Hozzászóló: Géhring Zsuzsanna (BGE)
Abstract
Gay Pride Marches as part of annual Gay Pride Parades are the largest, best known and therefore the most represented events by the media related to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) community. This makes the media representation of the March an ideal subject of analysis, since it can unveil the practices with which a certain television channel pictures the LGBTQ community. With critical discourse studies and code based content analysis the frameworks in which the channels pictured the Gay Pride March could be delineated. The adoption of those two methods have ensured that the analysis of LGBTQ media representation was examined from several perspectives.
One could detect conspicuous differences between the Irish and the Hungarian news reports with the help of code based content analysis. The topic of LGBTQ rights, politicians’ and their parties attitude towards the March and the gay community, interviewing participants of the March are just a few examples of the abovementioned dissimilarities.
One particularly clear difference can be explained by the circumstances which under the Pride Marches took place in each country: the amount of news reporting on counterdemonstrators and police action. Throughout the examined years, Hungarian reports showed angry counterdemonstrators and policemen fighting with each other more often than Irish ones. Even though Hungarian channels had the opportunity to decide how much time and space they would like to provide for this phenomenon, they could not choose not showing it at all because it was an integral part of the Budapest Gay Pride March. The fightings and the presence of counterdemonstrators were also the reason behind the higher number of Hungarian reports on the Pride March. While the number of reports suggests that the event, and therefore LGBTQ people were more important for the media in Hungary than in Ireland, the viewer got as much or even less information about the gay community and its struggles from the Hungarian media outlets compared to the Irish television channel.
This presentation provides an overview of the analyzing process augmented by examples leading to the results. First of all, I discuss the direct frames of the examined reports, arguing that the news before and after each Pride report have an influence on the interpretation of the Gay Pride March. The second aspect of analysis is the appearance of sensitization in the reports. In this phase I examine whether news reports try to sensitize towards the gay community, and if so, how. Religion, law, family, and politics make the third aspect on analysis. Last but not least, the pictorial representation of the March as an inseparable part of television reports and the other three aspects.