Arab Women in Arab News: Old Stereotypes and New Media

by Amal Al-Malki, David Kaufer, Suguru Ishizaki

This book addresses east-west understandings of Arab women as portrayed through translated media. The vast majority of media studies on Arab women are western-based. They study the effect of western stereotypes in western media depictions of Arab women. There is a vast scholarly literature tracing western stereotypes of Arab women from medieval times to the present. From 1800, the dominant western stereotype of Arab women depicts them as passive and oppressed. Thirty years of social science media research in the west has shown that media images of Arab women reinforce this two hundred year old stereotype. Much of this research has studied silent "image bites" of Arab women, where women are pictured in veils and their own voices are replaced by western captions or voice-overs. This book sets out to answer this question. To answer it, we contracted with a global news translation service from the Middle East to collect and translate a sample of 22 months of new summaries from 103 Arab media sources belonging to 22 Arab countries. Filtering the summaries that contained one or more female keywords (e.g., woman, mother, aunt, sister, she) yielded 2, 061 summaries between September 2005 and June of 2007. Using the 2,061 summaries as input data, a coding scheme was developed for "active" and "passive" female behaviors based on verb-phrase analysis and conventions of English-language news-reporting.

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book should be a primer for any journalist or academic whose work concerns women living in Arab countries. The linguistic coding of the news briefs they sampled was interesting, and I think they did a good job of referencing diverse news sources that covered women from many different walks of life - from newly-elected politicians, businesswomen, students, and women living under threat of war.

That being said, I see it as a good overview or survey, but it left me wanting more at different points in the book. There's not really enough in-depth analysis to be useful for someone seeking specialized knowledge about the subject. The authors cite numerous other scholarly articles and news briefs - many of which I made note of, intending to read later - but just as a compelling story would come up, their analysis and explanation would be cut frustratingly short. It reads like an academic paper, so at times the explanations of methodologies and revisiting stories mentioned much earlier in the book, felt repetitive when brought up again.

Maybe it was outside the scope and intent of the book, or maybe it speaks more to the way that women are, in fact, treated in the news briefs. The portrayals of Arab women are certainly more nuanced than what western readers have been exposed to in the past, but at the same time, we don't come away with more complete knowledge of what her life is like. Her voice is often still relegated to sound-bite quotes, while the rest of the story focuses on the men around her. The authors make an effort to provide "counter-stories" from the perspective of women. If anything, it does provide some ways journalists and editors covering Arab countries can improve: we need more real conversations with women (not just tokenism), and more opportunities to hear their voices.

[Lamya · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book reads more like a research methodology paper. As soon as it engages you with a strong statement as to Arab women in Arab news, it's discussion thereof is brief and somewhat shallow. So far it has been a disappointment -- it's a book that opens up the possibility to more in depth discussions that the book hints at but does not really pursue.

[Shaoola · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is more of a research and it's findings and conclusions rather than a book with a certain developing theme or idea. However, there are a number of interesting findings that raises a number of critical questions regarding our developing world and the importance of gender roles in that development...