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Summary: Journalism, Gender and Power revisits the key themes explored in the 1998 edited collection News, Gender and Power. It takes stock of progress made to date, and also breaks ground in advancing critical understandings of how and why gender matters for journalism and current democratic cultures. This new volume develops research insights into issues such as the influence of media ownership and control on sexism, women's employment, and "macho" news cultures, the gendering of objectivity and impartiality, tensions around the professional identities of journalists, news coverage of violence against women, the sexualization of women in the news, the everyday experience of normative hierarchies and biases in newswork, and the gendering of news audience expectations, amongst other issues. These issues prompt vital questions for feminist and gender-centred explorations concerned with reimagining journalism in the public interest. Contributors to this volume challenge familiar perspectives, and in so doing, extend current parameters of dialogue and debate in fresh directions relevant to the increasingly digitalized, interactive intersections of journalism with gender and power around the globe. Journalism, Gender and Power will inspire readers to rethink conventional assumptions around gender in news reporting--conceptual, professional, and strategic--with an eye to forging alternative, progressive ways forward.

Chapter 5 of the book "Talking Adolescence" is presented. The chapter looks at the role of media in shaping the lives of young people, placing emphasis on media education in Great Britain. It examines postings made by young people to the "Newsround" website of British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) and the extent to which such postings highlight their awareness of current events and their willingness to engage in political debate.

This article focuses on the social and ethical issues which surround the Human Genome Project (HGP) and the changing role of scientific expertise, and its relationship to lay knowledge, particularly as it is framed by the media. HGP, an international programme costing billions of dollars, has been likened to the biological science's equivalent of landing on the moon. It is an attempt to map and sequence all 3,000 million base pairs which constitute the human genome. It aims, in its metaphorical search for the holy grail, to write the book of life. In 1988, an organisation called HUGO--the Human Genome Organisation, described as a United Nations for the Human Genome--was established inter alia to encourage public debate on the ethical, social, legal and commercial implications of the project. The issue, then, may be how best to constitute forums in which better informed as well as less stereotypical exchanges can take place. The list is extensive, ranging as it does from science shops, citizens' courts and scenario workshops to public representation on advisory groups and consensus conferences. Meanwhile, public participation in the future development of the new genetic technologies cannot be hampered by the breakdown of trust in scientific expertise, the framing practices of the media, or the many problems posed by current participatory experiments.

Presents an alphabetical listing of items and their corresponding page number which appeared in the book "Environmental Risks and the Media," edited by Stuart Allan, Barbara Adam and Cynthia Carter.

Presents a list of writings or publications about environmental risks including "Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time," by B. Adam.

This article aims to problematise the concepts of environment and media in an attempt to extend Beck's (1992a) risk society thesis to the virtual world of information and communication technologies. In his widely acclaimed Rise of the Network Society, Castells (1996) describes the contours of an informational landscape, which is characterised by a series of relatively smooth, globally operational, flows (of data, people, money, goods, services, images). This landscape, or what he calls space of flows, is the field in which global capitalism, with its geopolitics of the new world order, is able to bolster new heights in the accumulation of wealth and power. However, what becomes evident from this research is that journalists operate on the basis of a logic that substantially deviates from the logic of capital. That is their environment is not as well organised as the political economic theory of the media tends to suggest. The mediation of HIV/AIDS, like the mediation of computer viruses, articulated risk sensibilities far beyond the technoscientific domain, and entered--one might say infected--wider popular cultural formations. Governance and commerce were always inherently part of this movement, as cyberrisks in particular are always matters of discipline and commodification.

In this article, the authors argue that the very form of the mass media might be just as important as its informational content in generating the cultural ground for a global, cosmopolitan sensibility. Why might a putative notion of global citizenship be important in relation to the politics of the environment? A concept of responsibility and a sense of belonging that goes beyond our own locality and stretches to the world as a whole is implicit--and often explicit--in many political appeals from governmental and non-governmental institutions. Other writers have also envisaged a central role for the media in reinvigorating the public sphere. Morley and Robins (1995), for example, argue that the media may be the catalyst in reviving public spaces and recreating a civic culture, but that the decentralised communities constituted over time and space through mediated experience must complement lived experience and not stand as alternatives to it. There are a number of ways in which the very form of the mass media can contribute to a global sensibility. First, by extending the experiential reach of individuals, the media offer a space in which individuals can frame themselves differently in relation to the wider world. Second, the very awareness of the sheer variety of places, ways of life and points of view that are available to us through the mass media might have the effect of disembedding us from local cultures, traditions and identities, in a way that is perhaps best captured in the practice or even the mere possibility of channel-hopping. We do not claim to have answered all the questions about the role that the media might play in encouraging global responsibility among the public.

This article analyses underlying causes for why these errors and inaccuracies in environmental reporting may occur and how they have affected public comprehension of climate change. Added to the scientific and journalistic quagmire is the increasingly fractious political milieu of climate change. Precisely because climate change is directly related to how people live, the issue strikes raw nerves. U.S. President Bill Clinton announced in the summer of 1997 that the global warming science is clear and compelling, and proceeded to direct U.S. policy leading up to the December 1997 Kyoto Summit. The greenhouse effect is not a new scientific theory. As early as the nineteenth century, some scientists began to speculate on the effects of increased carbon released into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels. Nevertheless, the intriguing idea that humanity could raise Earth's temperature seems at first to have attracted surprisingly little attention in the scientific community and even less in the public media. This article has analysed several causes for this kind of reporting and offered recommendations on improving future media communication of climate change so that we can all be better prepared to make the kinds of policy decisions that climate change demands of us.

The article focuses on public places, fear of crime and the media. Thus, Osborne (1995:27-8) argues that media narratives encode crime and disorder as the representations of fragmentation rendered coherent. In his analysis, the obsessive…and hysterical replaying of the possibility of being a victim and staving it off (Osborne 1995:29) that marks the boundaries of our senior citizen's comment, has become systemic in the media's attempt to institutionalise the postmodern condition. Typically, individual survey questions like Do you feel safe walking alone in your neighbourhood at night? are used to measure fear of crime in this research. There are at least three problems with this kind of survey question. First, it is too hypothetical and ambiguous. Many older women, for example, will tell you that they do not feel like going out at night since their partner died, and even if they do, they may be as afraid of falling over an uneven pavement as of being mugged. Secondly, the responses to this question are used as evidence of the so-called risk/fear paradox. The third problem is a complete undervaluing of human agency. Young women and older people have a wide range of strategies which they apply when they choose (or choose not) to go out in the neighbourhood at night.

This article explores the ways in which various groups of women responded to a televisual crime reconstruction portrayal of sexual violence. The report was accompanied by a reconstruction which depicted the last hours of this woman's life, and which appealed to witnesses to come forward with information which might assist the police in solving this crime. In terms of how the women in the reception study generally evaluated Crimewatch, there was an overwhelming belief that it performed a valuable informative function in that it made women aware of the risks of associated with public environments. Such responses demonstrate how this programme encourages women to anticipate danger, and seek ways to inhibit their activities outside of the home as a way to avoid it. For the most part, however, this study found that women negotiated their everyday lives privileging a gendered distinction between public and private spaces. In these terms, the research findings are highly comparable to Valentine's (1989) examination of women's fear of male violence and their perception and use of public space. Yet when one asks women about danger, their fears translate into concerns about the danger lurking in the physical environment: car parks, public stairwells and public transport, for instance, are typically named by women as dangerous places in community safety audits collected by campaign groups or local crime prevention initiatives.

The article traces the media career of youth homelessness--the way it entered the headlines and, later, how the reporting changed. Youth homelessness first became widely reported in the British news media in 1989. In 1998, the Labour government appointed a homelessness tsar, demonstrating that it regards homelessness as a serious social problem. Youth homelessness can be seen as the fallout from global change--recession and then economic restructuring which left little employment for young school leavers--coupled with broad monetarist politics which exacerbated unemployment and led to cuts in welfare benefits. Before understanding the effect which media coverage has had on homelessness as a social issue, it is important to consider further the kind of images which have been produced. It is undoubtedly true that rough sleeping is the predominant media symbol of youth homelessness. For example, an early article (Guardian 3 March 1987) was concerned with young people trapped in their parents, homes because of increasing property prices. Parallels can be drawn between the media politics of a social issue such as youth homelessness and the media politics of many environmental issues. In both, dangers and risks are caused by global changes and national policies which can create physical or social pollution--be it oil on the coast or young people sleeping on the streets.

This article focuses on product advertisements in print magazines targeted at women. The texts promote their products by naturalising specific value systems and resisting others. They work, for example, to undermine what we could call the discourse of avoidance--the simple logic that if exposure to the sun is dangerous, one should avoid it, and the associated value system that sun exposure is outdated and naíve. They posit ideological dilemmas, particularly desire for hedonistic leisure while avoiding risk, to promote expensive, technologised and packaged solutions to them. These meanings are communicated for the most part implicitly, in the subtle semantics of the texts language and visual imagery. The tacit assumption in all sun-care promotional texts is that brown or golden skin has aesthetic advantages over white skin. There appears to be a reticence to use the colour vocabulary itself; golden delicious and, in the same text, all the gold without the guilt is the only reference in the sampled texts, other than tan as a colour, for example the only colour you will turn is tan. Rather, the priority is established visually, in the skin tone of female models portrayed and in the colour of product packaging. In terms of what the colours signify, gold is powerfully associated with warmth and richness, just as brown skins are associated with southern skin types and cultures.

This article gives a temporal inflection on the media politics associated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and its posited link to the new variant Creutzfeldt Jacob's Disease (nvCJD), which turned a scientific veterinary problem into a public health issue and economic matter of transnational concern. BSE, this most pervasive of risks, does not fit this conception of risk. Its probabilities are unknown. Ignorance and uncertainty surround questions about its causes, its consequences and its remedies. What is known about it is highly disturbing and threatening but the language of risk seems to be largely inappropriate. Clearly, scientists now know much more about BSE and nvCJD than when these diseases were first identified. But, even so, the extensive and indeterminate time-scales involved mean that the significant relations are not bounded in time and space and thus can neither be grasped through the rules of causality nor safeguarded, remedied or compensated. Despite the public's need for knowing the histories of those two diseases as well as the agricultural, political and medical actions associated with their respective developments, providing information on the historical background is generally not considered to be an integral part of newswork.

In this article, the authors' explore the politics of pollution in Teesside, a conurbation of over 400,000 in north-east England. As researchers, we ourselves were not disinterested spectators content to let our findings speak for themselves--epidemiological findings do not speak for themselves. Attempts to clarify and correct press statements were made. More particularly, we each also had a hand in editorial compromises over the various summaries of such a large body of data which helped to pave the way for the representations which occurred. As social scientists, the two of us have been intrigued as much as dismayed by the manner in which our findings have been remoulded, and used as a basis for apparently authoritative claims about pollution and its impact. For a century, air pollution has been a sensitive topic in Teesside with both sides of the River Tees recording some of the highest levels of smoke, ferric oxide and sulphur dioxide in the country since national monitoring began in the 1950s and 1960s. Any suggestion, however, that these events have helped to nail the myth about local air quality are, we suggest, unlikely to be fulfilled. For the link between pollution and health continues to provoke public disquiet and unease in Teesside, particularly in areas close to industry, while more generally, media interest in pollution and its risks is growing, not waning.

This article examines the media politics of environmental reporting within the wider context of the study of new social movements. Social movements are defined here as organised forms of collective action representing a broad mobilisation of interests around a specific goal. Although they are outsiders from mainstream political institutions they may have some access to formal channels of influence, for example through lobbying activity. Within the literature on social movements and theories of risk society environmentalism is viewed as a particularly strong illustration of a new social movement. A number of different explanations have been offered to account for the rise of the mass environmental movement in western society. Perhaps one of the most widely known is provided by Beck (1992a). He views social movements as representing the emergence of a new form of politics in a society which is based upon conflicts around risk. Clearly, new sources of identity have emerged through the growth of non-party based networks and community groups which often tend to be concerned with localised environmental issues, offer the opportunity for shared emotional release, and tend to be non-hierarchical with a relatively rapid turnover of people.

This article provides news about bodies, tunnels and green guerrillas. In April 1997 protesters dug under the proposed site of a new stretch of the A30 at Fairmile, near Honiton in Devon, south-west England. Tree-dwelling protesters attracted considerable media attention but something about the action of those who burrowed beneath the earth really caught the imagination of journalists. It also proved a very effective way of resisting eviction for these green guerrillas. But the protesters did not get off lightly in the Express, dubbed by Norman that lank-haired, anorak wearing vegan class, but their democratic right to protest was firmly stated and the dubious use of vague laws was condemned. The Express managed to sympathise with the protest, condemn left-wing politics, denigrate veganism, ridicule the tree and tunnel rebellion and support British law and order, at a stroke. The only explanation for its convoluted approach might be the need to satisfy a readership of rather conservative, nationalistic green-belt dwelling not in my backyarders some of whom might well have been providing warm baths and hot meals to the empty headed hippies at Manchester. Its sister paper, the Daily Mail, steered clear of the kind of turbulent ideological political effort adopted by the Express by ignoring the whole thing.

This article examines how deep-sea dumping of redundant North Sea oil installations and its principal promoter, the environmental pressure group Greenpeace, were covered by a sample of British national newspapers. Several problems arise in relation to claims-making about environmental risk. First, many environmental risks are relatively invisible and may not develop into future threats or disasters. Second, their development cycle tends to be ill fitted to the twenty-four-hour cycle of news production. Third, their causal or other connection to putative future outcomes is often shrouded in scientific uncertainty and in a language of probability and likelihoods. The scientific uncertainty which is inherent to much claims-making about environmental risks runs directly counter to conventional news values, yet in order to support and legitimise their claims, those who make claims about environmental risks must argue their case principally on scientific grounds. While the Greenpeace publicity stunt of occupying the derelict Brent Spar platform was the action which initially helped secure media attention and coverage, it is unlikely that this action in itself would have been sufficient for moving the issue along either in terms of continued media coverage or in terms of invoking action. Apart from the obvious media event focus on the occupation of the Brent Spar and Shell's legal response putting an end to the occupation, reoccupation by Greenpeace and so on, it was Greenpeace's simultaneous promotion of the issue through other key news-forums which helped secure continued news coverage.

This article focuses on the concept of news media framing in the context of contentious issues. Building on the pioneering framing studies of the 1970s and 1980s, researchers have given increasing focus on framing relating to news since the early 1990s. In fact, it served as the theme for a conference on Framing the New Media Landscape at the University of South Carolina in October 1997, which included more than sixty papers and presentations. The term claims-maker is equally appropriate in referencing the takeholder groups. People who are involved as stakeholders in a policy issue engage in related discussions, both private and public. Members of these competing stakeholder groups become claims-makers when they articulate their perspective. As people speak from their perspective, they make claims and frame issues by emphasising certain aspects and ignoring others. Whether consciously or unconsciously, involved stakeholders will exclude competing or contradictory viewpoints in their discussion. In covering a disaster, journalists need differing kinds of information in different phases. During the disruption of normalcy phase, journalists seek to establish the facts. Preferred sources are eyewitnesses. Private parties such as company spokespersons are listened to, but their statements are treated with scepticism. If the event is an ongoing danger such as an oil spill, then opinions of experts are sought to assess the risk. During the investigation phase, preferred sources are government investigators who are to establish the facts and experts who can put the facts in context and offer interesting conjectures as to why the disaster occurred.

This article presents a rare moment in the news mediation of environmental risks and, for that matter, TV news broadcasts more generally. More theoretically, Frances Hall represents what Ulrich Beck in Risk Society has termed the voices of the side effects. Her tragic experience of the consequences of an invisible risk leads her to articulate a form of social rationality and confront the administrative failure of politicians to manage hazards as well as the technocratic failures of scientists to know and therefore to be able to quantify, predict and control risks--Beck's so-called manufactured uncertainties. It has become something of an orthodoxy in media studies and mass communication research that the media, and the news media especially, are structurally oriented to the institutions and centres of political, economic and social power, granting access as of right to the elites of society. Clearly, space permitting, there is much more that could be examined and said about the nature and forms of accessed voices--both ordinary and nonordinary--within environmental TV news. Enough has been indicated, none the less, that lay opinion and views of the environment are severely constrained by their forms of news entry, as well as a seeming professional practice that packages and positions ordinary voices to symbolise and embody the world of everyday experience.

This article provides the authors' introduction to the book Environmental Risks and the Media, edited by Stuart Allan, Barbara Adam and Cynthia Carter. In choosing the title Environmental Risks and the Media for this book, we wanted to signal from the outset our commitment to establishing a fresh analytical basis for rethinking some of the more familiar assumptions associated with research in this area of inquiry. We recognise, of course, that each of the component terms conjoined by our title, namely environment, risk and media, exists in a state of conceptual tension. That is to say, the boundaries which delimit their respective meanings are the subject of intense discursive conflict, and as such are constantly being drawn and redrawn in relation to the social hierarchies of time, space and place. This focus on risk, we suggest, has helped to initiate an important break from these earlier approaches in several decisive ways. Identified as being particularly consequential, for example, are the relations of definition underpinning media discourses which condition what can and should be said about environmental risks, threats and hazards by experts and counter-experts, as well as by members of the lay public. Following this sketch of several of the more prominent contours of the research terrain, then, the last section of this chapter echoes the larger structure of the book by offering an overview of the respective contributions. Our hope is that Environmental Risks and the Media will be recognised as contributing to such a process of formalisation by identifying key areas of shared concern between highly varied disciplinary engagements with the media--environment nexus.

Presents a list of contributors to the book "Environmental Risks and the Media," edited by Stuart Allan, Barbara Adam and Cynthia Carter.

The article focuses on the ideological shift in news coverage of sexual violence whereby the extraordinary is normalised into the ordinary. Critical news researchers have long sought to analyse the ways in which journalists report on crimes of sexual violence. Several studies have confirmed that since 1945 there has been a substantial increase in the quantity of sex-crime news items in the British tabloid press as well as in North America. In Great Britain, the most significant changes in the news reporting of sexual violence occurred during the 1970s, a time when tabloid newspaper content, in general, became more openly sexualised. By the 1990s, at least one sensational case per week was being reported in the daily tabloid press, regardless of the political affiliation, class or gender of their target audience. Findings also suggest that the style of reporting sexual violence has become more explicit and lurid in detail over the past few decades, sometimes inducing moral panics amongst news audiences.

The article discusses about the male dominance in the field of journalism. Today, as human beings approach the start of a new century, the day-to-day culture of most newsrooms is still being defined in predominantly male terms. Whilst there has been a dramatic increase in the number of women securing jobs in journalism, white middle-class men continue to occupy the vast majority of positions of power throughout the sector. Women are still not being promoted to senior decision-making posts in proportion to the overall role they play in the profession. At a time when both broadcast and print news organizations are facing ever more intensive forms of competition, and when female readers, listeners and viewers remain as elusive as ever, the costs of this failure to treat women fairly in the journalistic workplace continue to mount. A study of British journalism documents the varied types of discrimination female news workers often encounter with their male counterparts. Still, this is not to deny that women have made crucial gains in the field of news reporting which have fundamentally altered the types of sexist dynamics, which once characterized the profession.

The article discusses about mass media. The term mass media refers to large-scale, institutionalized, public forms of production, dissemination and consumption of newspapers, magazines, film, radio, and television. Processes of communication via the mass media result in the formation of a mass relationship between media producers and audiences. This relationship is primarily one-directional and impersonal because most messages are created and distributed by large and centralized media institutions in locations that are situated at some distance from their audiences. Mass communication differs from interpersonal communication in a number of significant ways. First, senders of mass media messages tend to be highly professional who are employed by large media institutions. Second, content is constructed according to standardized and routinised methods of mass production. Third, messages are products with a commercial value to be sold and bought in the marketplace. Fourth, output is the product of industrial activity shaped by the policies and by professional routines of large media organizations and the political, economic and legal structures of the societies in which they operate. Finally, because large audiences consume messages, they have the potential for wide-scale social influence.

This section tackles the significance of the mass media in the risk society. Over the course of the centuries, humanity has learnt to deal with selfgenerated uncertainties. The crucial category here is that of risk. This concept refers to those practices and methods by which the future consequences of individual and institutional decisions are controlled in the present. In this respect, risks are a form of institutionalised reflexivity and they are fundamentally ambivalent. The category of risk becomes central at the point where the apparent boundaries of nature and tradition dissolve into decisions. Both in terms of conceptual history as well as in their triumphal march through the institutions, risks are a modern phenomenon. They are an invention of civilisation which is being ever further perfected as modern society and its balance between uncertainty and self-control develops. At the same time, this invention is being applied to more and more fields of action--technology, the labour market, health, ecology, biography. This is clearly not sufficient given the significance of the subject and is to be attributed to my limitations alone. For the risk society can be grasped theoretically, empirically and politically only if one starts from the premise that it is always also a knowledge, media and information society at the same time--or, often enough as well, a society of non-knowledge and disinformation.

The article discusses cultural methodologies which generally refer to qualitative methodologies employed by cultural studies researchers. Cultural studies research aims to offer new intellectual insights into the social or discursive construction of "reality" rather than seeking to be theoretically correct by proving the existence of an objective "truth." Some critics, however, have suggested that some forms of cultural studies research have resulted in a form of "cultural populism." The argument is that cultural studies researchers have tended to focus narrowly on the analysis of popular consuming practices, using audience research methods, tending to turn away from using critical forms of depth explanation that were concerned with the material conditions of cultural production, such as the political economy of culture. Similar concerns have been raised concerning feminist cultural studies research, although it should be noted that critical feminist scholarship seems to have taken different political forms in the U.S. from those in Great Britain. In the U.S., primarily influenced by poststructuralist theories, feminist cultural scholarship has employed a range of textual methodologies to examine how cultural representations, particularly those found in a range of women's media genres such as women's magazines, soap operas, romance fiction, and melodrama, construct and naturalize certain preferred definitions of femininity.

The article informs that from the mid-twentieth century, communication theories developed to provide models to map the operation of human communication as processes in which messages are encoded and transmitted from a sender to a receiver through a particular channel with certain effects. Such theories were primarily created by media and marketing professionals seeking to understand and maximise the impact of communication messages on audiences. Because most of the sources of media messages are men, it is in their continuing interest to shape media content so as to legitimate and reproduce patriarchal privilege. Media content is therefore thought to reflect a male 'world view'. The media's portrayal and legitimization of this 'world view' encourages audiences to accept and conform to traditional gender roles. Utilizing such theories, feminist researchers have criticized the media for their portrayal of women, arguing that images tend to reinforce traditional sex-role stereotypes which inhibit women's advancement in society.

Acknowledges the people who have made important contributions to the realisation of the book "Environmental Risks and the Media," edited by Stuart Allan, Barbara Adam and Cynthia Carter.

Provides a brief information on the book "Environmental Risks and the Media," edited by Stuart Allan, Barbara Adam and Cynthia Carter, which explores the ways in which environmental risks, threats and hazards are represented, transformed and contested by the media.

Lists the titles of statistical data and tables that appeared in the book "Environmental Risks and the Media," edited by Stuart Allan, Barbara Adam and Cynthia Carter.

The article provides information on the book "News, Gender and Power." The book addresses the pressing questions of how gender shapes the forms, practice, institutions and audiences of journalism, and draws on feminist theory and gender-sensitive critiques to explore the multiple interconnections between news, gender and power. In this book, range of media issues are investigated, including ownership and control, employment and occupation status, professional identity, news sources, the portrayal and representation of women, the sexualisation of news and audience research. Within this framework the contributors of the book explore media coverage of cases such as the O.J. Simpson trial, the BSE scandal, the horrific crimes of Fred and Rosemary West, child sexual abuse and false memory syndrome, and the representation of women in life-style documentaries.

The article presents the list of authors' who have contributed to the book "News, Gender and Power." Some of the names included in the list are: Rod Brookes, Cynthia Carter, John Hartley, Gill Branston, Patricia Bradley, Stuart Allan, Beverley Holbrook, Patricia Holland, Jenny Kitzinger, Myra Macdonald, Lisa McLaughlin, Paula Skidmore, Linda Steiner, Janet Thumim, Liesbet van Zoonen, C. Kay Weaver and Maggie Wykes. Myra Macdonald lectures in communication and media at Glasgow Caledonian University. She is the author of the book "Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in the Popular Media." Stuart Allan lectures in media and cultural studies at the University of Glamorgan. He has published primarily in the areas of news media studies, cultural theory, and nuclear issues. Gill Branston lectures in film and television studies in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University. She is co-author of the book "The Media Student's Book." She is currently writing a book on film and culture, and researching the voice in the technologies and ideologies of cinema and television.