Men dominate news coverage worldwide, report says
Mar 02, 2006
A recent report criticizes the news media for largely ignoring about 3.2 billion of the world’s population: women. A three-week campaign in response to the report concludes March 8, on International Women’s Day.
The third Global Media Monitoring Project, led by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), is a research project on gender representation in the news media.
Media organizations in 76 countries analyzed nearly 13,000 news stories in print, radio and TV on February 16, 2005. A year later, they released the report in conjunction with a roundtable discussion in London and a three-week, global campaign for gender equality.
Among other things, the report found that women are interviewed or the subjects of news stories 21 percent of the time. In stories on politics and government, that number drops to 14 percent. Even in stories on gender-related violence, men’s voices dominate. Furthermore, gender representation in the news media has not changed much from the two previous reports in 2000 and 1995.
The project’s goal is to encourage worldwide discussion on the results in an effort to ensure fair representation of women. The campaign also offers a “Take Action Pack,” to help activists create and promote their own events for journalists. The organizers also hope that more media organizations worldwide will train journalists on how to seek out women’s voices in their reporting.
Temporarily available at: http://www.ijnet.org/FE_Article/newsarticle.asp?UILang=1&CId=304626&CIdL
