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.

• • • ‘Gender-sensitive reporting’.• • ‘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’.

• •

• 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=LVIkmJcodFM

• And• http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=D0bd_vwitHg

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)

• 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

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