WOMEN CORRESPONDENTS IN THE SPANISH PUBLIC TELEVISION (TVE)

The main objective of this paper is presenting a report about the coverage that women correspondents of the TVE (the Spanish public television) offered about the Invasion of Iraq of 2003. We will try to analyze how this conflict was presented to an audience that was mainly OPPOSED to that invasion in the context of a public television whose government SUPPORTED the same invasion.

Our approach will take into account the kind of view that those women offer us from a double perspective: geographical and gendered. In the first case, we will see what kind of approach to the Middle East they offer us, how they present that reality to a European audience, the orientalist elements included, the stereotypes... The special relation of Spain with the Arab world, still related for a large part of the population with Al-Andalus and the Muslim presence during the Middle Ages, maybe can be tracked in the articles of some of the women correspondents. In the case of gender, we will try to see if their approach presents some differences in relation with the one of the masculine journalists or if that differences don’t exist nowadays.

The final objective is check the presence or absence of an orientalist and feminine view in the work of those correspondents, as a basic media of influence in the European audience. That influence is not just a matter of Journalism, but a powerful weapon that configures in a great extent the image that the Occidental world has of the Arabic landscape nowadays.

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