Lauren Jiggins

T7105633

Paul Bailey/Antje Glück

Journalism (Issues and Debates) (MED2015-N-FJ1-2017)

A Study of Representation in the Media

Word Count: 2,775


In this essay I will be studying representation in the mass media. Representation is how

the media portrays issues such as race, gender, national/regional identity and other issues

to a wide audience.

While studying why the media portrays issues of representation in a certain way, along

with looking at stereotypes and if the media reinforces or subtract from them, and

ideologies of theorists and of the societal beliefs of the time. Foucault’s theory of

archaeology will be a main source throughout my research, as it is the theory of examining

the past to explain the present, and with stereotypes and issues of representation there is

always a history surrounding it, which when applied to the research will lead to a more fair

view of representation within the media.

Propp’s Narrative theory is frequently seen in the semiotics of traditional news outlets

(Print and TV). Propp’s theory is that there are individuals who contribute to the equilibrium

of the narrative of a media text, for example there is a villain, a donor (someone who offers

advice or information), a ‘princess’ or ‘prince’, someone who needs protecting, the ‘king’

who rewards individuals, and of course the ‘hero’ (Propp et al., n.d.). We also see Levi

Strauss’ theory of Binary Oppositions in media narratives. The theory of Binary Opposites

is based upon a conflict between stark opposites such as Good v Evil, Nature v

Nurture, Black v White, Human v Technology and Man v Woman. These binary opposites

allow for an argument to be presented and discussed fairly, as both points of view should

be able to be considered. In the case of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, the binary

opposite of nature vs nurture was used and still discussed to this day, 25 years after the

crime took place. “In the days after the arrest of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson for

the murder of James Bulger, their mothers were attacked and vilified in the street. In the

weeks and months and years that followed they have been attacked and vilified by the
press. To many, these two women (the boys' fathers seem somehow to have been

absolved of blame) were ultimately responsible for the death of the two-year-old abducted

by their sons…The suspicion was that it must have been their lack of care, love, or firm

parental control that led to James Bulger's torture and death on a railway line. Faced with

the near-inconceivability of the crime itself, and two suspects below the age at which the

law judges young people as morally capable, the media and the public needed surrogate

criminals to bear the blame, to be the object of their sense of outrage and desire for

retribution. But was it the parents' fault?” (The Guardian, 2000). This view argues that

nurture was the point, but ends by explicitly posing the question of was it truly their fault,

allowing for discussion within the audience.

The idea that it is the fault of Venables’ and Thompson’s mothers leans towards the

nurture argument, but also shows the unfair treatment that lower social classes can

receive due to the narrative and binary opposites theories. The cases of Shannon

Matthews and Madeline McCann both further illustrate this, as they fall victim to nature vs

nurture, rich vs poor, middle vs working class, and Madeline was seen as a ‘princess’ by

Propp’s theory, whereas Matthews was quickly forgotten about because she wasn’t as

‘cute’. “The McCanns got Premier League footballers to wear Madeleine T-shirts…They

asked for advice from the likes of Phil Hall, former editor of the News of the World. And

there was another factor: Madeleine was cute, and Kate McCann good-looking. The

cameras loved her, even when she broke down during a press conference, clutching her

daughter's pink Cuddle Cat. Karen Matthews is not as elegant, nor as eloquent. Middle

England may not envy her life, or identify with it. …But it seemed that almost as much

attention was paid to the fact that Karen has had seven babies by five fathers… So the

family is complicated, and working-class. The people of Dewsbury Moor don't have the

connections, the finances or the know-how.” (Moreton, 2008).

Propp and Strauss’ theories can also tie into the Audience Reception and Hypodermic

theories. The Audience reception theory shows that there is a preferred reading if the text

is consistent with the audience’s beliefs, in comparison to a negotiated reading where the

audience can choose whether or not to accept the content of a text (Hall, 1980). Similarly,

the Hypodermic theory is where the mass media can be considered to influence a large

group of people by subliminally ‘injecting’ them with messages designed to gain a

response (Universiteit Twente, 2018). We see these theories combined with the Narrative

and Binary Opposite theories in most newspapers. A modern example is how we see the

‘villain’, who is usually a politician, and the conflict of right v left, but the source will depend

on how the villain is portrayed, and they can sometimes become the hero. “Jeremy Corbyn

Demands Theresa May 'Step Aside' And Let Him Strike Brexit Deal” (Simons, 2018),

“Theresa May calls on Corbyn to rule out second vote on Brexit after top Labour figures

call for referendum re-run” (Gye, 2018). Both of these headlines were published on the

same day, surrounding the same in-parliament conversation, but both portray different

views on the subject. The headline for Simons is from the left leaning HuffPost, whereas

the Gye headline is from tabloid and right wing favourite The Sun. The representation of

political stance is heavy depending on what outlet the reader uses, leading to the question

of is the news as fair in it’s representation as it should be, and do certain theories such as

audience reception and hypodermic allow them to become biased. It can be argued that

the media cannot be unbiased, as with the Audience Reception theory, people will read

what they agree with, as this promotes their own beliefs and reinforces the reader that they

are right, so because society is biased the media cannot be unbiased. This allows certain

outlets to become representative of certain social groups, such as The Daily Mail being

seen as the newspaper for Conservatives, The Guardian the newspaper for the left

(Monkeon.co.uk, 2018), The BBC is seen as having a left wing bias in it’s broadcasting yet
a right wing bias in it’s news shows (Nomagic.org.uk, 2018), and Channel 4 overtly left

wing in all of it’s broadcasting (Pollard, 2014). This is reflected in the viewing ages of The

BBC and Channel 4, as the average age of a BBC viewer in 2017 was 61, and Channel 4

was 42 (Usborne, 2017). These ages are high more due to the fact that younger people

are watching TV less and less, but there is still a notable 19 year age gap between the two

channels and it’s various sister channels, and this goes in correlation with the way the UK

voted in the 2017 election, with over 60’s voting in favour of the Conservatives, whereas

people in their 40’s voted for the Labour Party (Curtis, 2017).

Representation of women in the media has always been varied depending on the theme

and outlet, for example in fictional TV shows women are becoming more likely to be

portrayed as stronger characters than in previous years, but there is always room for

creative licence unlike in more traditional media forms such as the news, where there

shouldn’t be any gender bias presented. Berger’s theory of ‘Men look, women appear’

states that women are solely for the objectification of the arts or media, and that at all

times women are thinking of how they are being perceived, and this reinforces the idea

that the way we see femininity in the media is damaging to younger women growing up

with it. “A woman is always accompanied… by her own image of herself…From earliest

childhood she is taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. She has to survey

everything she is and everything she does, because how she appears to others – and

particularly how she appears to men – is of crucial importance for what is normally thought

of as the success of her life.” (Ways of Seeing, Episode 2, 1972). We see this heavily in

the media, but a modern example is that of Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid - presenters

of the early morning news show, Good Morning Britain. The way Reid is portrayed in

tabloid headlines in comparison to Morgan strongly reinforces Berger’s theory. Some

headlines to represent Morgan are: “Piers Morgan helps sweet Good Morning Britain
fan” (Hill, 2018) and “Piers Morgan passionately DEFENDS 'heroic' Winston

Churchill” (Bosotti, 2018) meanwhile headlines for Reid are usually “Susanna Reid flaunts

curves in tighter-than-skin dress…Reid caused a fan frenzy in an eye-popping

ensemble.” (Cleary, 2018), “Susanna Reid praised by fans for stunning make-up free

selfie” (Robinson, 2018) and “Susanna Reid hints she has a SECRET

BOYFRIEND” (Farmer, 2018). These headlines reinforce not only Berger’s theory but also

Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze - where women are portrayed as objects of male

desire, and audiences are forced to view women from the point of view of a heterosexual

male even if they are otherwise. When using loaded words such as ‘flaunts curves’ and

‘eye-popping’, Reid is made to be an object of desire rather than a serious news presenter,

who has won Newsreader of the Year various times, all the while making Morgan appear

to be a strong and moralistic newsreader who truly cares about British values by defending

Churchill and helping fans, when in reality he was at the centre of a phone hacking

scandal, where the voicemails of dead teenagers, MP’s and celebrities were hacked

(Holden, 2012).

All of the articles were written by women, and newspapers that frequently objectify women

such as The Daily Mail have a higher female readership than male, around 52.5% female

vs 47.5% male (Intermedia Brand Marketing, 2017). A reason for women being the main

objectifiers of women can be due to Gramsci’s theory of Cultural Hegemony, where the

ruling class can control the masses so that their ideologies are top. Cultural Hegemony

can only be defined as so if “…those affected by it also consent to and struggle over its

common sense” (Laurie, 2015) and this is something we see frequently as while some

women objectify each other, others widely campaign against the objectification. We see

cultural hegemony along with Berger and Mulvey’s theories in the articles surrounding

Reid as women are objectifying other women in a very masculine way, something that
tabloids have done for decades, meaning the women who are writing these articles have

grown up seeing this and believe it is normal and harmless to judge women in the public

eye on merit rather than appearance, just as most women would judge themselves on

appearance, as Hannah Fearn quoted in The Independent; “Another answer is that women

know that they are judged in myriad ways on their own appearance and therefore believe

that those who choose to enter public life – particularly women, who are most likely to face

scrutiny based on choice of clothing, hairstyle and the like – knew exactly what they were

getting into when they put themselves in front of the cameras. Just like the chitchat over

Theresa May’s collection of kitten heels, they may say, this is a bit of harmless fun that

both parties willingly signed up to. Indulging in the guilty pleasure of asking “who wore it

best” is a victimless pastime. And it sells papers.” (Fearn, 2017).

These ideas about representation of women follow on to representation of race and age.

Bell Hooks theorises with her colour codes theory that lighter skinned women are seen as

more desirable in the western beauty standards, whereas black women are shown as

commodified and as more disposable (Hooks, Jackson and Scott, 1996). Jacques Lacan

also theorises that ‘the mirror stage’ is a way the media show infants who to aspire to, as

young people will see themselves mirrored in the people they see on television. The

representation of race and age during the London Riots (2011) has been widely lauded as

being biased against young black people. The 2011 riots didn’t start as a conflict about

race, but stemmed from the police shooting of a London gangster, where his family and

friends were protesting across the country, and then the far right became involved and

made it a race issue, with one man in Liverpool overheard saying “It's going to kick off. A

n****r is going to get it tonight” (Akmini Bloom, 2012). Major news outlets also played on

the ages of the people involved in the riots, with the Telegraph referring to the young

people as ‘the underclass’, ‘feral’ and ‘a Hobbesian dystopia of chaos and brutality’.
(Riddell, 2011). In describing a ‘Hobbesian dystopia’, Riddell refers to the theorist Thomas

Hobbes, who believed in a liberal view of the law that allows people to do whatever the law

does not explicitly forbid them from doing.

The mass media itself couldn’t decide if the issue was about race or not, "These riots were

about race. Why ignore the fact?" chided the Telegraph columnist Katharine Birbalsingh.

Abroad, there seemed no need for deeper reflection. "Over 150 arrested after London hit

by huge race riots," said one US business website. "Let's talk about those race riots in

London," urged talkshow hosts in New Zealand. Those on the other side of the debate

could appear just as certain. "This is not about race at all," Max Wind-Cowie of the left-

leaning thinktank Demos told the Huffington Post. (Muir and Adegoke, 2011). The first

statistics about the race of people involved in the riots was 41% white, 38% black, 12%

mixed race, 7% Asian and 2% Chinese or other, and in comparison to the country’s ethnic

makeup of 12% of the population being black and 69% white, it seems there was no bias

by the news outlets but in fact fair representation, but on looking deeper at the conviction

rates, 44% were white compared to 35% black, 12% mixed race, 6% Asian and 2% for

others, meaning that the coverage being weighted against black young people was in fact

unfair, as the majority of convictions were from white young people (Full Fact, 2012).

Representation around age is usually found to cause a moral panic, turning the young

people into ‘folk devils’ (Cohen, 1973). ‘Folk Devils’ is a term coined by theorist Stanley

Cohen, to describe a group of people who are made out to be deviant by the media, and

are a social scapegoat for crimes and moral panics, which in turn is the fear felt by society

of a change that threatens the hegemonic values of the time. Young people have been

made into folk devils by the media throughout the ages, starting in 1964 with the clash

between Mods and Rockers on Brighton beach. Both groups posed a threat to the values
of the time, as they were the image of post war rebellion, taking drugs and having sex

outside of marriage freely without trying to hide it. After the clash, the media used

headlines such as ‘The Battle of Brighton’ (Evening Argus, 1964), which was heavily

weighted for the time as it was only 24 years after the Battle of Britain, something that a lot

of readers would have been able to remember. The local press also used an accidental

drowning to make it seem like a Mod had died either via murder or suicide (Cohen, 1973),

which further promoted the idea of folk devils and that the young people had a

recklessness and lack of care for life. Folk Devils were also used in the more recent past

after the Columbine school shooting in 1999, when news reports following the massacre

portrayed the shooters as obsessed with gothic culture, and leaned towards the idea that

this was the reason for them committing the mass murder (Griffiths, 2010).

In conclusion, almost all of society is represented by the media, and for some part the

media represents society. This has been investigated in the case of modern media outlets

such as print and TV, and after studying issues of representation and looking at

stereotypes such as the typical working class person, or of women in media compared to

men in media, I have found that the media mainly reinforces them and has done this as

long as the media has been around.

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