Academics and The Economist - The Economist

In a newly fashionable effort to quantify claims about how power is transmitted through words and images, Yana van der Meulen Rodgers and JingYing Zhang, of the College of William & Mary in Virginia, have analysed The Economist's photographs. Their paper, "A Content Analysis of Sex Bias in International News Magazines", asks, first, how often are women portrayed compared with men? Second, how often are men and women depicted in a sexual way? For answers, they looked at all the issues of five news magazines, including The Economist, in 2000, and the photographs in The Economist in even-numbered years from 1982 to 2000.

All the magazines studied contained an over-representation of women depicted in sexual ways. But The Economist, apparently, had more frontal nudity in its photographs than all the other magazines combined. When it came to "partial breast exposure", it was at the top of the league. Particularly curious to the authors was our use of sexual content to illustrate stories on topics such as finance and technology. A photograph of three bikini-clad beauty contestants, used to illustrate a story on financial regulation, with the caption "Pick your regulator", was both emblematic and problematic.

(Pointer via Riding Sun.)

My experience in the Emirates is that the copy of The Economist we receive paid for by the university has offending parts of such pictures blacked out.

Cable TV available in the Emirates is not censored. Movies in the cinema are.