Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook - Perpetuating Inequality: Media Discourses on “Race” and Gender, Jun 2021

Although overt expressions of racism are increasingly rare within the sport media, implicit and conscious/unconscious racial bias, on the other hand, is a common feature within contemporary sports reporting. A comprehensive body of research has illustrated that Black athletes are more likely to be praised for their supposed innate biological superiority while White athletes are more likely to be credited for their work ethic and intelligence. In addition, Black, Asian and minoritized ethnic athletes, such as Lewis Hamilton and Raheem Sterling, have often been criticized for being too ‘flashy’ by some sections of the UK press, which conjures up images of undeserved riches. These representations are symptomatic of a wider culture in which minoritized communities are ‘othered’. This article, then, focuses on one example of racial bias from BBC Radio Derby’s Sports Scene podcast from February 2020. Former professional footballer turned pundit, Craig Ramage, suggested that ‘all the young Black lads’ needed ‘pulling down a peg or two’ and needed to work harder. This work empirically investigated three online post titles across Facebook, Instagram and a forum to critically examine how contemporary football audiences reacted to such comments. The analysis illustrated that online participants were: (1) divided over whether Ramage’s comments were racist or not, (2) unsure of who was to blame, (3) unsure of who the victim was. The article concludes by outlining preventative measures to avoid such reoccurrences and emphasizes the importance of educational training around equality and diversity within the sport media.

In the late twentieth century, the rise of the female suicide bomber phenomenon was prevalent in Chechnya, Lebanon and Sri Lanka. Arguably, in terms of academic engagement and visibility within the wider public consciousness, the first wave of Palestinian female suicide bombers during the second intifada (2000–05) encapsulates particular notoriety in relation to the perceived deviance of Palestinian female participation in political violence. Key to this construction is the role of news media as an agent of power. This article examines coverage of Palestinian female suicide bombers during the second intifada period within the scarcely examined medium of British terrestrial broadcast news media. This article determines the impact of individual journalists' gender in producing forms of discourse that delegitimize political agency. In particular, it shall establish if female journalistic voices are complicit in communicating intersectional gendered and Orientalist frameworks.

This research sits at the nexus of women, peace-building and the news media in order to decipher how the representations of women and peace-building in post-conflict Northern Ireland affect women’s social situation in divided societies recovering from violent ethnonational conflict. Women are habitually associated with non-political community-level reconciliation through an assumed innate and feminine propensity to peace. This is amplified through gendered news media portrayals which serve to reinforce patriarchal social knowledge, and in turn, this disenfranchises women by foregrounding their femaleness rather than political expertise; and damages peace by marginalizing a significant demographic of the population and intensifying social inequality, which is the foundation for conflict.

This article analyses links between the archetypal myths in Croatian news stories and images of woman politicians transferring through the media to the public. A total of 73 articles have been empirically analysed using content analysis to identify master myths according to Jack Lule’s classification in Croatian news articles about the migration crisis 2015. The analysis covers the period from 31 July 2015 to 8 November 2015. The articles have been selected by searching web extension of the newspapers Jutarnji list, Večernji list and 24sata from 31 July 2015 to 8 November 2015. The data has been selected, coded and analysed per chosen woman politicians, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, Vesna Pusić, Mirela Holy, Ruža Tomašić and Milanka Opačić. The results show that the dominant myth in all analysed statements is the myth of a good mother. In doing so, the use of lexemes indicates a stereotyped and idealized social role of a woman who cares for and protects ‘her family’. Two framing perspectives are evident: one is a patriarchal, protective and defensive attitude towards migrants, while the other is humanitarian, based on a positive attitude towards migrants. The article’s value is that it provides a perspective on mythological narration within media texts, whereby the mythological narration could be used as a tool for stereotypical and ideological construction on politician’s images in the media.

In the modelling profession, ageing is a multi-challenging process. By analysing the auto/biography Becoming by Cindy Crawford and Katherine O´Leary, the ageing issues prove to be particularly stimulating. Crawford views her private and professional, internal and external self through a temporal perspective. The special focus of the analysis is a relationship to the body exposed to multiple views. In this context, the auto/biographical text becomes a relevant and stimulating document for questioning (self)presentations of ageing female celebrities, analysing the production of new cultural notions of appropriate ageing and transformations of beauty ideology that creates new (unrealistic) standards, norms and expectations.

The topic of this article is the phenomenon of double, namely cross or additive discrimination against senior women in the media sphere. Many studies and articles are devoted to ageism, discrimination against the elderly and gender inequality as discrimination against women. Rarely and hardly ever in Serbia, research is focused on the topic of gender differences that determine the quality of life in old age. While some believe that gender inequality and stereotypes end with age, which is in itself a basis for discrimination, and that gender differences are equalized, others believe that gender differences are particularly pronounced in old age, especially when considering marginalized elderly populations such as elderly people belonging to the Roma nationality, people with disabilities, LGBT people and HIV-positive people. This article is a comprehensive literature review article. The authors applied theoretical and interpretative methods of research, discursive and critical thematic analysis. The interpretative method is based on the meanings and representation of different aspects of the issue. The main finding of this article is the existence and prevalence of a gap and contradiction between the reality of longer and better quality of life and outdated media representation of old age, especially of elderly women.