Media and newspaper representations

In recent years there has been a large expansion of European scholarship on the representation of men and masculinities in a wide variety of media, including film, television, video, magazines, painting, fine art, music, dance, Internet, photography and advertising (for example, Middleton, 1992; Pedersen et al., 1996; Edwards, 1997; Nixon, 1997; Sterr, 1997; Penttilä, 1999; Jokinen, 2000). However, relatively little attention has been given to the mundane medium of daily newspapers. When studying men, the daily press appears to have been frequently taken-for-granted, unlike, say, Hollywood film. Newspapers are literally everyday phenomena; their very ordinariness may mean that they are not taken as seriously in studies on men, gender relations and media as other ’more dramatic’ or ’glamorous’ media such as film, video and television. Furthermore, newspapers are generally designed for more local, national or regional audiences and markets than some other media, such as Internet websites, mailing lists and newsgroups.