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Article published In: Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 11:3 (2012) ► pp.336–356

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The “image bite,” political language, and the public/private divide

NBC News coverage of Hillary Clinton from scorned wife to Senate candidate

 | Carnegie Mellon University
 | University of Maryland
 | Educational Testing Service, Princeton
Published online: 26 November 2012
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.11.3.02kau
Voice-overs with muted images, often known as the “image bite,” have become an increasingly used but understudied format of political language by the television news media. Because the media can use images to fit many contexts and purposes of commentary, the media images are susceptible to continuous de-contextualization and re-contextualization. Drawing from theories of feminist critical discourse analysis and gender performance as well as scholarship on the public/private divide, we examine the commentary of one U.S. television news organization’s (NBC) re-contextualization of the same stock footage of Hillary Clinton over 10 newscasts spanning 20 months from August 1998 to June of 2000. NBC re-enforces the public/private binary in conventional masculine terms. Yet it also worked, at times, to unify the binary when covering Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate campaign; on those occasions at least, NBC revealed the potential erosion of gender stereotypes and a small but still significant role for human agency in the study of gender ideology.
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