Women are seen more than heard in online newspapers

Feminist news media researchers have long contended that masculine news values shape journalists’ quotidian decisions about what is newsworthy. As a result, it is argued, topics and issues traditionally regarded as primarily of interest and relevance to women are routinely marginalised in the news, while men’s views and voices are given privileged space. When women do show up in the news, it is often as “eye candy,” thus reinforcing women’s value as sources of visual pleasure rather than residing in the content of their views. To date, evidence to support such claims has tended to be based on small-scale, manual analyses of news content. In this article, we report on findings from our large-scale, data-driven study of gender representation in online English language news media. We analysed both words and images so as to give a broader picture of how gender is represented in online news. The corpus of news content examined consists of 2,353,652 articles collected over a period of six mon...长期以来，女性主义新闻传播学研究者始终主张，男性化的新闻价值范式主导着记者日常判断新闻价值的决策逻辑。据此观点，传统上仅被视作与女性相关、契合女性兴趣的议题与话题，在新闻报道中往往遭到边缘化；而男性的观点与声音则被赋予优先报道的特权空间。当女性确实出现在新闻中时，她们往往被塑造成“视觉花瓶”，此举进一步强化了女性仅作为视觉愉悦载体的价值，而非以其观点作为报道的核心内容。迄今为止，支撑此类主张的证据往往基于小规模的人工新闻内容分析。本文汇报了一项针对英文在线新闻媒体性别表征的大规模数据驱动研究的发现，本研究同时对文本与图像展开分析，以期全面呈现在线新闻中的性别表征图景。本次研究所分析的新闻语料库包含2,353,652篇采集自六个月时长（原文此处截断）的新闻文章。