Thematic Network: The Social Problem and Societal Problematisation of Men and Masculinities

IRELAND NATIONAL REPORT ON NEWSPAPER REPRESENTATIONS ON MEN AND MEN’S PRACTICES

WORKPACKAGE 26 , November 2001

Harry Ferguson, with the assistance of Claire Mackinnon

Key points from Irish report

  1. The Irish like their daily newspaper and they tend to prefer the better quality, serious media as opposed to the tabloid press. I chose for this study the Irish Times (the quality broadsheet par excellence, the national ‘paper of record’), Irish Independent (largest daily sale)and Irish Examiner (the most populist/tabloidy of Irish produced papers), which are all broadsheet newspapers. There are no Irish produced daily tabloid newspapers, although there are Irish editions of UK tabloids, like the Sun, Daily Mirror and Daily Star. It was not appropriate to include any of the latter as their Irish content is minimal (no more than c10-20%), which would effectively have meant including a paper that had mostly UK content and production values.
  1. The relatively non-tabloid nature of the Irish press is partly reducible to the strict nature of the libel laws which restrict aggressive investigative journalism, the ‘naming and shaming’ of gay men, politicians, child sex abusers and so on as occurs in the UK, for instance. A second influence is the traditional power of the catholic church which, since the formation of the Irish state in 1922, heavily regulated discourses and images surrounding socio-moral issues. Irish men have traditionally been represented in de-sexualised ways, as the exemplar of traditional hegemonic masculinity has been the celibate priest. The disclosure in the 1990s of significant amounts of child sexual abuse by priests and the systematic cover-up of that abuse by the church has been crucial to weakening the church’s hegemony. The ‘paedophile priest’ has become a key symbol of danger to children, a social construction which is entirely a media event implying clear links between celibacy and child sexual abuse. Significantly, while there are many more convicted sex offenders who are married heterosexual men, malestream heterosexual masculinity within and without the Irish family has not been problematised. This reveals the press’s role in broadly supporting and reproducing normative assumptions about men and gender relations.
  1. In the two week period under review, the overall quantity of articles relating to the specific themes were relatively very low. The majority of articles about men come under the ‘other’ category, accounting for 19.27% of the overall newspaper coverage. Most of these are about men in sport, ie their personal achievements, disappointments and so on, while others are to do with entertainment, featuring well known musicians, actors etc. and politics.
  1. The largest coverage within the four categories only - ie when all other coverage is excluded - concerned social Exclusion at 48%, violences was next at 30%, Home and Work 18%, with health 3.5%.

National media and press background: The Irish context

The Irish like their daily newspaper. And they tend to prefer the better quality, serious media as opposed to the tabloid press. This is reflected in the three papers I have chosen for this study are the Irish Times, Irish Independent and Irish Examiner, which are all broadsheet newspapers. I have included all broadsheets because there are no Irish produced tabloid newspapers, although there are Irish editions of UK tabloids, like the Sun, Daily Mirror and Daily Star. It was not appropriate to include any of the latter as their Irish content is minimal (no more than c10-20%), which would effectively have meant including a paper that had mostly UK content and production values.

All three chosen papers would claim to be ‘serious’ or ‘quality’ broadsheets, yet some are undoubtedly more populist than others. The Irish Times is the Irish quality broadshhet par excellence, widely recognised as the national ‘paper of record’. Its daily sales are in the region of 110,000 per day, its highest circulation ever. By far its biggest sale is in the greater Dublin area, reflecting its appeal to an urban professional readership. The Irish Independent is, however, the largest selling national daily with a circulation of in the region of 155,000 copies per day. While it has general appeal across social groups, it has a large rural audience and is more populist and somewhat less analytical than the Irish Times. The Irish Examiner sells in the region of 65,000 copies per day. Prior to the late-1990s, it was not a national newspaper as such, being the Cork Examiner, serving a daily readership in the Munster (ie, Southern) region of the country. Since going national it has made only modest gains, with an increase of only some 5,000 sales per day. On going national, its editorial policy became more populist, with lighter more tabloidese content - although this stops short of portrayals of naked women. This makes it the closest in the sample to a tabloid, although elements of ‘serious’ comment remain in its values and coverage.

The production values of the Irish press are heavily influenced by two processes. Firstly, the relative absence of a tabloid media or style is partly reducible to the strict nature of the libel laws. These are such that the aggressive investigative journalism, the ‘naming and shaming’ of gay men, politicians, child sex abusers and so on is just not possible in the way that it is in the UK, for instance. The political and public service culture in Ireland is such that resignations for being ‘outed’, or as having failed in one’s public duty are very rare indeed. Politicians are simply not held to account in the same manner as in the UK, or at least they do not take the ultimate step/sanction of resigning; nor are they sacked. Secondly, the traditional power of the catholic church was such that since the formation of the Irish state in 1922, discourses and images surrounding socio-moral issues have been heavily regulated. Until quite recently, censorship has played a powerful role in stopping more explicit sexualised discourses reaching the public domain. This has influenced the construction of gender in a variety of ways. Irish men have traditionally been represented in de-sexualised ways, as the exemplar of traditional hegemonic masculinity has been the celibate priest. Against this background, the disclosure in the 1990s of significant amounts of child sexual abuse by priests and the systematic cover-up of that abuse by the church has been crucial to weakening the church’s hegemony. The ‘paedophile priest’ has become a key symbol of danger to children, a social construction which is entirely a media event in both discursive terms and through dramatic photographic imagery (Ferguson, 1995). This was exemplified in 1998 when an Irish Independent photo of the most notorious clerical child abuser of all, Father Brendan Smyth, being taken into court won the Irish media’s photograph of the year award. Many articles since the nid-1990s have attempted to explore links between celibacy and child sexual abuse, or simply assumed such connections to be apparent. Significantly, while there are many more convicted sex offenders who are married heterosexual men, and while there have been some press photographs of convicted offenders from such backgrounds, there has been no corresponding construction of ‘paedophile fathers’, businessmen, farmers and so on. In effect, malestream heterosexual masculinity within and without the Irish family has not been problematised. This reveals the press’s role in broadly supporting and reproducing normative assumptions about men and gender relations. The assumption is that men’s sexuality is predatory and needs and requires ‘satisfaction’ from an other, that men must have sex and it they do not they will ‘inevitably’ explode and visit their desires on even the most vulnerable members of society.

General treatments and representations of men in Irish newspapers

On the other hand, media interest in men as a distinct area of discourse, as a ‘problem’, has increased significantly in recent years. For the past decade or so the trend has been for ‘crisis of masculinity’ articles to periodically appear, covering such issues as increases in male suicide; problems in male (non-)expressivity leading to relationship and marriage breakdowns; men abused by their wives/partners; separated fathers; men and deaths on the roads. In general, many of these stories are driven by the emergence of single issue groups, such as Amen, an organisation representing ‘male victims of domestic violence’ who have been very adept at using the media to publicise the issue and their work. There has been a certain ‘Man bites dog’ quality to this interest in the apparently novel problems of men which has to be seen in the context of media fatigue with women’s issues. This has gone hand-in-hand with the anti-feminist journalism, most notably by campaigning columnists like John Waters of the Irish Times who in the past seven years or so has written many explicitly anti-feminist and aggressive articles about ‘feminazis’ and the ‘domestic violence industry’ in attempts to undermine the efforts of women’s groups. His main targets are promoting fathers rights in the context of an allegedly anti-father family law system and the cause of abused men through arguments about 50-50 gender symmetry in domestic violence. This is having a distinct effect on gender politics in Ireland. While it has helped the problematisation of men and masculinities in public discourse, this has been at the cost of it appearing to be coming more difficult for stories about violence against women, and women’s issues in general to be a legitimate focus of comment in their own right. Defeating feminism appears to be more important than promoting men’s welfare.

Quantitative analysis of press coverage May 2001

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Average total number of pages per day of each paper, including supplements, during the 2 week period

Irish Independent 42

Irish Examiner 44

Irish Times 55

Average total square centimetres per day of the whole paper, including supplements, during the 2 week period

Irish Independent 49,213

Irish Examiner 41,546

Irish Times 55,042

Average number of pages per day of each paper, including supplements, devoted to advertising during the 2 week period

Irish Independent 16.2

Irish Examiner 11

Irish Times 16.6

Average total square centimetres per day of the whole paper, including supplements,devoted to advertising during the 2 week period

Irish Independent 25,958

Irish Examiner 24,752

Irish Times 23,110

For each paper for each day number of articles addressing men in relation to the 4 themes

Overall percentages of each theme covered in the specific coverage of men in the entire papers

Other 19.27%

Home and Work 0.94%

Social Exclusion 2.5%

Violences 1.56%

Health 0.02%

Overall percentages of each theme covered in the specific coverage of men only (ie excluding non-men specific coverage)

Other 79%

Home and Work 4%

Social Exclusion 10%

Violences 6%

Health 0.7%

Overall percentages of each theme covered in the specific coverage of men only excluding ‘other’

Home and Work 18%

Social Exclusion 48%

Violences 30%

Health 3.5%

The overall quantity of articles relating to the specific themes were relatively very low. The majority of articles about men come under the ‘other’ category, accounting for 19.27% of the overall newspaper coverage. Most of these are about men in sport, ie their personal achievements, disappointments and so on, while others are to do with entertainment featuring well known musicians, actors etc. Included here are some articles about men in politics, but only those that referred to men in particular rather than political parties or policies, which sometimes referred to male politicians but which were not about them. Similarly, articles about football clubs are not included, but only those concerning specific players etc. A few articles in the ‘other’ category concerned men’s accidents. These are often culturally specific, concerning men in agriculture for instance, the traditional mainstay of Irish economic and social life. This category also includes motor accidents, which arguably should be included under health.

Home and Work

Just 0.94% of the entire newspaper coverage concerned this theme. Articles in this category were mainly of a business nature, featuring one man, as company director and his background achievements and business plans and ambitions. The business supplements are utterly dominated by photographs as well as articles about men. However, this is very much about the ‘public man’, the man ‘at work’ as at best only fleeting reference is made to his domestic life, typically in a profile referring in a single sentence to the existence of a wife and children. The man ‘at home’ is completely relegated to insignificance. One weekend supplement did feature an article about fathers, which was conspicuous by its presence in relation to the ‘home work’ theme.

Social Exclusion

2.5% of the entire newspaper coverage was devoted specifically to men and social exclusion. These were most commonly about convictions resulting in a prison sentence - for non-violent crimes (violent crimes are included under the violences category). They tended to be short factual reports and on the whole were clumped together on particular days in court reportage. There was reportage of other excluded persons, such as evidence of racism towards asylum seekers and refugees, but which was not gender specific.

Violences

1.56% of the entire newspaper coverage was devoted specifically to men and violences.Similar patterns to blocks of reportage of court cases on particular days. In addition there were reports of fresh violent crimes committed by men, including rape, crimes which had not yet been ‘solved’ or a perpetrator apprehended. The most prominent case of all, and the event/incident which received the single most prominent reporting of men’s issues of all the categories, concerned the dismissal of the Managing Director of the national airline, Aer Lingus, for sexual harassment. The rights and wrongs of the action were hotly debated, with many commentators questioning the motives of the women who made the complaint and whether men can ever properly prove themselves innocent of such charges. The texture of this commentary fits with a sense that is growing in the Irish media that feminism has gone too far and men are being unfairly discriminated against and always losing.

Health

This barely featured at all, amounting to just 0.02% of the entire newspaper coverage. This may reflect the bias and selectivity of the 2 week period considered, but which is more likely to reflect the the general failure of the media to problematise men’s lives. It may also be a symptom of how the papers now have dedicated ‘health’ coverage (the Irish Times on its features pages on a Monday, for instance), some of which is opening up men’s health issues, but which is commonly non-gender specific.

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Work in Progress

29.10.18

Ireland