1F25 What the Hail?

The add to look at is a front page cover that looks like any other, big headlines saying “WE DID IT” with two members of a sports team celebrating by shaking hands front and centre. At the top there are two cricket players with their gear on together and then their wives together as well. This is in the Australian news and right after Australia beat Pakistan in cricket during the 1999 Olympic Games. When you look at the add a bit deeper you notice that it is very male dominated and that the wives are secondary. In Hollywood a handsome man would be the purse on a woman’s arm but in this case the wives are the purse on their husbands arm. The added uses suggestive terms like “We” speaking as if the whole country won the match together rather than using “They.” It catches the reader’s eye being bigger, bolder and making it easy to read quickly with three short words, “WE DID IT.” During the 1999 Olympic Games most Australians only cared about the Games so having a big win front and centre on the newspaper made perfect sense. Since I live in Canada this newspaper did not affect me and probably didn’t affect most of the word as well. “The same event will be reported differently in different countries.” (Michael O’Shaughnessy and Jane Sadler, Media and Society Fifth Edition, p.186) Canada held the Olympics in 2010 and the number of medals “we” as a country won did not affect Australia. I’m sure that Canada winning gold in hockey didn’t matter to the Aussies. Australia celebrated their medals and we as Canadians celebrated ours. I personally only watched Canadian male sports not that I am sexist they applied more to me that female sports did. That goes with all sports; I don’t watch many female sports but watch pretty much every male sport. “Gender is central to identity, and gender socialisation is one of the earliest processes of interpellation” (Michael O’Shaughnessy and Jane Sadler, Media and Society Fifth Edition, p.185) I have always watched male dominated sports because that’s all I was allowed to watch when I was younger. The add was very well placed because it was predominately male which relates to me and grabs my attention.