Page 235 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

224 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

surprise then that the intimization of Dutch TV news coincides with a
remarkably high number of women newsreaders.
At this point a disclaimer is necessary. The women newsreaders
themselves will firmly deny that the supposedly superior capacities of
women to sustain intimate relationships (in this case with the audience)
is the main reason for appointing them. The women newsreaders and
their superiors will rightfully refer to professional standards providing
criteria for recruitment policies.
Without denying their professional performance, however, women
can hardly be expected to come to the public sphere playing merely a
professional role, in this case as a newsreader. Again that would deny
the gendered nature of subjects, the gendered nature of cultural
expectations and perceptions. ‘Woman’ inevitably signifies a whole
cultural set of feminine values. Which of these come especially to the
fore varies and depends on the particular context, as comparison
between the women newsreaders of BBC news and Dutch TV news
shows.
Writing about BBC news, Holland wonders:
Is there some quality expected of newsreaders, which, despite the
apparent contradictions, is turning this into a suitable role for
women to play?… Is this role of mediation and management one
that can be reconciled with the forms of femininity that have been
constructed out of power relations between women and men?
(Holland 1987:142–3)

She argues that newsreading might become a ‘woman’s job’ because
the newsreader’s task has become that of a performer. For women ‘the
invitation to speak with the voice of authority may be nothing more but
an invitation, yet again, to be a decorative performer’ (Holland 1987:
149). Holland draws her evidence from public discourse about well-
known British anchor-women, in which their appearances and
‘feminine’ styles (often criticized as not ‘feminine’ at all) are
continuously foregrounded. Holland concludes that the presence of
women newsreaders in the BBC news expresses a common and well-
known form of televisual femininity: woman as a pleasurable object for
the voyeuristic (male) gaze: ‘If we are not watchful we will find that
once more, with the infinite flexibility of effortless power, women will
have been put in their place again’ (Holland 1987:149).
In abstract terms her argument can be applied to Dutch television
news as well. In the Dutch case too the high visibility of women marks