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Jacinda Ardern, Gender, and the News Media Reportage of her Political Leadership

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Thesis(2.23 MB)

Date

2024

Authors

Supervisor

Craig, Geoffrey
Devadas, Vijay
Watts, Jennie

Item type

Thesis

Degree name

Doctor of Philosophy

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Publisher

Auckland University of Technology

Abstract

This thesis examines the gendered mediation of Jacinda Ardern during her inaugural term as the 40th Prime Minister of Aotearoa, New Zealand (2017-2020). By examining the interplay of gendered behaviour, the performance of political leadership, and conventions of political reporting, this thesis underscores the significance of gender as a performative phenomenon (Butler, 1990). Moreover, it posits that politics, like gender, is a performative and communicative phenomenon. Citizens comprehend and interpret political events and messages through the lens of news media reportage and social media activity (Craig, 2016; Trimble, 2017). The research design takes a mixed-method approach and is structured around the interplay of gendered behaviour, the performance of political leadership, and political journalism. It employs a multi-case study method, incorporating quantitative content analysis of 125 online news media stories, including news stories that originated in print and broadcast radio and television. A thematic analysis was then performed on 121 written news stories. The units of analysis are news media stories from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Five news events make up three case studies in this thesis: the first case study involves news media stories about Jacinda Ardern’s motherhood status; the second case study is about Ardern's crisis leadership, which involves three news events, the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque attacks, the aftermath of the Whakaari White Island eruption, and the initial COVID-19 Outbreaks of 2020; and the third case study is Jacinda Ardern on the world stage, meeting other world leaders. This study of Jacinda Ardern offers an analysis of the reportage of key political and cultural events in recent Aotearoa New Zealand history. The findings of this research show that the journalistic formula for reporting on politics and other news sections is not one-size-fits-all but needs to be tailored to the specifics of the news events and news subjects. While the content analysis found that two-thirds of the news coverage held a positive news coverage stance on Ardern’s performance of political leadership, the news framing of Ardern’s leadership was still thick with essentialised gendered exceptionalism and preferences sexist and misogynistic viewpoints from the news sources’ quotes. The research findings show that the cultural understanding of gendered behaviour and the role incongruity women in politics experience is imbued in both the critique and praise of Jacinda Ardern's performance of political leadership. That is, the findings show instances of misogyny but also what is termed here, ‘benevolent sexism,’ where Ardern's political leadership is credited to her feminine gendered character virtues, as opposed to her agentic leadership decisions. As such, the marking of Ardern’s political leadership as ‘exceptional’ (in both senses of the term) underscores how the foundations and conventions of political journalism privilege culturally hegemonic masculine perspectives over female and non-binary gendered experiences. This thesis offers a theoretical contribution to the literature by providing a tripartite model of the gendered mediation of female political leadership, asserting that the relationships between the performance of political leadership and media reporting is understood through the lens of gender. Furthermore, through an understanding of Bourdieu’s (2005) field theory, it is argued that both the media and political fields have masculinised norms that agents enact. In response, it is argued here that both politics and media should not be ‘gender-blind,’ but rather that gender be explicitly thematised in political and media performance in ways that critique existing frameworks while also establishing and normalising different ways of engaging in political practice and reportage, which this thesis refers to as a ’gender-consciousness’.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10292/18683

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Doctoral Theses