Representation-Newspapers

Over the last few lessons we have been discussing how different newspapers present different events and groups of people. Each newspapers has it's own views and presents their version of the story. For example how each newspaper would portray Brexit. The way events are shown in newspapers can depend on their political view or what they believe will get the most reads.

Through discussing this we watched a video showing how men and women are portrayed in newspapers, in particular 'The Sun'. In the video the creators collected 'The Sun' for six months and cut out any pictures of men and women and stuck them to a wall.

Findings from the video:

Women:

• Are mostly posing.
• They are shown smiling or pouting.
• Are often wearing no/little clothing.
• They are not seen doing activities like sport even though 'The Sun' is known as a sport newspaper.
• They are mostly young. 

Men:

• Show a range of ages.
• Are often doing sport or other activities.
• Show multiple emotions.
• Are mostly fully dressed and not posing.

This shows that women are more likely to be used to get more readers in newspapers and are less likely to be apart of actual news unless it is about their private life. They are rarely congratulated for something they have done unlike men who are congratulated for sports, politics etc.

Through this research I found another source that shows the lack of female sport presented in the media.

http://la84.org/coverage-of-womens-sports-in-four-daily-newspapers/

This source found that:

• Stories focusing exclusively on men’s sports outnumbered stories addressing only women’s sports by a ratio of 23 to 1.
•  Women-only sports stories accounted for 3.5 percent of all stories; men’s stories made up 81 percent of the total.
•  Photographs of male athletes outnumbered those of female athletes 13 to 1.

This shows that male sport is presented a lot more then women's and supports the idea that women in newspapers are used to get readers rather than be apart of the actual news.