Women's Depiction by the Mass Media

Abstract

So angry at the blatant sexism of the mass media as to be blinded, students of the media's presentation of women have been more politically sophisticated than theoretically sound. In part, their research has been crippled by dependence upon the academic study of mass communications, a field hardly known for its intellectual vigor, but one whose problems must be understood in order to see why research on women and the media is theoretically stalled. The American Study of the Mass Media In the years following World War II, the media grew exponentially. So did study of the media. Perhaps because the media associated with the "mass" were insistently differentiated from high culture and intellectual substance, no academic field was willing to give such study a home. Instead, just as interdisciplinary teams of social scientists had cooperated during the war to study propaganda, they now cooperated to study the mass media. Perhaps defensively, the field became ponderously "scientific." To demonstrate that the media constituted an intellectually valid subject, researchers embraced the sophisticated techniques of modern social science and simultaneously hired themselves out as media consultants. Working for both Madison Avenue and the media conglomerates, they were asked to supply practical answers to seemingly