Page 243 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

232 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

Some authors claim that the news doesn’t provide women with
knowledge that enables them to make sense of their own daily
experiences. Consequently they will not feel much incentive to watch.
Morley (1988:45) illustrates this by the observation that women do
watch local news programmes very attentively.

They say that they don’t understand what international economic
news is about and, as it has no experiential bearing on their lives,
they’re not interested in it. However, if there has been a crime in a
local area, they feel the need to know about it, both for their own
sake and their children’s sake.

A related reason for gender-specific reception of TV news might
be found in the relevance of another social function that TV news can
fulfil for its recipients. Jensen observed that for many male viewers TV
news provides ‘legitimation’: ‘an opportunity for the recipient to…feel
part of a particular social order’ (Jensen 1986:227). Women, and other
outsiders to the ‘particular social order,’ might not feel part of that order
and might not see the need to keep up with it at all.
These kinds of observations might suggest that the intimacy of Dutch
television news would appeal to women in particular, since its subjects
and mode of address seem to be in close accordance with the discourse
of their life-world. However, such a conclusion again reconstructs a
gendered public-private distinction. The women that are referred to in
the above-mentioned research are living (or assumed to be living) in
traditional family situations. Women are more or less equated with
isolated housewives, still confined to the private sphere. Aside from the
theoretical problems such an analysis runs into—as discussed in the
previous sections—few people still live in traditional family situations,
and the ‘isolated housewife’ is hardly representative of ‘the average
woman’ any more. More than half of the households in Amsterdam, for
instance, consist of a single individual. The way women from different
social and cultural backgrounds, with different intellectual and political
predispositions and with a variety of public careers, relate to the
intimacy of Dutch (TV) news and to recent trends in journalism in
general, is yet to be explored, and should be an important part of the
agenda for research in journalism. In many cases such explorations will
result in contradictory evaluations of the feminist qualities of TV news
and journalism, simply because of the increasing heterogeneity of
‘woman’ as a social and cultural category. But if we reject the universal
and consensual bent of the bourgeois public sphere model for its