Enduring Annihilation: Photojournalistic Representations of Men and Women, 1966-2006.

The rise of the women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s drew attention to the continuing numerical and qualitative inequalities experienced by women in the economy and society, including what Gaye Tuchman referred to as women's 'symbolic annihilation' from the public sphere as the news media focused overwhelmingly on the activities of men. Since then, women have made gains in political and economic realms, including the news media, but we know much less about how the news itself has evolved over this time. If news is, as many feel and as most journalists would have us believe, a mirror of reality, how well has it reflected these broad social changes? In this paper, I present findings from a longitudinal content analysis of close to 530 photojournalistic images from one widely read American daily newspaper. Findings show that pictures of men overwhelmingly dominate the photojournalistic sphere and that male domination in this sphere has not subsided over time, despite a brief balancing in the mid-1970s. Testing several hypotheses derived from the empirical and theoretical literature on media production, I conclude that the findings of this study are best explained by a combination of two forces: organizational routines and procedures that enforce male domination in news organizations; and the explosive but un-sustained power of the women's movement in attracting media attention in the early and mid-1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]