Page 231 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

220 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

result in more balanced and less sex-stereotypical news (Butler and
Paisley 1980).
Dutch television news presents an interesting test case for such
beliefs. In 1965 the first woman newsreader of the ‘Journaal’, as the
Dutch news bulletin is familiarly known, made her appearance. In the
1970s about one-third of the presentation teams consisted of women,
but it wasn’t until recently that anchor-women acquired a central role in
the news. At the moment news bulletins are broadcast five times an
evening and presented by seven alternating newsreaders. Five of them
are female. 1
At face value this dominance of anchor-women in Dutch television
news can be said to mark an uncommon and positive development.
Those newsreaders provide female audiences with positive sociological
role models, quite rare in other programme types:
Combining the tools of a journalist with the power of the
television medium the on-air newswoman knows herself to be a
role model for others. Positive role models for women remain
remarkably rare in television, a medium that generally creates and
reinforces the classification of the female sex as secondary.
(Gelfman 1976:168)

There is an equally important symbolic value to the appearance of
women newsreaders. Paradoxically, the perceived objectivity of the
news and its social status depend for a great deal on the perception of a
presenter’s personal reliability, credibility and authority. The suggestion
that the presenters speak the ‘objective discourse of truth’ is supported
by their discursive central location, materialized in their position behind
the central desk in the news studio (cf. Fiske 1988:288–9). The
personality thus constructed embodies the viewers’ need for a person
who knows everything and who will explain the confusing and often
unsafe world to them. ‘This all-seeing, all-knowing, god-like person is,
of course, male and white. White women, and men and women of
another race …are left to the margins of the morning and the nightly
news’ (Morse 1986:64). In the Netherlands, however, for the greater
part our guides in experiencing the threatening modern world are
women. One is tempted to conclude that the appearance of female
newsreaders in the Dutch Journaal indicates that power, authority and
expertise are no longer features exclusively reserved for men; it seems
to indicate that ‘woman’ no longer automatically signifies sexuality,
submissiveness, domesticity and other usual forms of televisual