Women’s absence from news photos: the role of tabloid strategies at elite and non-elite newspapers

Abstract

In 1978, Gaye Tuchman pointed to women’s ‘symbolic annihilation’ from the public sphere as the media focused overwhelmingly on the activities of men. Has anything changed since then? This article presents findings from a longitudinal content analysis of 1252 news photos from two widely read American newspapers – one elite and one non-elite – between 1966 and 2006. Findings show that pictures of men dominated the news in both papers over this period. Nevertheless, women made more gains in the elite paper than in the non-elite paper. This article argues that these trends were the product of divergent paths towards tabloid journalism, where papers replace politics and business coverage with sports, entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle coverage. The elite paper expanded entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle coverage, where women show up just as often as men. The non-elite paper expanded sports coverage, where women are virtually absent.

Keywords

content analysis gender inequality newspaper photograph tabloid

In 1978, Gaye Tuchman (1978a) argued that women’s absence and distorted image in the media contributed to their ‘symbolic annihilation’ in the public sphere, and that this detracted from women’s opportunities to participate fully in society. Since that time, though barriers and gaps remain,¹ American society has moved increasingly towards gender equality. The proportion of women in the labor force has inched closer to that of men (U.S. Department of Labor, 2004: 9–10); women’s hourly wages have moved closer to those of men (U.S. Department of Labor, 2007a: 4); female representation in decision-making roles in the public sector has grown (CAWP, 2007: 2); women have entered traditionally male-dominated occupational groups at an unprecedented rate, while men have in turn moved into traditionally female-dominated spheres (Reskin and Roos: 1990; U.S. Department of Labor, 2004); and educational outcomes have gravitated together (U.S. Department of Labor, 2007b: 1). Overall, women are more present in the public sphere today than they were in Tuchman’s time. Have these changes been reflected in news coverage?

Tuchman’s comments focused on two aspects of women’s ‘symbolic annihilation’: absence and distortion. On the former count, women showed up much less often than did men. On the latter count, photos of women were overwhelmingly concentrated in the ‘women’s section’ of the newspaper and tended to depict women in traditional roles, such as that of the homemaker. This article asks four questions related to these concerns. First, do women show up more often in news photos today than they did in Tuchman’s time? Second, where women do show up, are their images concentrated in a ‘women’s section’ or are they distributed across a range of news sections? Third, does the gender distribution of news photos look different, and has it evolved differently, at elite and non-elite newspapers? Finally, what forces are driving any changes observed?

To answer these questions, this article presents findings from a longitudinal content analysis of 1252 news photos from two widely read American newspapers – one elite and one non-elite – between 1966 and 2006. Findings show that pictures of men dominated the news over time, but that the degree to which they dominated varied across elite and non-elite papers. In the non-elite paper, men overwhelmingly dominated news photos in 2006, just as they had in 1966. By contrast, in the elite paper, some convergence occurred over time, leading to a greater degree of gender equality in news photos in 2006 than was the case in 1966. This article argues that these trends were the product of divergent strategies taken by elite and non-elite newspapers to move towards tabloid journalism, replacing politics and business content with content on sports, entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle. As the elite paper reduced coverage of politics and business, it expanded coverage of entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle. The non-elite paper, by contrast, dramatically expanded its focus on sports. At both papers, coverage of politics, business, and sports was absolutely dominated by men over time, while coverage of entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle was equally divided between men and women. This meant that the elite paper replaced coverage of a male-dominated sphere (politics and business) with coverage of a sphere that men and women shared (entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle). By contrast, the non-elite paper replaced coverage of one male-dominated sphere (politics and business) with that of another (sports). Over time, women’s photos grew as a proportion of overall news photos in the elite paper, but only because that paper’s strategy to introduce tabloid techniques prioritized entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle over sports, not because the elite paper moved towards greater gender equality in its coverage of politics, business, and other news contexts.

This article aims to fill a gap in the literature. Mainstream media scholars have largely ignored questions around gender (Robinson, 2005). Feminist and gender scholars have attempted to fill this research gap by examining the previously neglected terrain of women’s and men’s lifestyle magazine, which they point to as important sites of gender reproduction owing to their overwhelming and explicit focus on what it means to be feminine and/or masculine (e.g. Benwell, 2003; Earnshaw, 1984; Gough-Yates, 2003; Milkie, 2002). This research has yielded valuable insights, but it has come at the cost of a neglect of other important, though less obviously gendered, media spheres, including the general audience news media. News products rarely engage in the types of explicit ‘gender building’ found in men’s and women’s lifestyle magazines, yet the messages they deliver can play a role in propagating gender ideologies. Indeed, their importance as daily sites of information dissemination and gathering could very well make them more important as avenues for the (re)production of gender ideologies than the lifestyle magazines that have dominated previous research. In this sense, the news media are the type of everyday, seemingly harmless site that Smith (1987) points to as demanding our attention if we are to better understand the curricula of social learning. To be sure, a number of scholars have trained their eyes on the gendered nature of news content (e.g. Devitt, 2002; Klaus and Kassel, 2005; Ross, 2007) and news production (e.g. Lachover, 2005; Whitlow, 1977; Zoch and Turk, 1998), while others have raised important questions about the role of images in contemporary newsmaking (e.g. Adatto, 2008; Moeller, 1999; Zelizer, 2002). Yet, few of these studies have examined the gendered distribution of news photographs over an extended period of time, as I do here.²

Theoretical perspectives

What does previous research on media production lead us to expect? A review of the literature reveals no consensus. Perhaps the most common approach to understanding media content is as a simple reflection of reality. Many journalists suggest that ‘they just report the world as they see it – the facts, facts and nothing but the facts’ (Schudson, 2000: 176). This approach appears to be prevalent among photojournalists, who are trained to approach news photography as pure fact and who are punished for any attempt to manipulate photos after the fact (Schwartz, 1997). For viewers, photojournalism offers ‘a vision of the world easily consumed and digested, while its naturalism perpetuates its legitimacy as an objective bearer of the news’ (Schwartz, 1992: 108). Applied to the question at hand, such an approach leads us to expect that, as women entered the public sphere in increasing numbers, so too news photography will have become increasingly populated by women. If this approach is correct, our content analysis should show a gradual and steady rise in women’s photojournalistic presence in both elite and non-elite newspapers.

A second approach stresses the characteristics of individual newsmakers – for example, the gender, race, class, and/ political leanings of journalists and editors. At an abstract level, scholars in this vein suggest that news content is a reflection of the composition of the newsroom. Those who advocate the hiring of more female reporters and editors, under the assumption that such a move would necessarily spur more gender equality in news content, implicitly draw on this perspective. For example, in 2000, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) called on news media throughout the world to mark International Women’s Day by turning over decision-making responsibility to women for one day in order to show how the news could be different under their direction (Pantin, 2001).

Some research suggests a direct link between the gender composition of the newsroom and women’s presence and depiction in news content. For example, Zoch and Turk (1998) and Zeldes and Fico (2005) show that, while male sources show up much more often than female sources in news content, female reporters tend to draw on female sources more often than do male reporters. Similarly, Devitt (2002) demonstrates that, in news coverage of American gubernatorial races, male reporters tended to focus on female candidates’ personal characteristics (e.g. age, personality, attire) even as they focused on male candidates’ views on policy issues, yet female reporters treated male and female candidates similarly, focusing on each candidate’s policy views. Craft and Wanta (2004) highlight the importance of female decision-makers in the news production process: at newspapers with a higher proportion of female editors, male and female reporters covered similar issues; at newspapers with a higher proportion of male editors, male reporters tended to be assigned to political stories while their female counterparts tended to be assigned to education stories.

For the period covered in this study, research shows that women’s presence in American newsrooms grew over time. Between 1971 and 2002, women jumped from 20.3% to 33% of American journalists, an advance that exceeded that made by women as a whole in the American civilian labor force. However the story is more complicated than one of secular growth. Virtually all of this increase in women’s presence in newsrooms was made between 1971 and 1983, when women rose from 20.3% to 33.8% of journalists. Since then, the gender balance among journalists has remained constant (Weaver et al., 2007: 8). A similar story can be told about women’s access to decision-making positions. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, into the 1970s, women were marginalized from positions of power in newsrooms and news organizations (Robertson, 1992). More recent data suggest that, between 1966 and 2006, women made gains at the editorial and managerial levels, though scholars disagree on whether women continued to gain greater access to these positions from the early 1990s onwards (Lacey, 2007; Selzer & Company, 2002; Strupp, 2003). Overall, the trend has been towards greater gender equality in American newsrooms and among editors and managers, though women’s access appears to have leveled off in the latter half of the period examined here, and men continue to occupy the majority of positions at all levels in news organizations. This approach leads us to expect that, just as women’s presence in the newsroom grew into the 1980s but then leveled off, so too will women’s presence in news photos have increased into the 1980s but not beyond that, with no difference between elite and non-elite newspapers.

A third approach suggests that journalists’ own personalities and commitments mean little in the face of organizational demands. This approach emphasizes the importance of constraints imposed on journalists and other actors by newsgathering routines (e.g. deadlines, news beats), organizational policies (e.g. workplace structure), external actors (e.g. the need to cultivate positive relationships with sources), and other organizational or micro-structural elements of the media system. For example, drawing on qualitative research in newsrooms and with news producers, Tuchman (1978b) and Gans (1980) separately conclude that such routines play an important role in shaping what does and does not make it into the news and, moreover, that they do so in a way that tends to reproduce status quo power hierarchies in society. Through a reliance on beats, ‘legitimate’ sources, notions of objectivity, and other patterns and ideologies, journalists and the organizations they work for help reproduce the legitimacy of those with power and the ways in which they perceive the world.

This reproduction of the status quo occurs in several different ways. Routines themselves can directly limit what ends up in the news. For example, in Tuchman’s (1978b) study of reporting on the American women’s movement, evening and weekend meetings held by movement participants who held full-time day jobs were neglected because they fell outside journalists’ normal schedule. Workplace routines and culture can also entrench an ideology of male domination among both male and female employees and managers. For example, while women are more present in sports newsrooms today than in the past, they still feel ‘invisible’ to their colleagues, are treated as if they are expected to know less and accept menial assignments, and are the targets of sexist language (Miller and Miller, 1995). Tuchman (1978b) shows that female reporters were often the harshest interviewers and critics of the women’s movement because organizational ideologies demanded that they remain detached and critical, a task that female reporters might have felt especially compelled to take on in order to prove their reportorial abilities to their male colleagues.

A large body of research on gender inequality in media representation offers support for this approach. A number of studies (e.g. Liebler and Smith, 1997; Ross, 2007; Whitlow, 1977) find that female reporters are just as likely as their male colleagues to prioritize male sources and male newsmakers. Other studies highlight the vast under-representation of women in the news (e.g. Davis, 1982; Freedman and Fico, 2005; GMMP, 2005, 2010; Lont and Bridge, 2010). These studies are buttressed by more wide-ranging analyses (e.g. Douglas, 2010; Wolf, 1991) that underline the finding that women continue to be marginalized and objectified in the media. Taken together, research on the importance of organizational routines leads us to expect that male domination in news photos will have persisted over the period studied here, regardless of women’s increasing presence in newsrooms and among the managerial class, with no difference between elite and non-elite newspapers.

A fourth approach draws a direct link between the content published in a newspaper and the interests and preoccupations of the audience targeted by that newspaper. One major change in attitudes among the American population is relevant here. A number of studies have demonstrated a notable liberalization of attitudes towards women’s role in society since the 1960s (Simon and Landis, 1989; Spence and Hahn, 1997; Twenge, 1997). All social groups seem to have been affected by this trend, but those with higher levels of education appear to have experienced a more significant shift towards liberal attitudes (Thornton and Freedman, 1979; Thornton et al., 1983). This last point is important because, on average, individuals who read elite newspapers have higher levels of education than do those who read non-elite newspapers (e.g. Daily News, 2012; New York Times, 2012). Together, these facts lead us to expect that male domination in news photos will have declined steadily for both newspapers over the decades examined here, but that this decline will have been experienced more intensely in elite newspapers than in non-elite newspapers.

A fifth approach stresses the impact that actors outside the immediate sphere of media production can have on news content. One important ‘actor’ to consider here is the American women’s movement, which saw large-scale mobilization in the late 1960s and 1970s (Boles, 1991). The movement’s growth was accompanied by what Costain and Costain (1987) refer to as periods of ‘routinization’ and ‘institutionalization’, as the movement shifted strategies away from protest towards more established channels of influence, such as lobbying and laying down roots in political parties. This shift met with some success, as the number and proportion of bills concerned with women that were passed by Congress increased significantly during this decade (Klein, 1984: 22). The movement’s wider impact on society also became more obvious as important institutions, such as universities and government bureaucracies, migrated in feminist-friendly directions (Taylor, 1989). Media coverage followed this trend – Cancian and Ross (1981) show that women appeared in the news with increasing regularity over the course of the 1970s as the movement grew in size and strength, while Tuchman (1978b) points out that press coverage of the movement improved notably once it shifted its style and culture in ways that better met the demands of media organizations.

The 1980s proved more difficult for the women’s movement. Rising attacks from the political right, as well as internal division between radical and moderate activists, played a role in the movement’s de-mobilization and abeyance in the 1980s (Bashevkin, 1994; Sawyers and Meyer, 1999). No quantitative study could be found on the impact of the movement’s decline on media content, however qualitative and anecdotal accounts suggest that women’s presence in the news declined (Bradley, 2003; Faludi, 1991). Research on a previous incarnation of the women’s movement suggests that a similar process occurred in the early 20th century: Cancian and Ross (1981) show that while media coverage of women increased as the movement reached a high point, it declined once the movement de-mobilized. This leads us to expect that women’s presence in news photos will have increased as the women’s movement grew in size, strength, and influence in the 1970s, but will have reverted to 1960s levels as the movement declined in the 1980s.

Overall, these approaches offer no consensus on what to expect. The following section reports this study’s findings, after which the usefulness of these approaches is considered.

Methodology

This article presents findings from a longitudinal content analysis of 1252 news photos from two widely read American daily newspapers – the New York Times and the New York Daily News (henceforth, Daily News) between 1966 and 2006. Given that this study examines women’s presence in the news, photographs that appeared in advertisements, classifieds, and obituaries were excluded from the analysis.

The year 1966 was chosen as the starting point for the sample as this was not long before Tuchman (1978a) wrote of women’s ‘symbolic annihilation’ in the media. Data from this year establishes a baseline against which to compare data from later years. Photos were drawn from a wide range of editions published in 1966, 1976, 1986, 1996, and 2006. Reducing the number of collection years from 40 to five allowed me to gather large enough samples for each collection year (approximately 125 images for each paper in each collection year) to say with some confidence that the patterns observed in each sample are representative of patterns in the wider population of photographs for each of those years. This made it possible to assess change over time. However, limiting the number of collection years to five also meant that this study potentially ignores changes that might have occurred in non-collection years. Findings should therefore be interpreted with a degree of caution.

For each of the five collection years, images were randomly sampled using a multi-layered process that randomized day of the year, page number, and location on the page. For example, in 2006, for each image sampled that year, I randomly selected a day of the year, then randomly selected a page number within that day’s edition, and then randomly selected which image on that page to use (if there were multiple images on that page). Given that I sampled approximately 250 images in each of the sample years, this process brought me into contact with photographs in a wide range of editions, in a diversity of sections of the newspaper, throughout the full 12 months of each year. Of course, this sampling technique does not reflect how people actually read the newspaper. Instead, it is designed to increase our knowledge about women’s presence (or absence) from news photography in general. This goal calls forth the need to address the overall population of news images, not just those on the front or back pages of papers or sections.

This study concentrates on two aspects of the photographs sampled: presence and context. The former allows me to assess who shows up in the news, while the latter allows me to assess the gender distribution of images across different spheres of news.

In coding for presence, I categorized all photos with only or mostly women together as ‘women’, and all photos with only or mostly men as ‘men’. A third category was created for images where men and women appear in equal number. In a small number of cases (2.2 % of total images), no person appeared in the image or the person in the image was too distant or too blurry to determine the person’s sex. In such cases, the image in question was coded as ‘other’. Given the small size of this latter category, it is excluded from the discussion of findings below.

For context, I used an iterative process to develop categories. I first examined a test sample of images, from which a short list of relevant categories was derived. I then tested those categories on a second set of images, revising the short list of categories where needed. I ended with a list of six categories: politics/business; sports; entertainment/fashion/lifestyle; community/education/social services; crime/violence/social problem; other. For both newspapers, the three most common contexts found were: entertainment/fashion/lifestyle (30.9% of combined sample); politics/business (29% of combined sample); and sports (18.9% of combined sample). Below, where context is discussed, I focus my analysis on these contexts alone.

The context of images is often obvious upon first glance. For example, a photo of a football player scoring a touchdown would be categorized under ‘sports’ without much thought. However, not all photos are so easy to categorize. In instances where the photo offers few clues about context, the coder was directed to glance at the text around the image, such as nearby headlines or image text, in order to learn more about the context. For example, while a photo of three casually dressed men talking privately could fall into any number of context categories, nearby text indicating that the men are politicians would lead the coder to categorize the image under ‘politics and business’.

All images in the study were coded by one researcher. To check coder reliability, a pilot study was conducted by this researcher and one other researcher using a separate sample of 84 news images. Both researchers independently coded all 84 images in the pilot study using the coding procedures laid out above. This test yielded very high reliability scores for both the ‘presence’ (Scott’s pi = 0.957) and ‘context’ (Scott’s pi = 0.966) variables.

The choice to examine the New York Times and the Daily News was driven by several factors. First, both papers have very large audiences, making them important outlets for the dissemination of information and opinion in one of the world’s largest media markets. In 2011, the New York Times had 1,150,589 daily weekday readers, while the Daily News had 605,677 readers; they were the country’s third and fourth largest dailies (Lulofs, 2011). Second, the two audiences compare and contrast in important ways. For both papers, the audience is comprised of approximately 50% women and 50% men. Yet, reflecting a general difference between elite and non-elite newspapers, the typical reader of the New York Times has more formal education than is the case for the Daily News (Daily News, 2012; New York Times, 2012). This is an important difference because previous research has suggested a link between higher education and more liberal attitudes towards women’s role in society. If newspapers tailor their content according to the interests and preoccupations of their target audiences, we should see greater convergence in the presence of men’s and women’s news photographs in the New York Times than in the Daily News. Finally, there is a need to expand understanding of non-elite media. Most media research that focuses on newspapers focuses exclusively on elite newspapers.³ There are often good reasons for focusing on these publications (e.g. agenda-setting function for other publications), yet this bias in the literature has left other areas of the newspaper field under-researched. Of course, the decision to focus in depth on the historical experience of two American newspapers also means that caution should be used in any attempt to generalize the conclusions reported below.

Findings

The first and most striking finding is that photos of men overwhelmingly dominate the news in both newspapers and that this domination has persisted for much of the 40 years. In the New York Times, photos containing only or mostly men comprised 81.6% of all images in 1966 and 61.6% of all images in 2006. In the Daily News, photos of men comprised 63.7% in 1966 and 69.5% in 2006. Figures 1 and 2 show the distribution of photos over the period studied. For both papers, the difference between the proportion of men’s and women’s photos is statistically significant in all years.⁴

Figure 1.

New York Times total images, divided by gender (%)

Figure 2.

Daily News total images, divided by gender (%)

Men’s photos dominate news coverage in both papers, but not to the same degree. Comparing Figures 1 and 2, we see that male domination declined slightly over time in the New York Times, while it remained high in the Daily News. The difference between the proportion of men’s and women’s photos in the New York Times sample was 68.8 percentage points in 1966, but only 34.4 percentage points in 2006. By contrast, the differences in the Daily News were 46.8 percentage points in 1966 and 48.9 percentage points in 2006.

These trajectories were not entirely smooth. For both papers, the year 1976 stands out as an anomaly. In that year, both papers saw a convergence in men’s and women’s photos, followed by a reassertion of greater male domination in the following decade. This trend was more pronounced for the Daily News than for the New York Times.

Figures 3 and 4 show the breakdown of contexts for women’s photos. For women, the most common context throughout the period studied was entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle. This was true for both newspapers, but more so in the New York Times where women rarely appeared in other contexts. Interestingly, entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle photos comprised the vast majority of women’s photos in each of the years when women showed up most often in the overall sample – 1976 and 2006 for the New York Times (see Figure 1) and 1976 for the Daily News (see Figure 2).

Figure 3.

New York Times context of photos containing only or mostly women (%)

Figure 4.

Daily News context of photos containing only or mostly women (%)

Figures 5 and 6 show the breakdown of contexts for men’s photos. In this area, both newspapers experienced a dramatic decline in politics and business coverage. For the New York Times, it declined from 72.5% of overall photos in 1966 to 37.7% in 2006. For the Daily News, the decline was from 54.4% in 1966 to 15.4% in 2006. Both papers also saw an accompanying rise in the use of sports, entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle photos.

Figure 5.

New York Times context of photos containing only or mostly men (%)

Figure 6.

Daily News context of photos containing only or mostly men (%)

Figures 7 and 8 focus on the entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle context, which comprised 32.3% of the overall New York Times sample and 29.5% of the overall Daily News sample. Here, several findings are worth highlighting. First, while this context was by far the most common context for women in both newspapers (see Figures 3 and 4), photos of men were also very common in this context, sometimes even outnumbering those of women, as they did in 1986 and 1996 for both papers. This suggests that the entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle context is shared by women and men, not dominated by one or the other. Second, in the years in which women show up most often in the overall sample – 1976 and 2006 for the New York Times (see Figure 1) and 1976 for the Daily News (see Figure 2) – women also show up most frequently in entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle photos. This is most conspicuous in the 1976 sample for the Daily News, where men’s and women’s photos converged dramatically (see Figure 2) and where women dominate the entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle context.

Figure 7.

New York Times entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle photos (%)

Figure 8.

Daily News entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle photos (%)

Figures 9 and 10 show the distribution of photos appearing in the sports context. The only observation to be made here is how seldom women show up in this context in both newspapers. Over the decades examined here, men appear in 93.1% of sports photos in the New York Times and 88.7% of sports photos in the Daily News.

Figure 9.

New York Times sports photos (%)

Figure 10.

Daily News sports photos (%)

Figures 11 and 12 show the distribution of photos appearing in the politics and business context. The story here is similar to that for the sports context: photos of men absolutely dominate this context. A small exception appears in the 1966–86 period for the Daily News, where women’s photos rise slightly and men’s photos fall slightly as a proportion of politics and business photos in those years. However, this trend is undone in the following decades as male dominance reasserts itself in this context.

Figure 11.

New York Times politics and business photos (%)

Figure 12.

Daily News politics and business photos (%)

Discussion

These findings make clear that the ‘mirror’ thesis – that news content mirrors changes in the composition of the world outside the newsroom – holds no water. The persistent domination of men’s photos between 1966 and 2006 fails to reflect the increasing presence of women in a number of spheres of society, from politics to workplaces and beyond. Moreover, the evolution of news photos away from politics and business is hardly reflective of any real disappearance of politics and business.

These findings also call into question the suggestion that news content reflects the gender composition of the newsroom. Women comprise a larger proportion of American journalists, editors, and managers today than they did in the 1960s, yet the data presented in this article show that women do not show up much more often in news photos today than they did four decades ago. While it is true that women’s increasing presence in newsrooms paralleled their increasing presence in news photos between 1966 and 1976, this is likely only a coincidence. In 1976, just as in other years, women showed up overwhelmingly in entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle photos in both papers. If the rising presence of women in newsrooms, including in decision-making positions, was responsible for women’s increasing presence in news coverage, we would expect to see women appear in a range of news contexts or at least more often in the more prestigious politics and business context, yet this was not the case. Furthermore, women’s presence in news photos decreased in 1986 despite there being no drop in women’s presence in newsrooms, suggesting no link between these factors.

By contrast, research on the routines and bureaucratic practices of journalists and news organizations makes room for continuing male domination in news content despite a compositional change in newsroom staff and changes in the world beyond the newsroom. Here, male domination in news photos might have been institutionalized through a reliance on news beats and notions of ‘legitimacy’ and ‘newsworthiness’ that privileged men. The findings reported in this study buttress past research that demonstrated ongoing gender discrimination despite the rising participation of women, even in supervisory and managerial positions (Liebler and Smith, 1997; Miller and Miller, 1995; Milkie, 2002; Ross, 2007; Whitlow, 1977). Nevertheless, despite its usefulness in understanding stability over time, this approach offers no help in understanding important changes, such as the shift away from politics and business reporting towards sports, entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle reporting, and the convergence and divergence of men’s and women’s photos that occurred in both newspapers in the 1976–86 period.

One possibility is that newspapers tailored their output to evolving audiences. From the 1960s onwards, the American population – particularly those with higher levels of education – experienced a liberalization of attitudes towards women’s role in society. This approach appears relevant in explaining why the New York Times, with a more educated audience, saw greater convergence in men’s and women’s photos than did the Daily News. Yet other findings contradict this apparent helpfulness. The presence of women in the New York Times increased over time, but not because they showed up more often among politics and business photos, or in any other context for that matter. Rather, their rising presence had more to do with a shift towards entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle coverage. This is not the trend we would expect if liberalizing attitudes about women’s role in society were driving changes in news content.

The rise and decline of the women’s movement might help explain the convergence of men’s and women’s photos in 1976, followed by divergence in 1986. In the 1970s, when the movement reached its peak and when it became more media savvy, its impact might have been felt in the gender balance of news photos. Equally, as the movement de-mobilized in the 1980s, journalists and other newsmakers might have reverted to the news beats, sources, and topics that they considered newsworthy and legitimate, thereby bringing about a reversion to male dominance in news photos. These findings appear to confirm previous research linking the rise and fall of the women’s movement to the improvement and later degradation of women’s coverage in the news media (Bradley, 2003; Cancian and Ross, 1981; Faludi, 1991; Tuchman, 1978b). Yet other findings call into question the relevance of this approach. While women did show up more often in 1976, they showed up overwhelmingly in entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle photos, not in photos relating to politics, where we would expect them to show up if movement activities became the focus of news content. At the same time, in both papers, we also see an overall decline in the proportion of photos showing up in the politics and business context, as well as a rise in sports, entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle photos, a trend that we would not expect to see if heightened political conflict were driving changes in news content.

An alternative approach to explaining the findings presented here needs to confront head-on the shifting distribution of news content across the three major news contexts. The most significant change at both newspapers concerns the shift away from politics and business coverage towards sports, entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle coverage. This is illustrative of a wider shift among newspapers towards ‘tabloid’ coverage, a trend that has seen, among other things, an increase in coverage of ‘diversions’ such as sports, entertainment, and scandal and a decrease in coverage of ‘hard news’, such as politics, the economy, and business. Past research suggests tabloid journalism has increased over the decades examined here, and that elite papers have joined their non-elite counterparts in adopting these techniques, though not to the same extent (McNair, 2000; Sparks and Tulloch, 2000; Esser, 1999).

Returning to our findings, it is clear that politics and business coverage in both papers declined significantly between 1966 and 2006. In the New York Times, photos in this context declined from 61.6% of total photos in 1966 to 31.2% in 2006. In the Daily News, they declined from 34.7% in 1966 to 12.2% in 2006. In their place, both papers increasingly added coverage of sports, entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle, yet they pursued different strategies in doing so. The New York Times significantly increased entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle coverage without expanding sports coverage by much. This left entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle as the most common context in the New York Times in 2006, followed by politics and business, and lastly by sports. By contrast, the Daily News dramatically increased its coverage of sports, but did not increase its coverage of entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle issues. By 2006, this left sports as the most common context in that paper, followed by entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle, and lastly by politics and business.

These changes had important repercussions for the gender distribution of photos in both papers. In the New York Times, the slight convergence of men’s and women’s photos over time was the result of a decline in politics and business photos (which men dominated over time) and a rise in entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle photos (where neither men nor women dominated over time). Men dominated the sports context in the New York Times, but this context never grew large enough to have much of an impact on the overall gender distribution of photos. The net effect was a slight convergence in men’s and women’s photos over time. By comparison, in the Daily News, the sustained dominance of men’s photos was the product of a decline in politics and business coverage (which men dominated over time) and a rise in sports coverage (which men also dominated over time). Women showed up just as often as men in entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle coverage, but the paper did not increase its coverage of these issues over time. The net effect of these changes was sustained male dominance, as one sphere dominated by men’s photos was replaced by another.

Looking specifically at the convergence of men’s and women’s photos that occurred in 1976, this approach is again helpful. In both papers, coverage of politics and business (which men dominated over time) declined significantly between 1966 and 1976. In its place, both papers increased entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle coverage (where women showed up more often in 1976). By contrast, in 1986, the divergent strategies of the two papers became more apparent. In the Daily News, sports coverage (which men dominated) displaced entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle coverage (which neither men nor women dominated over time) as the most common context, resulting in a reassertion of male dominance in news photos. The New York Times did not increase its meager sports coverage (which men dominated over time) but instead further increased its entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle coverage (which neither men nor women dominated over time). Nevertheless, the product of this move was different than it had been in 1976 because more men appeared in entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle photos in this year, a changing of guards not uncommon in this context where neither men nor women dominated over time. These trends suggest that the 1976 convergence and its subsequent undoing were anomalies arising from the two papers’ tabloid strategies, not the product of the liberalization of attitudes towards women’s role in society or of the impact of the women’s movement.

Taken together, these findings highlight the impact of divergent tabloidization strategies on the gender distribution of news photos. The in-depth focus on the historical experience of two newspapers provides useful data in this area, yet its findings should be treated as suggestive rather than conclusive. The New York Times and the Daily News are not representative of the range of newspapers in the United States. Furthermore, the decision to focus data collection on five years (1966, 1976, 1986, 1996, and 2006) over the course of a 40-year period raises the possibility that some shifts in news content might not show up in our findings. Nevertheless, this study raises provocative questions about tabloidization and its impact on the gender distribution of news coverage. Future research needs to expand this line of examination to a wider body of newspapers and to increase the number and range of years studied.

Footnotes

Notes

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