A Comparison of Women and Men Images on Iranian Press

Background and Due to the increase of various mass media, this belief has become common that media can change and form the values and norms of people or reinforce and individualize them. The present research seeks to see how the images of women criminals are in the Iranian press and are there any significant difference between their image and those of men. Etemad daily was chosen from among the Iranian dailies by simple random sampling. The statistical population consisted of all content of the incidents page of the Etemad Daily in 2008-2009 of which 24 issues were selected through stratified sampling and were analyzed by 13 indexes of Agenda-setting theory. Although there is a belief that women do not commit crime, the findings showed the journalists did not consider any differences in reflecting incidents in the news related to men than those of women; and female-related crimes, significantly, are not covered as those of men. It can be concluded that Iranian journalists acted based on professional processes not based on sexuality of criminals.