The coverage of war, security and defense policy: do women matter?. A longitudinal content analysis of broadsheets in Germany

• Autores: Romy Fröhlich
• Localización: Redes.com : revista de estudios para el desarrollo social de la Comunicación, ISSN 1696-2079, Nº. 3, 2006, págs. 91-109
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Our social consciousness reserves the role of the fighter solely for men. And because of our accepted model of womanhood, women are not considered as being authoritative, competent, or decisive actors in the context of war and violence. Violence and war are topics that make it especially difficult to perceive women as acting subjects. The media provide an important social space for the construction of social consciousness and, additionally, construct gender characteristics and gender concepts themselves. It is said that especially during armed conflicts or other violent crises, female acting subjects leave the public (=media) stage ¿a place on which they are underrepresented even under normal circumstances¿. Media coverage of war, it is said, assigns the role of the victim to women. However, we do not actually have much empirical evidence to support this view due to the significant lack of quantitative studies on media coverage of women during wartime. As a result, in Germany we conducted a complex framing analysis of media coverage of war between 1980 and 2000. This paper deals with the results of this framing analysis and the representation of women during wartime in quality German newspapers. It is the first longitudinal gender-specific framing analysis of war coverage ever ¿not only in Germany.