WACC report reveals that media decide which information the public should receive

LIMA, Mar. 3 (ALC). Despite what we are led to believe, the powerful news media are not a simple window on what is happening in the world; to the contrary, the media constantly decide what information the audience should receive, what they should see, hear or read.

According to the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP 2005), coordinated by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), an international NGO based in London, what people think about who they are as men and women, their values and attitudes, is also influenced by the messages from the media.

According to the investigation, women are marginalized in the world’s communication media and the radio relegates them the most, with barely 17 percent of news about women, as opposed to 21 percent in the written press and 22 percent on television.

The steep uphill struggle for male-female equality carried out by women’s organizations around the world is not considered of news interest for the media. Only 4 percent of news at a global level emphasizes gender inequality.

This coincides with the orientation of the news that tends to reinforce gender stereotypes and not to challenge them. Only three percent of the news questions these stereotypes while six percent openly reinforce them. “Generally the contents of the news reinforce these stereotypes by describing a world in which women are relatively invisible,” the report stated.

The voices and faces of men flood the news, whether they are spokesmen (86 percent) or experts (83 percent), while it is far less probable that women are considered experts. They more frequently appear as protagonists of a personal experience (31 percent) or as spokeswomen of grassroots opinion (34 percent).

The presence of women as victims (19 percent) is disproportionate in news programs compared to men who appear as such (8 percent).

When it comes to “soft” topics, like celebrities, sports and social affaire women reach 17 percent of coverage, but only 3 percent in economic issues and 8 percent in politics and government affairs.

Temporarily available at: http://www.wfn.org/2006/03/msg00067.html

Source: ALC News Service