Talking Tough: Gender and Reported Speech in Campaign News Coverage

Abstract

Reported speech represents an important means of analyzing how party leaders’ messages are mediated by the masculine norms of political reporting. Building on the notion of “gendered mediation”, we argue that conventional news frames construct politics in stereotypically masculine terms and we examine the implications of these news frames for the coverage of female leaders. Content analysis of reported speech in television news coverage of the 1993 Canadian election, combined with the results of an experiment, reveals that the speech of the two women leaders was subject to more interpretation by the media and was reported in more negative and aggressive language. The study concludes that gendered mediation serves to hinder women’s chances of electoral success.