Non-sexist songs and sexist reactions:

an analysis of digital coverage of emakunde's list controversy

Abstract

Introduction. The research focuses on media controversies around gender policies in the music industry. In this communication we focus on the impact of the media and digital media that the proposal of a list of non-sexist songs for the summer holidays in the Basque Country (by Emakunde, the Basque government's gender equality entity) had. Objective. To analyse how these proposals circulate in the media to check the ways in which news stories circulate and are modelled in the new public sphere. We start from the theoretical assumption that the public sphere is on transformation, as it fragments into various peripheral areas in which actors need to shape matters of interest in order to be able to insert the issues into the central sphere. In this, the traditional role of the media as regulators of public discourse is discussed in the face of competition from other digital media and the need to compete with them using the network's own strategies. Method. We start from the analysis of controversies, analysing the reaction to Emakunde's list as a one-off episode that is embedded in a long-range controversy, in turn connected with the anti-femininist reactions that have characterized public discourse in the last five years. Results. The analysis confirms that disputes occur in a fragmented public sphere, without hierarchies, where information appears without context and driven by the desperate search for the reader's attention.