Framing Gender in the Coverage of Protests: Arab Women's Uprisings in English and German Press

We report on the first stage of a project on the representations of gender in the coverage of the Arab Spring by Western media. We focus on designing comparable corpora to examine Arab women's depiction in English and German news during the uprisings. The English corpus is composed of reports published by The Guardian and The New York Times. The German corpus consists of articles collected from Der Spiegel, Die Welt, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Suddeutsche Zeitung. The datasets were processed through Sketch Engine to identify the terms collocating with women in the English corpus and Frau in the German one. Then, the themes reflected by these expressions in the two corpora were compared. The results show that both news media feature two types of topical frames linked to Arab women; one is associated with the uprisings while the other is related to their recurrent stereotypes in Western news discourse. Yet, there are discrepancies between their focus on related issues to each type. Other differences between the two sets of news outlets include intensity of reporting on Arab women and stressing their nationalities. These findings suggest that although Arab women's negative stereotypes continued to feature in western news discourse during the Arab Spring, new positive images emerged and contributed to changing their depictions in global media.