Media Disparity

Reviews / Votes

Armstrong has assembled an impressive collection of original research studies, theoretical essays, and literature reviews that, taken together, investigate not only stereotypical, harmful, and progressive representations of women and men but also contexts of media production, representation, and usage still in need of improvement. Contributors use an array of methods, including qualitative and quantitative content analysis, rhetorical and discourse analysis, and interviews. They investigate numerous topics, including gender portrayals and sexual scripts in music and advertising; news coverage of women's health; representations of female and male politicians and athletes; coverage of sex trafficking; and the gender gaps of Wikipedia, reality TV, and virtual environments . . . [T]he collection will be an important resource for anyone interested in media criticism, history, and production. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. * Choice Reviews * Media Disparity: A Gender Battleground, edited by Cory L. Armstrong and published by Lexington Books, with a roster of well-known media scholars contributing chapters on women in news (special attention is given to political coverage of female candidates), sports, health communication, advertising, music, television entertainment, and cyberspace. A special treat is the preface by Gaye Tuchman, reflecting on the changes that have occurred since the 1978 publication of Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media, which Tuchman coauthored with Arlene Daniels and James Benet. . . . The scholarship that Armstrong has gathered from her contributors documents continuing distortion in media representations of women, underscoring the need for continued media monitoring and activism around the results. * Media Report To Women * We are well overdue for an overview of gender and gendering in traditional and digital media. The chapters provide exceptional detail on employment, sourcing, coverage and representation in myriad media globally. This book needs to be a requirement in today's introductory mass communication classes. -- Pamela J. Creedon, University of Iowa Media Disparity, the latest bookshelf essential on women and representation, is going right next to my 1978 copy of Hearth & Home. In Media Disparity, editor Cory Armstrong doesn't just revisit symbolic annihilation 35 years later. She enlists Gaye Tuchman along with some of the smartest feminists in mass communication to contribute. Both primer and update, Media Disparity demonstrates creative ways to look at a persistent problem across platforms and around the world. -- Kim Golombisky, University of South Florida