The work on the project included identifying a suitable sample of national daily newspapers for analysis according to their format (broadsheet/tabloid), political orientation (left/right) and the extent of compatibility with the Israeli newspaper’s format. This while taking into account availability issues. The newspapers that were selected for this research were the Daily Mail, the Mirror, the Telegraph and the Guardian (for the British case study) and Yedioth Ahronoth (for the Israeli case study). The reason for focusing on one newspaper only for the Israeli case was that in Israel, unlike in Britain, there are very few dailies covering the entire research period. Yedioth Ahronoth was selected as it is the most popular newspaper in Israel for most of the research period, and it is also the only national daily that has been digitized for the entire research period.
The data collection process involved visiting physical archives, such as the British Library in London, the National Library in Jerusalem and Yedioth Ahronoth’s newspaper archive, and using various newspaper digital archives through platforms such as LexisNexis, Gale and ProQuest.
The analysis included: 1) quantitative analysis of news and commentary articles about feminism and the status of women during election years between 1969-2019 in the Israeli and British daily newspapers selected; 2) quantitative and qualitative content analysis of articles focused on women Prime Ministerial candidates (two British candidates – Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May and two Israeli candidates – Golda Meir and Tzipi Livni).
Preliminary findings from the work were presented at the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) conference in Madrid in July 2019. The paper, entitled: “Cherchez la Femme: Finding Feminism in Newspapers’ Digital Archives – the Cases of UK and Israel”, focused on the challenges concerning the data collection process for this project. Based on the findings presented at the conference, a methodological paper, which critically engaged with the challenges of archival research methodology, was submitted to a peer-reviewed journal in the field of communication.
A draft of a second paper, which focuses on the media representation of the four female candidates for the premiership in the UK and in Israel, is under preparation. In addition, this research project was presented in a meeting of the Network of Interdisciplinary Media and Communication Research (NIMCR) group. Moreover, a commentary article was published (16th September 2019) in The Conversation, focused on the September 2019 Israeli election and the gender gap in voting, entitled: “Israel elections: who women vote for and how it’s shifting”.
