Book reviews
Abstract
Media, Culture & Society 22(4) Cynthia Carter, Gill Branston and Stuart Allan (eds), News, Gender and Power. London: Routledge, 1999. This collection of studies of the gendering of journalism and of news in the mainstream media is firmly situated within an academic consensus that an increasingly female labour force in the media, and a mediascape restructuring to meet the perceived taste of female consumers, should not be expected to alter patriarchal practices and conventions. The collection suggests instead that in recent history women have interacted with the news as workers, subjects of media stories, consumers, and in rare cases as 'experts', to make minor modifications in practice and genre, and to contribute in these roles as well as as critics, readers and viewers to the important occasions when, to borrow Lisa McLaughlin's argument about the O.J. Simpson trial, societies are caught with their 'differences showing in public' (p. 84). The collection seeks to account for the apparent paradox in which high female participation in media work and consumption coexists with gender stereotyping, sexualization of women news subjects, gendered norms of rationality and expertise, and trivialization of 'women's concerns'. Part 1 of the book, 'The Gender Politics of Journalism',