Women Given Cold Shoulder as Sources for Stories
Posted June 18th, 2008 by Megan Tady
We’ve done a lot of research to show that media consolidation has resulted in a dearth of female ownership of media. But this gender exclusion extends far beyond who owns the news, and affects who is sought after as credible sources for news stories. And it certainly isn’t women.
This week, Jennifer Pozner of Women in Media & News followed up a session at this year’s NCMR titled, “There Is No Media Justice Without Women: Strategies for Feminist Social Justice Media Activism,” with a blog post aptly lamenting the hush of female voices as experts, pundits and sources in the media. She wrote: “Too many news outlets — not only corporate media, but some of our progressive and independent publications as well — still marginalize women as sources and experts in their stories, as decision-makers on the mastheads and as commentators on the op-ed pages. This is especially true for women of color, whose opinions are largely invisible in the pundit class.”
Pozner goes on to debunk all the lame excuses news outlets use to keep women’s voices out of the media. But as she points out, there’s one reason for the lack of female representation that can’t be discredited – media consolidation. Unfortunately, when only a handful of mostly male-run corporations own all of the media, diverse viewpoints don’t rise to the top. A 2005 study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that news outlets rely on men as sources twice as often as women.
The National Organization of Women has also been instrumental in fighting for diversity in the media. In a press release after the Senate victory to roll back FCC media consolidation rules, NOW said, “If we are to create a media environment that covers issues important to women, that treats women with respect, promotes their voices and opinions and portrays them as three-dimensional human beings, we must have more women at the very top calling the shots. The same goes for people of color and other traditionally disenfranchised groups.”
The Feminist Peace Network blog this week piggybacked on Pozner’s writing, calling for gender justice in media to become “an integral part of the media reform agenda.” The blog quoted a handful of the women who attended NCMR, including Andi Zeisler, cofounder and editorial director of Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, who said, “A media that both reflects and prioritizes the lives and voices of women—all women—is crucial not only to the development of a well-informed populace, but to the development of a new generation of thinkers and leaders inspired to make media that’s open-minded, democratic, and challenging.”
