Gender Differences in Political Media Coverage

Journal Article Review
Student’s Name
Institution
Course Number and Name
Instructor’s Name
Date
Journal Article Review
Published in the Journal of Communication, the article by Van der Pas and Aaldering (2020) examines whether there is a difference in media coverage of men and women politicians. Van der Pas is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, while Aaldering is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Science at the University of Vienna. Given these credentials, the authors are qualified to write and publish a study in the field of communication.
In the study, the authors sought to find out if there is a difference between how media covers women and men politicians. Given the role of media in conveying political information, the authors wanted to examine gender bias characterizing the coverage.
The methodology employed by the authors is a systematic review of 90 research studies covering more than 25,000 politicians in more than 750,000 stories in the media. Forty-four of the research studies are from the U.S., 23 from Europe, 16 from Canada, and two are from Venezuela and Chile. Some of the key criteria used by the authors in selecting the studies are that they must focus on how media covers politicians, and the method employed must be content analysis. There should be a comparison between how men and women are covered.
The study is quantitative in the sense that the focus is on the primary data collected in the many studies reviewed. In addition, the goal of the study is to develop a quantitative approximation of the phenomenon, that is, t...