectations play a key role in how women (and men) communicate with voters. This review of research summarizes major findings and changes in gender and political communication research over the past three decades. Our focus is on communication by candidates and how gender shapes that communication. In all, 119 scholarly sources were reviewed; these sources included scholarly journals from related disciplines as well as books. Gender stereotypes in political communication have also been studied using a variety of methodologies, and to reflect that the research reviewed in this essay include both quantitative and qualitative methods. This summary of existing research includes a discussion of the gender stereotypes faced by candidates and how candidates present themselves to the public in light of these stereotypes.


2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 207
Author(s):  
Valgerður Jóhannsdóttir ◽  
Þorgerður Einarsdóttir

The news media are the most influential sources of information, ideas and opinion for most people around the world. Who appears in the news and who is left out, what is covered and what is not and how people and events are portrayed matter. Research has consistently shown that women are underrepresented in the news and that gender stereotypes are reinforced in and through the media. The 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action recognised the relationship between women and media as a major area of concern in achieving gender equality in contemporary societies. This article presents Nordic findings from the 2015 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), which is the largest and longest-running study on gender in the world’s media. The findings show that women account for only 1 in 5 of the people interviewed or reported on by Icelandic news media and that women’s overall presence in the news has declined compared to the last GMMP study in 2010. The proportion of women as news subjects is also considerably lower than in other Nordic countries. We argue that the number of women who are journalists, managers in the media industry and decision makers in society has increased, but this shift has not automatically changed the representation of women in the news, either in numbers or in their portrayal. This discrepancy indicates that the relationship between gender and the news media is complicated and needs to be approached from different perspectives.


Author(s):  
Kira Sanbonmatsu ◽  
Kathleen Dolan

This chapter analyzes a series of questions related to citizen's attitudes about gender issues. These items are included in the 2006 Pilot Study. The examination of gender stereotypes suggests that many people see few differences in the traits and abilities of women and men, but that those who do perceive differences tend to do so in predictable ways. These new items also demonstrate that gender stereotypes transcend party, although gender and party interact in meaningful ways in some circumstances. The examination of voters' gender preferences for elected officials reveal the importance (or lack thereof) of descriptive representation to voters and the potential for women candidates to mobilize women in the public to greater political involvement. Finally, the analysis of these new items clearly indicates that while they are related to other gender attitudes, gender stereotypes and gender preferences are distinct attitudes held by voters.


2004 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Rodrick

This article begins by outlining what the principle of open justice is intended to achieve. It then investigates the nature of the relationship that exists between the courts and the media, and between the media and the public, and suggests that these relationships are not always conducive to realising the aims of open justice. While the reporting role of the traditional news media will undoubtedly persist, at least for the foreseeable future, it is argued that, since courts now have the means to deliver to the public a fuller and truer picture of their work than the media can, they should seize the opportunity to do so.


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