ALBAHITH ALALAMI

Since the mid-seventies of the last century, communication and media research began to pay attention to the representations of women in cultural production in general and the media in particular, to monitor the shifts in the image that may result from economic, cultural and political development programs that seek to achieve a better status for women. The course of those studies has identified two interrelated understandings.
The first one was clearly directed towards the relationship between the presentation of men and women by communication and media, and the objective demographic reality. This understanding does not assume that all the outputs of these means must be completely faithful and accurate in re-presenting reality.
Therefore, the debate is more correct, if the media, for example, exaggerates in presenting certain jobs or roles or presents them in an incomplete, rapid and insufficient manner, then men and women should be presented in proportion to the positions they occupy in the population ratio that reflects the proportion of men and women, including what they occupy In the real world. In other words, the fantasy presented should be in harmony with reality.
The numerically unbalanced representation of men and women in the media clearly reveals only a small part of the story and is not necessarily the most important part. Most of the studies have gone far in investigating cultural (gender) differences in occupational and social roles, personal and psychological traits, physical traits, etc. The results have been widely documented in most parts of the world, including the Arab world, and perhaps the most important thing that these results raise is related to the contents of the messages that permeated in representations of men and women in these media: why was the paradigm shaped in this way? and why it was persisted chronically despite more than three decades of research and action aimed at change?
From these raised questions emerged [the second trend] to study the relationship between women and the means of mass communication, which is an extension of the first, but invoked a more complex theory between women and the media and posed greater problems for research within the limits of both analysis and interpretation.
The basic premise here is that mass communication as a cultural force does not simply reflect, but indirectly helps in shaping social reality.
This hypothesis emerged in the theories of sociology and social psychology of the socialization process, as “these two theories basically suggest that attitudes and behavior patterns are learned through a complex process of simulation and comparison with the attitudes and behavior of important individuals and groups as well as cultural forces, including the means of production of culture”.