Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | J | Journal of Australian Studies

Women and male hegemony in Australian regional and country journalism.

Article Excerpt
The treatment of women by the Australian news media has received increasing attention in Australia in the past two decades or so. (1) Many of these studies, as Romano and de Ponte indicate, reveal that women have been 'under-represented and misrepresented' by the Australian news media. (2) To date, the metropolitan media's portrayal of women has been scrutinised much more intensely than that of regional and rural media. This is somewhat surprising, given the important place and space media occupy in regional and rural areas. Many of these communities are served by a limited range of news media, with access to only one daily newspaper. Newspapers have for many country towns ceased to be truly local, with titles being produced in larger centres some distance away, and content increasingly being networked, that is, shared between several newspapers which serve different readerships. The continued existence of small country town newspapers is increasingly threatened, with large corporations frequently closing small titles soon after purchasing them. (3) There are now few independent newspaper operators in regional and country Australia. (4)

In 2001, as part of a broader rationalisation of its newspaper holdings, Australian Provincial Newspapers closed its weekly newspaper located in the small country town of Blackall in Central Western Queensland. (5) The Blackall Leader was the town's only locally produced newspaper and its closure had a considerable impact on the community. (6) In 2002, a survey by the Department of Primary Industries identified that residents wanted a newspaper. (7) As a result, a collaborative project by Blackall residents and James Cook University in Townsville, 735 km to the north-east, culminated in the re-establishment of a masthead which was launched in the nineteenth century but had ceased publication in 1983 when the newspaper offices burned down: The Barcoo Independent. Journalism students from the university gathered and wrote most of the articles in the first six editions of the Barcoo Independent and, in June 2004, the newspaper committee took full control of writing and production in their own town. The publication has since then continued and expanded on its own merits. A local businessman and his wife were the most active members of the original committee of community members established to oversee the production of the newspaper. After their departure from Blackall, three local women became the committee's most active members.

In this article we explore the treatment of women as news sources by the Barcoo Independent. We do so because evidence suggests (8) that country or rural newspapers typically use few women sources and present women as 'peripheral, as artefacts in the story to tell us something about men ... or about the community generally'. A study by Ewart and Massey found similar evidence of the treatment of women in regional daily newspapers in Central Queensland, the area in which Blackall is located. (9) In their comparison of Queensland's metropolitan newspaper, the Courier-Mail and four regional newspapers, Ewart and Massey found women were under-utilised as news sources by both types of newspapers. Given the limited data available on the gender of news sources in regional and country newspapers, we want to explore how the Barcoo Independent uses women as news sources. What is particularly noteworthy about this newspaper is that it is noncommercial and its production is overseen by a community committee whose most active members are three women. These women are, to a large degree, responsible for the establishment and continued existence of the publication.

Literature

As stated at the beginning of this paper, research has revealed that the Australian media have replicated the patterns of representation and treatment of women found in mainstream international media. A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that during a nine-month content survey across all American media 'men are relied on as sources in the news more than twice as often as women'. (10) While that study revealed that newspapers performed slightly better in respect of the number of female sources used, they are still 'half as likely to contain a female source as a male source'. (11) Bridge suggests that news media patterns of representation of women are related to men being 'in charge of most of the nation's and the world's powerful "news-making" institutions, and as leaders, men define what constitutes "newsworthy'". (12) As early as 1978 this issue was attracting the attention of researchers with Molotch identifying that: 'because women do not hold dominant positions in society, women lack access to news making and hence the likelihood of becoming newsmakers'. (13) Australian researcher Jenkins has criticised the news media's reliance on male sources arguing that women are used in smaller proportions in the news than men, despite them making up more than 50 per cent of the population. (14) These comments are of particular significance to our research and we return to them in the discussion section of this paper.

Australian research has consistently revealed that the sourcing patterns of journalists result in the use of far fewer female than male sources, which can lead to stereotypical representations of women in the media. (15) One reason for this is the male hegemony which exists in large...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!