The Political and Civic Potential of Popular Women’s Magazines: The Israeli Case

Abstract

In light of growing interest in the role of market-oriented journalism to enable political and civic discourse, this study examines Israeli popular women’s magazines, in which consumerism is key, asking whether this genre also has the potential to further such discourse. The study examines the relationship between women’s magazines and the public sphere in Israel by means of microlevel analysis of examples of the encounter between the two domains. The corpus was derived from two periods of social protest, the early 1970s and the summer of 2011, and includes items from the two largest-circulation magazines. The analysis reveals a dynamic process of ideological struggle demonstrating oppositional power and a transformative role, as well as two coverage practices that enabled the conflicting ideological discourse: use of the personal story to paint the bigger picture and a blend of coverage conventions identified with “popular journalism” with conventions identified with “quality journalism.”