Blog Post Week 3
Oct. 7, 2025
The media does a lot in our day-to-day lives. It allows us to gather information, lets us know breaking news and gives us the ability to speak about urgent issues.
The other thing it does is shape our perceptions and our world.
When we look at history, we also look at how women have attributed. They way women navigated journalism, how thy are portrayed to this day and what our stereotypes are all have one common factor: the constant fight against inequality and feminism. Throughout decades and especially in the last ten years, we have better understood the barriers on women and the possibility of change.
The history of women in the journalism field is filled with exclusion and persistence. Lind’s section Historical Contexts of Women’s and People of Color’s Access to Broadcasting (p. 274-280), we see how minorities and women did not have access to equal opportunities in media, which limited them to roles that were “lesser” or left out completely. Even when women did have the opportunity, their work was looked at as uninteresting and unimportant. Women journalists had to fight tooth and nail for credibility in a field of masculinity.
News media has always portrayed women differently than men, and media continues to do so. The chapter Never About My Work, Never About My Motivations (p. 269-263) details how women journalists of color are judged by their appearance, race and gender as opposed of skills. This flows into the broader stereotyped portrayal of women who are astonishingly beautiful and family oriented, while men are portrayed as leader, pioneers of their field or experts.
Different media theories like symbolic annihilation, social cognitive theory and the framing theory all show how inequalities are shown. For symbolic annihilation, we see women not really being covered in major media unless it is applicable. The social cognitive theory illustrates how women are portrayed as passive or a decorative “object”. This is so harmful to gender identity because it reduces our role in society to nothing more than just a mannequin. The framing theory explain how media shapes interpretation. For example, female politicians are framed by their clothing or tone of voice while male politicians are framed by their policies and activities.
A feminist approach to mass media would challenge these stereotypes by questioning whose stories are prioritized, who gets to speak and how power can be gender-ized to help shape coverage. Lind’s Framing Feminism (p. 118-123) demonstrates how feminist critique actually exposes how restricted mass media is and how we can have more equal representation. Cameron Russell’s TED Talk Looks Aren’t Everything does a great job at reminding us that even women who are “benefited” by beauty standards are still held down by them.
By analyzing our history of underrepresentation of women, we can have a better understanding that women have always fought for their place, regardless of the ride. We can move towards the conclusion that women are valued for their voices, work, skill and for their humanity, not just their appearance.