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Empowering Men:
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Manufacturing Concern:
Chapter
One: Introduction --“The
Five Ws”
Jim Boyce |
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Who, what, where, when and why are the building blocks of journalism. These
basic questions -- “the five Ws” --are used to investigate and describe
the news. The same questions could be asked of this thesis. I would answer
that it examines female and male victims of violence (who) as they are portrayed
in the headlines (what) of the seven daily newspapers indexed by The Canadian
News Index (where) between 1989 and 1992 (when) in order to explore the
scope, focus, accuracy and consequences of coverage of gender and violence
(why). This chapter explores these questions in detail.
Who? Adult Male and Female Victims of Violence
This thesis compares and contrasts headline coverage of male and female
victims of violence.
The term “victims
of violence” raises two obvious questions.
What is meant by “victims”? And what is meant by “violence”?
Sources on crime -- surveys, academic studies and police reports – are
based primarily on legal categories. The media usually report and rely on
these sources and categories and I will also use them. A typical example is
a Statistics Canada report called Patterns
of Criminal Victimization in Canada.
The “violent crime” category includes assault, sexual assault,
and robbery (because it is a survey, the category does not include murder)
(Sacco and Johnson 1990:21).
Another Statistics Canada report, “Gender Differences Among
Violent Crime Victims”, is based on police reports and includes similar,
although more detailed, categories. Violence
is seen to include assault, sexual assault, robbery (including violence or
threats of violence) and “other” acts such as homicide and attempted
murder (Trevethan and Sarnagh
1991:16). Considering this,
”victims” in this thesis will refer to people who have been
the subject of unwanted physical assaults by others. “Violence”
will refer to these acts of physical assault.’ This definition describes
what are commonly understood by the media, police and academia to be victims
of violence and it is this general connotation, rather than a broader standard,
that I wish to use. It follows that some types of violence, like euthanasia
and suicide, are not considered in this thesis even though the latter appears
to have a strong link with gender.2
I have chosen to focus on adult rather than child victims
for several reasons. First, sources on crime are more likely to distinguish
the gender of victims when addressing adults. Second, children are often categorized
without regard to gender: the terms “wife abuse” and ‘‘violence
against women’’ are used frequently while the terms “boy abuse”
and “violence against girls” are not. Third, studying adult and
child victims would go beyond the scope of a manageable thesis. Finally, the
issue of violence against women has received an increasing amount of media
attention in the past decade and merits particular attention.3
This thesis will also focus on victimization as a societal
issue. I am interested in media coverage of trends of violence rather than
individual cases (although I recognize that there will be some overlap and
that an individual case can be depicted as representative or symbolic of a
trend). An example would be coverage of the murder rate in contrast to that
of an individual murder case. In short, this thesis covers trends in the coverage
of trends. This allows more leeway for general conclusions since media coverage
of these trends can be measured against the sources on which it is based.
What? The Portrayal of Victims in Headlines
My data is necessarily selective since analyzing the portrayal of victims
of violence in all types of media would be an enormous and impractical undertaking.
The focus of this thesis, then, is limited to seven Canadian daily newspapers.
Still, examining every article on victims of violence would also be unmanageable
and I will, therefore, focus on headlines since they provide a succinct guide
to the content of these articles.
The importance of the headline as an indicator has
received considerable academic support. During the 1940s
and 1950s. an emphasis was placed on the headline’s
intended accuracy and its appeal and influence on readers. Tannenbaum
stressed the importance of the headline when he wrote that it “creates
the first mood or impression which subtly and perhaps unconsciously dominates
the reader’s attention.... In a way, it provides a lens through which
the remainder of the story or article is perceived” (1953:197).~
Ten years earlier, in explaining how headlines could be used to further the
war effort, Allport and Lepkin
claimed that “here, in miniature, we have a striking instance of words
as weapons” (1943:212).
More recently, the significance of the headline, both
for the newspaper and the reader, has been emphasized in texts on editing,
academic studies and newspaper style manuals. The general consensus is that
the headline’s primary function is to summarize news articles. The headline
is described as a “news bulletin” (Watanabe et al. 1984:436), “an
abstract of the abstract [the lead]” (Bell 1991:150) and, when properly
summarizing news stories, “a form of index to the page” (Baskette
et al. 1982:174). “The headline that simply summarizes the story as concisely
and accurately as possible,” write Baskette
et al., “is the bread and butter of the headline writer” (l982:174).~
The Globe and Mail Style Manual gives as “one general guideline
worth mentioning” the principle “that a good headline is single-minded,
dealing only with the main thread of the story” (McFarlane
1991:127). This stress on accuracy is supplemented by a concern that headlines
appeal to the reader, reflect the mood of the article and tone of the newspaper,
and stay within the limits posed by practicality (such as space limitations)
and newspaper policy (such as the use of the active rather than passive voice).
Thus, one textbook states that “the first goal, the sine qua non, is
to indicate the reward readers can expect from the story.... The goal is more
than just to tell the story; we must also sell the story” (Gibson
1984:144).6 This
goal, however, is nonetheless seen as linked to accuracy: “few errors
can cause as much gnashing of teeth as a headline that is incorrect”
(150).
Accuracy is also emphasized by journalists who work
at the newspapers studied in this thesis.7 When asked, “What
factors, in order of importance, are considered when writing a headline?”
each included accuracy as the most important characteristic or one among a
few equally important characteristics. An assistant managing editor wrote
that “heads must be accurate and fair above all, and they must deal with
the guts of the story” (Paper3 1993) while Robert Walker, The
Montreal Gazette’s ombudsperson. in a column
responding to my questions, wrote that by far “the most important [factors]
are clarity and accuracy” (1993 :B3).’ The relationship between
the headline and article content was seen as inseparable by an assistant managing
editor who stated: “it’s a little like saying to what extent should
a hockey player be able to skate” (Paper4 1993).
Studies also suggest that newspaper headlines are generally
accurate. Bell, for instance, clipped 360 news stories on climate change in
New Zealand, mailed each to the scientist it most quoted and asked the scientists
whether they thought they and the issue had been accurately portrayed. Using
a five point scale that ranged from “absolutely accurate” to “extremely
inaccurate,” he found that “over 80 per cent of stories are rated
no worse than slightly inaccurate.” More to the point, he found that
12.1 per cent of the 201 articles with inaccuracies were seen to have inaccurate
headlines (1991:2l7-8)9.
Taking a different approach, Marquez compared the headlines
and content of 292 “hard” news articles published in 1978 in four
large Philadelphia dailies. He found that 75 per cent of the headlines
were accurate, with 14 per cent and 11 per cent being “misleading”
and “ambiguous” respectively (1980:33). In terms of headlines related
to “Law and law enforcement,” 86.2 per cent were rated accurate
(35).10 The
general accuracy of headlines was suggested by Watanabe et al. who, in discussing
the problems eighth-graders had using headlines to predict the content of
news articles, stated that “a class of undergraduate college students,
on the other hand, had no problem with the activity” (1984:436).
Accuracy aside, headlines significantly influence how
the news is interpreted. Tannenbaum demonstrated
this by presenting 398 readers with the front page of a student newspaper
in which an article had been removed and replaced with a murder story. Each
reader received the same murder story but only one of three headlines: one
suggesting the suspect was guilty, one suggesting innocence
and one that was neutral. Opinions as to the guilt or innocence of the suspect,
it turned out, were linked to which headline had been read. Those reading
the “guilty” headline believed the suspect was guilty, and so on.
Less significant results were obtained with a story on the merits of different
college programs but were “still indicative of the same general effect
of the headline” (1953:195).”
Tannenbaum’s conclusions
are especially important given that they confirm the intuition that headlines
are highly influential on their own. The average reader does not have time
to read every article and, as Berner writes, “readers
form their impressions of the news -- in fact, believe they are getting all
of a story -- from the headline. Headlines bear a heavy burden in communicating
clearly what’s in a newspaper” (1991:153).12 This
was borne out in an early study by Emig who found
that the 375 people he surveyed spent an average of 32 minutes per day reading
newspapers. One hundred and ninety-two of them claimed to base their opinion
on headlines alone, while an additional 144 claimed to base their opinion
on both the headline and article (1928:53). “The formation of public
opinion, in so far as the newspaper is concerned,” he wrote, “depends
largely, the survey would seem to indicate, on the reading or skimming of
headlines” (1928:55). And as Tannenbaum
found, the less likely the article was read, the more likely the reader was
to side with the bias of the headline: “When we consider how much of
newspaper reading actually falls into this category, the potentiality of the
headline as an instrument of bias becomes even more notable” (1953:196).”
What matters most for my study, though, is that newspaper headlines are
generally intended to represent the content of news articles accurately and
more often than not shape a reader’s understanding of those articles.
When? From 1989 to 1992
My thesis will examine four years of headlines. I chose the years 1989 to 1992 so that the sample would include
headlines appearing before and after “The Montreal Massacre” --
the murder of 14 women engineering students in Montreal in December 1989.
The Montreal murders received widespread media attention and I hope to determine
whether there is a shift in the focus and amount of coverage of male and female
victims of violence. This four-year period is also highlighted by other events,
particularly the hearings held by The National Panel on Violence Against
Women and the organization of the White Ribbon Campaign to oppose violence
against women.
In order to provide some perspective on these four
years, I will briefly examine headlines appearing in 1984. This will allow
me to measure relatively recent headlines against some indication of the nature
and extent of coverage of gender and violence five years before the period
being studied.
Where? The Newspapers Indexed by The
Canadian News Index14
My source of headlines is The Canadian News Index or CNI. It indexes
seven daily newspapers: The Halifax Chronicle Herald, The Montreal Gazette,
The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Winnipeg Free Press, Calgary Herald
and The Vancouver Sun.15 The
CNI’s mandate is “within the bounds of
economy and practicality, to be an index not only to Canadian news, but also
to Canadian newspapers,” and it selects its sources “for geographic
coverage and editorial quality” (CNI 1990:vi). It is the standard library
reference book for Canadian news articles between 1980 and 1992.
“Editorial quality” is not defined by CNI
but has been by others. Ericson, Baranek
and Chan distinguish “popular” and “quality” newspapers.
Popular newspapers, they argue, seek acceptance through seeming to be close
to reality. Their formats thus incorporate iconic elements, including pictures,
brief items on simple themes, strongly opinionated
columns on simple themes, colloquial expressions, and parochial interests....
Playing on the heart, and on lower regions of the anatomy, popular newspapers
are able to effect a sense of what it is “really”
like to be involved in a situation (1991:35).
Quality newspapers, on the other hand, seek
acceptance through more “literary” and symbolic means. Their formats
include longer items, features, and continuing stories on complex matters
affecting business and political elites on a national and international scale.
There is a concern with being a source of record both at the moment and historically,
resulting in close attention to language and to mechanisms for correcting
errors that exhume accuracy and authority (35).
They also describe a third type, “the mass newspaper,” which
is a hybrid of popular and quality newspapers.’6
These distinctions were also recognized by the Canadian
Royal Commission on Newspapers. When the Commission reported that “the
two most talked-about newspapers in the country are the Globe and Mail
and the Toronto Sun (and its satellite Suns in Edmonton and Calgary),”
it distinguished between, [Globe and Mail] readers
nationwide who are interested in business and economic issues, national politics,
and the world scene... [and Toronto Sun] readers who want a quick skim
of the news, briefly written and in a lively style, with lots of columns,
strongly-worded editorials on simple themes, good sports coverage, and generous
dollops of what has given the tabloids in London’s Fleet Street the generic
name of “tit-and-bum” newspapers (Bain 1981:70).
Given the definitions provided by the Canadian Royal
Commission on Newspapers, and Ericson, Baranek
and Chan, I will consider the newspapers indexed by CNI to be “quality”
rather than “popular” or, at the least, to tend towards quality,
the mass newspaper serves as a dividing line between the two. It follows that
the conclusions of this thesis apply to what are plausibly among the most
accurate Canadian newspapers.
In terms of circulation, these newspapers rank among
the top 21 in Canada with all but The Chronicle-Herald among the top
14. When only English-speaking, nonfinancial
dailies are considered, all rank within the top fifteen, including four of
the top five.’7 The Chronicle-Herald is the lowest
of the seven but is the highest-circulation newspaper in the Maritimes (Holmes
and Taras 1992:349-352). The paid circulation of
these newspapers is 1,364,516 for an average weekday, 1,739,252 on Saturday
and 869,894 on Sunday (Canadian Advertising Rates & Data 1989~1993).18 Individual
circulation figures are as follows:
| |
Mon-Fri |
Sat |
Sun |
Vancouver
Sun |
215 805 |
266 808 |
* |
Calgary
Herald |
135 841 |
136 961 |
119 487 |
Winnipeg
Free Press |
163 041 |
229 011 |
149 196 |
Globe
and Mail |
185 623 |
185 623 |
* |
Toronto
Star |
406 745 |
586 863 |
357 835 |
Montreal
Gazette |
169 255 |
245 780 |
155 170 |
Halifax
Chronicle-Herald |
88 206 |
88 206 |
88 206 |
* not published |
1 364 516 |
1 739 252 |
869 894 |
CNI also states that the newspapers indexed are selected for their “geographic
coverage.” They span six provinces, ranging from British Columbia to
Nova Scotia, with Ontario the only province to contain two (The Toronto
Star and The Globe and Mail). In
the context of this thesis, this geographic distribution prevents newspapers
in one or two regions from overwhelming those in other regions, providing
an indication of how victims of violence are portrayed throughout the country.
Because these newspapers are English and urban-based, they
do not provide a representative sample of French newspapers or those in rural
areas or small cities. Even so, it is worth noting that an important
Montreal newspaper is included, that Canada is a highly urbanized country
and that various editions of these seven newspapers are sold in areas outside
the cities in which they are published. Though CNI has limited resources and
cannot index every paper, it is the most extensive, publicly-accessible index
of Canadian newspapers.
A final attribute of these newspapers that warrants
mention is ownership. It is distributed among four groups: Southam
Incorporated (Calgary Herald, The Montreal Gazette,
The Vancouver Sun), Thomson Newspapers Limited (The Globe and Mail,
Winnipeg Free Press), Torstar (The Toronto Star) and the independently-owned
Chronicle-Herald. While it might be argued that these papers generally
reflect the bias of business, their diverse ownership prevents them from reflecting
the bias of a single owner. When considered in conjunction with geographical
distribution and high circulation, the headlines found in CNI represent a
significant, national sample from what are arguably Canada’s most accurate
newspapers. The importance of newspapers as a medium of information makes
these headlines even more significant.’9
Why? To Determine the Scope, Focus, Accuracy and Consequences of Coverage
of Gender and Violence
A 1988 Statistics Canada survey
of 9870 Canadians found that, “in general, men face greater risks of
criminal violence.., than do women” (Sacco
and Johnson 1990:24). Statistics showed that nearly twice as many men were
murdered as women (Statistics Canada 1989:65). Perhaps more surprisingly,
a study of 562 couples in Calgary revealed that “wife-to-husband violence
prevailed over husband-to-wife violence” (Brinkerhoff
and Lupri 1988:429).20 Yet
five years later, the final report of the National Panel on Violence Against
Women stated:
Almost daily, newspapers, and radio and television broadcasts carry chilling
reports of women harassed, women terrorized, women raped, women shot, women
bludgeoned, women killed -- almost always by men. So prevalent are these events
that they have been described by one parliamentary committee as a “war
against women.” And the accounts that reach the media are only a fraction
of the events that never get reported, that remain invisible (Marshall and
Vaillancourt 1993:8).
Some obvious questions
arise. Are the newspaper reports described in the above quote an accurate
indication of violence in our society? Is violence against women more significant
and deserving of attention than violence against men because the perpetrators
tend to be members of the opposite sex? And, fundamentally, what status does
our society give to female and male victims? We can begin to answer some of
these questions by examining how the media portrayed victims of violence in
the years between 1988, when the above findings were gathered or published,
and 1993, when the final report of the National Panel on Violence Against
Women was released.
The scope
and importance of studies of media coverage can be gleaned from a few of the
thousands that have been published.21 Most
relevant to this thesis are studies on headlines and studies on media coverage
of violence. Taken in conjunction with the common finding that headlines reflect
the content of newspaper articles, these studies suggest that headlines are
biased. Mahin, for example, argued that biased headlines
propelled the United States government into war against Spain:
[The press]
set about to drive the public to drive the government to declare war and it
did this not through logic but through visual appeal to the emotions. Headlines
were many inches, sometimes half the depth of the page, in height; they constantly
played up the word “WAR!” standing alone and in various juxtapositions,
and the whole front page was practically one of headlines, literally resembling
a circus poster, and exercising exactly the same hypnotic influence on the
unthinking, while assuming to be spokesman for all.... [W]e went to war with
Spain not because we had discoverable cause in accordance with international
law but because two newspapers [the Hearst and Pulitzer papers], for what
reasons they knew best, willed war (1925:17-18).
In 1942,
Winship and Allport studied
war headlines from a three-month period -- “an interval during which
defeats and discouragements were intermingled with success” -- in a dozen
major American newspapers. Of the 3226 headlines in their sample, 59 per cent
were found to be optimistic, 22 per cent pessimistic and 19 per cent “neutral,
ambiguous, questionable and unclassifiable” (1943:206). Building on this
study, Allport and Lepkin
suggested that newspapers should purposely slant their headlines to further
the war effort. They had 109 people read headlines that suggested either “good
news” or “bad news,” and rank, on a ten-point scale, whether
each one made them feel like taking a more or less active role in the war.
Although all the headlines created a desire for more active participation,
those suggesting the “enemy” was losing or the “Allies”
were gaining were least likely
to
inspire this feeling while those suggesting the United States was losing,
the allies were losing or the enemy was gaining were most inspiring. They
advised that: “Where there
is no conflict with the truth and wherever it is possible to adapt it
to the necessities of typography and lineation, the choice of a headline
used on any particular story should be guided by consideration of its effectiveness
in increasing morale” (1943:221).
A study
by Kingsbury et al. compared the front-page headlines of a variety of major
American newspapers in 1929 in order to determine how they portrayed three
issues: “preparedness versus disarmament,” Germany’s reparations
and prohibition. They found biases among the headlines. On the issue of prohibition,
for example, the Christian Science Monitor favored the “dry”
side while the Chicago Tribune favored the “wet” side (1934:194-195).
Studies
of coverage of crime have tended to find media to be inaccurate. Bortner
writes:
Despite
their constant attention to crime and related issues, the media provide highly
selective information, for not only do they project erroneous images of certain
aspects of crime, but they also fail to provide any insight whatsoever into
other dimensions of the issue....
Numerous social science inquiries have provided a comparison
between media images of crime and official crime statistics, and the analyses
consistently have demonstrated that media crime does not correspond to the
realities of crime as represented by official statistics (1984:16; also see
Cohen and Young 198 1:21; Sacco and Fair 1992: 19
1).
For example, Sacco
and Fair examined 2027 crime articles which appeared in The Vancouver Sun
in 1980 and found that violent crime received more coverage than statistics
suggested it warranted. Homicide and rape accounted for .04 and .15 per cent
of reported crime, respectively, yet were the topic of 39.01 and 4.06 per
cent of the articles. On the other hand, break and enter, and theft, accounted
for 79.43 per cent of crime reported to the police yet received 15.32 per
cent of coverage (1992:195). Mawby and Brown studied
every second crime story from the June 1979 edition of eight national newspapers
and one local newspaper in Great Britain. They found that female victims were
over-represented, being identified as victims in 66.2 per cent of those articles
where gender could be discerned (1984:86).
In terms
of this thesis, a few studies are worth noting in more detail. In Manufacturing
Consent, Herman and Chomsky outline a “propaganda
model” of the media which includes a series of “filters,” such
as a dependency on certain sources of information or advertisers, that narrow
the range of news that passes through the gates and even more sharply limit
what can become ‘big news’ subject to sustained news campaigns”
(1988:31). In a chapter called “Worthy and Unworthy Victims” they
compare American mass media coverage of the 1984 murder of Jerzy
Popieluszko, a priest in Poland, to four cases of
murder in Central America: Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980; four female American
religious workers in 1980;22 72 religious
victims between 1964 and 1978; and 23 religious victims between 1980 and 1985.
Examining the New York Times, Time, Newsweek and CBS
News, they found that coverage of Popieluszko’s
murder was greater than the combined coverage of the other four cases and
write that “a priest murdered in Latin America is worth less than a hundredth
of a priest murdered in Poland” (39). They also found the content of
the coverage to be qualitatively different: “While the coverage of the
worthy victim was generous with gory details and quoted expressions of outrage
and demands for justice, the coverage of the unworthy victims was low-keyed,
designed to keep the lid on emotions and evoking regretful and philosophical
generalities on the omnipresence of violence and the inherent tragedy of human
life” (39).
In Manufacturing the
News, Fishman recounts the creation of a crime wave against the elderly
in New York in 1976. He found that the media reported violence in a way that
exaggerated its prevalence. The process was stimulated by the police, the
media’s key source of information, particularly a special squad dealing
with crimes against the elderly that “felt beleaguered, understaffed,
and... fighting a battle that deserved more attention” (1980:9). When
a series of stories in one paper was picked up by other types of media the
result was the manufacturing of a seven-week crime wave. “The police
wire was steadily supplying the press with fresh incidents almost every day,”
writes Fishman and, even on days when there were few crimes to report, “there
was plenty of activity among police, politicians, and community leaders to
cover” (10).
Both Fishman
and Herman and Chomsky state that the media bias
they found had a large impact on the public. According to Herman and Chomsky,
by downplaying the murders in Central America the media “serve[d] to
mobilize support for the special interests that dominate the state and private
activity” (1988:xi). They write: “A constant focus on victims of
communism helps convince the public of enemy evil and sets the stage for intervention,
subversion, support for terrorist states, an endless arms race, and military
conflict -- all in a noble cause” (xv). According to Fishman,
the
public outcry against these crimes [against the elderly] was almost immediate.
The mayor of New York vowed to make the streets safe for the elderly. He denounced
the juvenile justice system and allocated more manpower to a special police
squad focusing on elderly victimization (the Senior Citizens Robbery Unit).
Bills were introduced in the state legislature to increase punishment for
violent juvenile offenders. Community meetings were held on the problem. Months
later, a nationwide Harris poll showed that fear of this new kind of crime
was widespread (1980:4-5).
Following on these studies,
this thesis examines victims of violence but focuses on their gender rather
than their nationality or age. Given that violence is a public concern, portrayals
of the issue by the media is, as such studies argue, an influential force
in molding public perceptions and public policy. The question of Canadian
newspaper portrayals of male and female victims has already been broached
by Jones, in a 1990 examination of The Globe and Mail. Jones concluded
that the gender of victims was emphasized only in the case of women:
“In practice, the concept of violence against men’ does
not exist, although this category
represents the majority … of acts of violent victimization in Canadian
society” (Jones 1992a:3). According to Jones, statistics showing high
levels of violence against both sexes were misrepresented and/or used selectively
by The Globe and Mail, and “these sub-strategies serve to emphasize
women’s suffering and de-emphasize men’s, while focusing attention
on the stereotype of the male as perpetrator (rather than the victim or survivor)
of violence” (3). In cases
where victims were overwhelmingly male, such as homicide in the workplace,
they were, “likely to be categorized not by gender, but by some
other gender-neutral classification variable (e.g., age, occupation)”
(3). Although the articles in Jones’ sample are limited to a four-month
period and are selected on “the basis of their perceived bias [against
men]” (1), they provide some qualitative evidence of a disparity in coverage
of male and female victims.
This thesis expands upon
Jones’ study. Rather than examine one newspaper over a four-month period,
it examines seven high-circulation, “quality”
newspapers over four years. This larger time period allows for a broader analysis
of news coverage from both a quantitative and a qualitative point of view.
At the very least, I will test Jones’ findings; my hope is to provide
deeper insight into the larger issues surrounding gender and violence.
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