Gender and Power Constructions in Visual Political Reporting

Abstract

The analysis of visual presscoverage is still in the early stages of development, although politicalcommunication today is no longer logo-centered but mainly icon-centered. In ourpaper we first outline a method to analyze the meaning of journalistic picturesin a standardized way combining methodological insights from quantitativecontent analysis with findings from social psychology and (de-) constructivefeminist theory. In a second step we present the results of an analysis offront pages of German news magazines showing how “Cross-Sex-Typing” is appliedto mark political power or powerlessness.

Keywords

• journalism
• gender
• visual communication
• content analysis