Women war correspondents: does gender make a difference on the front line?

Abstract

Although there have been women reporters on the front lines since the First World War and their number has increased more and more in subsequent conflicts in the twentieth century, it was only during the first Gulf War that the phenomenon – fostered by the escalating feminisation of newsroom personnel in many countries – gained momentum. The visibility of women war correspondents on national and international television channels is now taken for granted; and women journalists from newspapers have stood by the side of, or replaced, their male colleagues when covering the conflicts. This paper deals with the controversial question of whether or not women journalists covering the news from the front lines ‘speak in a different voice’ from their male counterparts. War understandably offers a special opportunity for exploring such a question, since it is particularly in war that the agenda and the rules of the game of still mostly maledominated journalism come to the fore. This paper, which is based on research still in progress, aims at investigating whether women journalists (or at least some of them, in specific circumstances), once they have been admitted to the male preserve of foreign correspondents and furthermore to the most masculine of action systems such as war, are willing and able to create their own gender-based agenda and express their own point of view.