American Women and Politics in the Media: A Review Essay

Extract

The study of women and politics in the media is a relatively young subfield, blessed with scholarship from the fields of communications, cultural studies, history, sociology and political science. Members of these fields use methodologies—such as semiotics, qualitative analysis, and quantitative content analysis—to examine the content of communication about women and politics in news and advertising. Studies of the impact of messages use polls, experiments, and focus groups. Scholars draw primarily upon theories of framing (Entman 1993), hegemony (Gramsci 1971), and organizational structures (Epstein 1973; Sigal 1973) to explain why news content looks the way it does. Although most research focuses on content rather than causes and consequences, some studies are putting the pieces together to explain how efforts of groups and individuals influence coverage of women and politics and how audiences react to those messages.