Month: January 2015

“Give Us a Twirl”: Why Should Female Athletes be Expected to Talk About Their Kit Rather Than Their Performances?

Plenty of food for thought for anyone interested in gender and the media over the past week, though not all of it palatable. The arguments for dropping Page 3 from The Sun have been repeatedly well made and just as often countered with obnoxious comments that refuse to engage with the central argument; it is probably not worth committing another post about the “excessive objectification of women in some parts of the press, reducing them entirely to sexual commodities” to the web. Especially while things are still at the #epictrolling stage.

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Victory for ‘Indiewood’ at the Oscars?

The Academy Award nominations for 2014 that were announced on Thursday, January 15th 2015, attracted considerable attention from the media for being “too white”, that is, for ignoring the efforts of African Americans and other artists representing minorities in American cinema, especially when it came to nominations in the major categories, such as Best Director, Best Actor and Actress and Best Screenplay. This “white-washing” of the Oscars, however, overshadowed another very interesting feature of the nominations, namely, the very strong presence of a type of (mostly) American film that in the past 25 or so years has been largely described as “indie” and/or “indiewood”.

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Hard Evidence: How Has Press Coverage of Immigration Changed?

The British press has been accused of many things in recent years, most of them bad, but how can we measure performance in coverage of a particular subject such as immigration, and how is this changing over time? Surveys have identified significant gaps between perception and reality suggesting the UK public is not very well informed on the topic; content analysis of media coverage has also uncovered problems of accuracy, distortion and use of stereotypes in the language used.

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