Gay Marriage in Television News: Voice and Visual Representation in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate

Abstract

Drawing from critical-cultural scholarship, this quantitative content analysis systematically interrogates national network television news coverage of the same-sex marriage debate in 2003 and 2004. Analysis of sourcing patterns and sound bite length indicate the debate was dominated by conventionally “straight” perspectives. While gay and lesbian couples were visually prevalent in news stories, they were largely seen and not heard. Scrutinizing the visual narratives about gay and lesbian life in television news reports, this study found gay and lesbian representation was largely normalized and mainstreamed in typically heteronormative ways.

Notes

This research project was made possible by a Grants-In-Aid Research Award from Indiana University. The author thanks Maria Elizabeth Grabe and Radhika Parameswaran for their guidance throughout the project. Rebecca Lind and three anonymous reviewers also provided helpful comments and critique.

¹If a story was centrally concerned with presidential candidate John Kerry and his stance on a number of issues, with a brief voice-over that he “opposes gay marriage but thinks it should be left to the states to decide” that story was eliminated because it was not substantially about gay marriage. If, however, a story was centrally concerned with Kerry's position on gay marriage, how the issue presents a quandary for his campaign, how the issue is likely to affect his electability, that story was included.

²Many stories in the initial search constituted merely a short “news note,” 20 seconds or less in length. A “news note” often included an anchor voice-over such as “debates continued in the Senate today about whether or not to approve a Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage.” The only visual image was of a still shot of the Senate floor. These stories were eliminated from the census since they contained no substantive visual representation of the LGBT community or soundbites.

³The Vanderbilt Television News Archive contains the evening news broadcasts from the major networks ABC, CBS, and NBC since 1968. In 1995, the Archive began recording and preserving an hour per day of CNN, and in 2004 began archiving Fox News.

⁴Only categories for which there could have been disagreement were included in the alpha test. Therefore, obvious categories in which there was 100% agreement, such as story number and date, were excluded from the alpha test.

⁵This average amount of 34.4 seconds is largely skewed by one particular news story in which the grown 20-something daughter of a gay couple interviewed was granted over a minute and a half to speak. She had just written a book about her experience growing up in a household with two (gay) fathers.