Page 229 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

218 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

recent figures about the composition of American newspaper staffs
show that 35 per cent of the workforce is female. About half of the new
workers are female (Media Report to Women 1989). A similar trend is
said to occur in Britain (Sparks 1989). Can it be that women are
conquering a once exclusively male domain? In the case of Dutch
television news, women’s increased visibility runs parallel with a
conscious editorial policy to construct an informal and intimate
relationship with the audience. Such intimization occurs in other
countries and other areas of journalism as well. One might thus consider
the female newsreader in the Netherlands, and the general increase of the
number of women journalists, as no more than the embodiment of
intimacy, signifying just another articulation of traditional femininity.
Feminism seems to have two options to evaluate recent developments
in journalism. On the one hand one might contentedly conclude that
journalism is no longer a male preserve, but on the other one might also
claim more cynically that the increasing access of women to the
profession is part and parcel of the intimization that seems to permeate
most news. I shall elaborate these two positions in the following
paragraphs and conclude that both are caught in the dead end of the
‘sameness-difference’ dilemma of feminist theory, (too) simply put as
‘should women become the same as men and thus equal, or can women
be different from men but still be equal?’ I then go on to argue that the
‘sameness-difference’ dilemma is an inextricable product of the
bourgeois concept of the public sphere which dominates contemporary
evaluations of journalism in western democracies. The concept can be
of no avail to a feminist perspective on journalism since it is
philosophically and historically rooted in universalist concepts of
gendered human nature and society, resulting in the restraints of a male
public sphere and a female private sphere. In the final part of the
chapter I suggest a more particularist feminist approach, which uses as a
starting-point the way gendered audiences make sense of the news.

CONQUERING A MALE DOMAIN
Feminist approaches to the news have been relatively straight-forward.
Criticism centres not so much on how women are presented as on how
they are not present at all. According to a global research review by
Gallagher, in not one country does the number of women appearing in
news coverage exceed 20 per cent (Gallagher 1980). The few times
women are included, they mainly appear in human interest stories, in a
domestic setting or to give emotional eye-witness accounts. A more