National open university of nigeria school of arts and social sciences
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| Self-assessed Exercises Select 5 newspaper headlines on similar theme and identify how they differ in their reflection of the ideological stands of the writers. 3.5 Gender Representation in the Media Scholars in Media Studies have identified the typical ways women are represented in the Media. Women are often represented as being part of a context (family, friends, colleagues) and working/thinking as part of a team. In drama, they tend to take the role of helper. or object, passive rather than active. Often their passivity extends to victimhood. In addition, representation of women across the Media tend to highlight the following beauty, sexuality and emotion. Discussion of women in the media tends to focus a lot on physical beauty to the near-exclusion of other values. This is clearly seen as stereotyping women in the media, while the male gender is portrayed in positive light. There is a general belief that the society is largely patriarchal in nature and until in the recent times women have been marginalized in everything, including their representation in discourse. When compared with the representation of women, representation of men in the media seems to be more positive. Representations of men across all media tend to focus on the following strength, power, sexual attractiveness, physique and independence. Male characters are often represented as isolated, as not needing to rely on others (the lone hero. Though our focus in this section is on the representation of gender, it is important to mention that there are other groups represented in the media, which have caught the attention of scholars. Some other focus on representation in the media in addition to gender are class, age, race or ethnicity, religion, ability, and so forth. For instance, media scholars believe that the entertainment industry tend to exaggerate affluence and under-represent the working class. Likewise ethnic minorities are often stereotyped, while the majority is more favoured in media reports. |