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Bonnie J. Dow, Watching Women's Liberation 1970: Feminism's Pivotal Year on the Network News (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2014)
MEDIA HISTORIAN Bonnie J. Dow chose to examine the year 1970 in her study of the media coverage of American feminism because, she writes, the three major television networks of the day - cbs, nbc and abc - never gave it as much concentrated attention as a social movement before that year, or since. Dow approaches her case studies from a rhetorical perspective as she carefully examines both the verbal and visual media messages as well as the feminists' responding strategies during key events. Her overall findings, she writes, are more contradictory and complex than previous studies on feminism in the media would indicate.
The television networks, Dow notes, were already attuned to the social movements of the era and generally onside with equality or liberal feminism, especially regarding employment and education. They had much more difficulty grasping radical feminism, with its emphasis on revolutionary theory and process, not to speak of the activists' unruly behavior at a time when women were still expected to be well-behaved and moderate in their demands.
The first chapter analyses previous print media coverage of the second wave, identifying some of the rhetorical tropes that surfaced in the 1970 tv coverage and their impact on the feminists' responses to journalists. Specifically Dow dissects the major newspapers' coverage of the feminist protest at the Miss America Pageant in 1968 as a precedent to the kind of tv coverage that would follow the movement later, including the few available archived tv news clips of the pageant. She notes how even well-meaning journalists compared this all-white event to the staging of...