Gendered Frames in Facebook News Headlines about Filipino Women Politicians

Gendered Frames in Facebook News Headlines about Filipino Women Politicians

Given the mediatized manner of modern-day politics, Filipino audiences have migrated to the digital sphere of Facebook in order to receive news about politicians and the issues to which they are afflicted with. Previous studies, mostly western, have already warned that women in politics are “othered”, as they are considered to be outsiders of the public sphere. Thusly, there exists a need to investigate how Filipino women are covered by the press under the country’s current misogynist socio-political landscape. This study employed the Reception and Framing theory and placed emphasis on the existence of echo chambers in Facebook. Third world and Socialist feminism were then used to synthesize the operational framework. This study investigated the news posts under the National news section shared by Rappler, Inquirer, and Manila Bulletin to their Facebook pages. A total of 44, 421 news articles were collected through web scraping. From the latter data set, 400 news articles were randomly selected and analyzed through content analysis. Aside from using textual analysis to uncover emergent frames, Corpus Linguistics analysis was also used in documenting the lexical units used by the press in covering Filipino women politicians. A total of 15,355 words were collected. Congruent with previous literature, the findings reveal that Filipino women politicians were given limited coverage, and were typically framed in paradoxical characteristics. Furthermore, they were placed in story-like narratives by the press. However, the findings also suggest acts of resistance manifested by the women and the journalists. -- An undergraduate thesis by Samantha M. Gabronino and Brian Angelo C. Sereneo