Women journalists feature in several chapters of this book, as investigative reporters, foreign and war correspondents, editors, tabloid hacks (or hackesses, if such a term exists), producers and media executives. By devoting an entire chapter at this point to the representation of women in journalism, I have no desire to separate them off from the more general issues I am concerned with, or to ghettoise them. Such a chapter is justified simply because women themselves – as practitioners, scholarly observers and consumers of journalism – have for a long time discussed the place of their sex in the news media, often critically. Women present a distinct category of movie journalist who, if not necessarily or always heroic, are generally accepted to have been stereotyped and marginalised in the history of cinema.

One consequence of women's improved socio-economic status within advanced capitalism is that women are more often represented in the media in ways which reflect feminist ideas about sexual equality in the workplace, in the domestic environment, in the bedroom, in the culture. From the post-feminist perspective of the times in which we live, moreover, cultural producers (male and female) can also acknowledge without being accused of sexism the capacity of women, shared with men, for badness and villainy. I will consider villainous images of female journalists in this chapter, within an examination of how their representation has become at one and the same time more numerous, more diverse and, I will argue, more positive.