Journalist stereotypes and
contemporary British portrayals
The sorry litany of journalistic
caricatures in late C20/early C21
portrayals
What is a stereotype?
• ‘A widely held but fixed and oversimplified
image or idea of a particular type of person or
thing: "sexual and racial stereotypes“’.
• It has been argued that because journalists
themselves often stereotype minorities in
their own reporting that the evolution of the
stereotype of the shabby hack or the
scheming girl reporter is journalists getting a
taste of their own medicine.
Unesco
• Unesco has even produced a massive document about how
journalists should avoid stereotyping women:
• ‘All journalists, both female and male, can play a role in changing
attitudes to women and gender-based stereotypes:
• You can make a choice. You can make a difference. This article sets
out to provide you with some guidelines on how to become a
gender-sensitive reporter.
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• ‘Gender-sensitive reporting’.
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• ‘The reporting journalist needs to be more aware of gender issues
and to incorporate this awareness into the way work is
approached’.
• ‘At the workplace, in the editorial department where
decisions are taken about stories to be covered, on the
beat where information is gathered.
• All the time.
• Because professionalism, equity and good sense
demand it.
• Through being aware of the language used, being
open-minded and fair, and through careful selection of
the stories and the sources’.
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Another set of questions to help journalists and editors keep diverse perspectives, including gender-sensitive
ones, in their stories comes from the Poynter Institute of Journalism in the United States.
WHO?
WHAT?
WHERE?
WHEN?
WHY?
HOW?
Who’s missing from the story?
What’s the context of the story?
Where can we go for more information?
When do we use racial or ethnic identification?
Why are we including or excluding certain information?
Read publications, watch television / cable TV, listen to radio owned by or oriented towards diverse groups.
Contact organisations that represent diverse groups. Your own company may have its own versions of these
groups as well.
Alright in theory….but when you’ve got three minutes to explain a complex issue, it doesn’t always feel that easy
Celluloid and print
• We have already seen some devastating stereotypes of
contemporary journalism in print – Susan Street, Rita
Skeeter, Cameron Colley all adhere to one or other
journalistic stereotype.
• Rowe (1992) describes the stereotyping of journalists:
‘Journalists tend to be labelled as ‘hacks’, their
publications as ‘rags’ and many column inches devoted
to parodies and pastiches of the ‘cynical sensationalist
tabloids’. Here he is referring to how Sports fanzines
portray mainstream sports journalists, but sounds just
what the WW1 troops were doing to war
correspondents in their publications such as the Wipers
Times (remember Teech Bomas?)
James Meek, We are now beginning
our Descent (2008)
• Handout
• Think about what this extract tells you about
foreign correspondents and the way
journalists view ‘the enemy’
A N Wilson My Name is Legion (2004)
• Handout
• From your experience of news rooms, does
this extract have any basis in reality?
Susan Street, Ambition
• ‘She got drunk every night and every morning
woke up with a headache where her memory had
once been. The thought of suicide was always
there, comforting…’
• Burchill’s later commentary: ‘One thing which is
as fresh as ever is the extraordinary autonomy of
Susan Street…she is easily as perverse, perverted
and sex mad as her apparent puppet master
Tobias Pope’ – is Burchill challenging our
preconceptions of what a ‘nice’ girl should be?
Spitting Image hacks
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVIkmJcod
FM
• And
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0bd_vwi
tHg
Defence of the Realm and State of Play
• A major film and a television series.
• Watch short State of Play clip
• How much are the main characters based on
stereotypes?
• How would you describe their personalities?
• Is there any attempt to portray character beyond
a superficial level?
• Have a read of ‘hero to zero’ handout. Do you
agree with Armstrong’s analysis?
Context: Hard News, Channel Four
• Launched by Channel Four to cover instances of
tabloid excess. It was on this programme
December 21 1989 that Mellor famously
described the tabloids as ‘the popular press is
drinking in the last chance saloon…I’m almost
ashamed and embarrassed to live in the same
society as journalists who wrote such stories…the
consequences of sensationalism driven by the
circulation war…the government is painfully
aware of the widespread detestation of the
press.’
A N Wilson My Name is Legion (2004)
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All the journalists in this novel, apart from the principled Rachel Pearl, arts editor
of the Legion, are deeply flawed.
Worst are
Mary Much, exquisite Fashion Editor, hugely ambitious, conniving, clawed her way
up from being a teenage shoplifter
Martina Fax, columnist, married to the proprietor of the Legion, Lennox Mark
Lionel Watson, hopeless philanderer: ‘Just as some women, lunching with Lionel,
would know that there would be a point in the meal when a hand would begin its
exploratory work beneath the tablecloth hem…’
Worledge, new editor of the Legion: ‘Spies at Derek Worledge’s brutal features
conferences also brought most satisfying reports back to Mary Much about the
treatment meted out to Rachel Pearl…She’s been brave, bless her. She was, she
said, disappointed by the philistinism of Derek Worledge’s response…Worledge
had wrinkled his nose. Then in an insultingly laddish manner, he had started to
snigger, and to look to the others, nearly all men, for support.’
Other journalist ‘types’
• The reporter who misses the real story
• Sancroft in Ellen Wilkinson’s Division Bell
• Initially, Nick Mullen in Defence of the Realm –
gets pulled in by the ‘tip off’ about Prague
• Cameron Colley and his ‘deep throat’
• Mattie Storin in House of Cards – all along is
being manipulated by the despicable Francis
Urquhart, the man who wants to be PM
Proprietors
• Lennox Mark (2004)
• Marcel Cohen (1934)
• Janion, from the play The Earth, by James
Bernard Fagan, 1909
Lennox Mark
• ‘Seated, Lennox Mark had a certain dignity, since his
markedly short legs were not in evidence. He wore
expansive double breasted suits of a pale grey
suggestive of summer wear or tropical kit, whatever
the season. His face was fleshy but not especially fat.
He had a very big head with a massive jaw. White hair
was swept back from an apparently untroubled,
anyway unwrinkled forehead. In the massiveness, even
monstrousness of his skull, the eyes, always seemingly
slightly sore, as if mild conjunctivitis could not be
banished, looked small. His nose was blubbery, and had
a suggestion of the later, more syphilitic portraits of
Henry VIII.’
• Monstrous character of enormous appetites
for food, sex and money
• Ends up with neither sex nor money after his
newspaper conglomerate goes bust and his
wife runs off with Mary Much
Janion of The Earth (1909)
• ‘If your Manchester correspondent can’t give you better
copy out of a first class railway smash, you give him the
sack…Facts! – What’s that got to do with it? There’s no
colour, no details, no imagination. He’s got to make you see
this accident – sling his news at you in spasms – hurl it at
you in raw chunks of bleeding humanity. If he can’t let him
go and grow flowers somewhere – we’ve no use for him.
When people open their papers in the morning, they want
to get hit straight between the eyes…’
• Janion, a character of 1909 is perhaps the earliest of the
pantomime villains that are newspaper proprietors in
fiction. He tries to blackmail a liberal minister to prevent
him from going through with his plans to introduce a fair
wages bill; he is ultimately thwarted.
Stereotypes
• If you are tackling an essay on this subject in
the exam, think about addressing:
• What are they
• How do they emerge
• How true are they
• Dahlgren, journalism and popular culture
302.23/jou