Press conference on international and national results of GMMP 2005 in Hungary
The event that launched the “Who Makes the News?” report in Hungary was organized by the IgEN Association, authors of the report, in co-operation with the Center for Independent Journalism. The press conference attracted several journalists – women as well as men – from printed and online newspapers, television channels and women’s magazines, as well as some sociologists and NGO representatives.
The media professionals were interested in how the national results compared with the global ones. The presentation pointed out that according to the Hungarian findings merely 12% of the people featuring in the news were women, a proportion that was lower than the international average of 21%. Women were most likely to feature in the news as stars or as politicians, and only a few of them were experts, mainly in the field of social sciences. In general, the news media did not feature women in proportion to their actual presence and significance in society.
The findings showed that the gender proportion among journalists was more balanced (43% women, 57% men), which the media workers confirmed. While women journalists were more likely to present women as news sources, the gender of the journalists did not seem to affect either the topic or the point-of-view of the news reporting. In a discussion about the reasons for this phenomenon, the media workers drew attention to the how existing editorial practices and choices affect how and what they can report on.
On the whole, the highly critical GMMP findings were welcome by journalists themselves, most of whom found it a valid claim that the news media, rather than simply showing the reality about women’s and men’s unequal social roles, was actually not sensitive enough to the gender aspects of the news.
It was a positive outcome that reports on the press conference appeared on the same and the following day on television channel and were published in several online newspapers. At the same time, the topic “Women in the Media” was chosen by a number of radio programs planned for the period until March 8.
Links to reports in Hungarian:
http://www.fn.hu/index.php?id=97&cid=117979&hirlevelkatt=2006-02-17
