From Media Monitoring to Training for Advocacy

For the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), that ‘greater goal’ is gender-balanced media, an intervention at the discursive level that can potentially contribute to stemming, indeed reversing, gender-based discrimination in practice.

Comparative analysis of the results of the GMMPs of 1995, 2000 and 2005 evidences little positive change in selected indicators of gender in media. In the context of news-making, in news content and in journalistic practice, gender bias and negative gender stereotyping have continued unabated.

Reading the static GMMP results with, as a starting point, the understanding that text and images in media also script our lives, and then the activist recognizes the need to take action. It is at this point that the imperative for advocacy takes root.

This is the rationale for WACC’s series of regional capacity building workshops on gender and media advocacy.

First, the workshops are a platform to make known the extensive empirical GMMP data on the gender dimensions of media. The data are methodically presented and discussed collectively.

Second, the workshops equip participants with tools and skills for effective advocacy. The data are one tool for evidence-based advocacy. A specializedinstrument developed following GMMP is the WACC Gender and Media Advocacy Toolkit.

Third, the workshops provide a rare networking and experience-sharing space for organisations working on gender and media in different countries within the regions. In fact, participants often express surprise at the similarity of their struggles. Participants come to view their struggles not as lone interventions with little relevance outside the local contexts in which they take place, but as part and parcel of a wider struggle rolling out across their continents and the globe.

The workshops have served to build new relationships and foment old ones. Participants have become part of the growing GMMP network of academic researchers, media practitioners and grassroots activists concerned with gender in and through media.