According to Amal Al-Malki and David Kaufer, the vast majority of media studies on Arab women have tracked the effect of Western negative stereotypes of Arab women in the Western media, where they are represented as passive. Hence, the present book determines to track Arab women in Arab news, exploring whether Arab women would appear differently in Arab home media outside a Western cultural bias. Focusing on the written language of English-translated news briefs in Arab media, this book is presented in two parts with each raising and addressing different questions.

Part I, ‘Coding Arab females in Arab news’, relying on standard content-analytic methods, constructs and validates a coding scheme to measure active vs. passive behaviour in 178 news summaries (from September 2005 to June 2007) from four leading pan-Arab media sources where Arab females are mentioned in the highest frequencies. According to Al-Malki & Kaufer, ‘the active-passive dichotomy seems to refer to a female's claim to power than to the levels of energy she expends’ (23). However, for the (statistical) purposes of this study, ‘operational definitions of active and passive behaviour in news’ (24) were essential to allow authors to associate words and phrases of Arab news stories with active and passive behaviours. Therefore, chs. 2 to 4 elaborate the theoretical motivation behind a coding scheme to classify and examine the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ dichotomy, the urge for a range of more concepts within the spectrum of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ and the related methodological concerns in counting and tallying instances of active and passive behaviour of Arab women in news. This section, finally, represents the statistical results that followed from applying the scheme to the sampling appearances of Arab women on the news.

Part II, ‘Canvassing Arab females in Arab news’, employs two methods—grounded theory and text technologies—to take a more in-depth look into the individual lives of Arab women that were anonymously coded in the first part of the book: which parts of their lives brought them into the Arab news compared with that of women worldwide. Chs. 5 to 19 expand the concepts of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ into the more operational concepts of literacy, education, and employment, demonstrating that ‘these concepts are not dichotomous but overlapping categories’ (xii). While ch. 5 reveals the traces of passing from the coding study to a more qualitative canvassing of the same datasets, the other chapters of this part elaborate the various concepts that broaden a cultural frame of female activity in Arab news (chs. 6 to 13) and the same explanations and developments for a cultural frame of female passivity (chs. 14 to 19).

This data analysis of Part I demonstrates that ‘Arab women were represented less stereotypically and with more balance in Arab news’ (382) than in foreign news, concluding that internet translation services may impact the spread of cultural stereotypes. Meanwhile, the Part II also conceives that ‘female achievement plays a special role in empowering women in Arab regions and around the globe’ (383), thus ‘news can be a useful repository from which to take a conceptual census of persons’ (xxv).