Sotomayor and the Sexist, Racist Media

“Hispanic chick lady,” “an angry woman,” “a brown woman,” “this broad.”

Demeaning? Check. Sexist? Check. Racist? Check.

Do these descriptions help the public evaluate Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor as she faces her Senate confirmation hearing? Of course not. Yet the mainstream media have routinely spouted and parroted demeaning, sexist and racist language about Sotomayor instead of providing us with any substantive context or background about the judge.

President Obama’s administration said of Sotomayor, “If confirmed, Sotomayor would bring more federal judicial experience to the Supreme Court than any justice in 100 years, and more overall judicial experience than anyone confirmed for the Court in the past 70 years.” Can you imagine stooping to describe someone so qualified for our country’s highest court as “this broad”? And yet our media have – repeatedly.

Whether you’re for or against confirming Sotomayor, descriptions like “Hispanic chick lady” are shameful. The point here isn’t that Sotomayor was negatively referred to once or twice. The point is that this type of sexist media coverage has become a mainstay. And it’s not only about Sotomayor. Coverage of First Lady Michelle Obama’s toned arms or Senator Hillary Clinton’s cleavage has graced the covers of many magazines recently.

Over time, our media has the ability to weave stories into our collective mindset. Racist and sexist stories can create tangled webs that cloud our minds and eventually become part of our overall understanding of the world. When powerful and accomplished women are framed in ways that reduce them to “chicks, arms, and cleavage,” it demeans and disempowers them, and it does a profound disservice to all women.

We rely on the media to provide us with hard-hitting information about our elected officials and the people in power so we can make informed political decisions. The media fail us all – women and men – when they don’t provide substance or context in their reporting. Gender discussions have a role in politics and in the media, but that role is to foster understanding and to advance the conversation, not to push us back.

In response to the media coverage of Sotomayor, the Women’s Media Center released a video this week,  “Media Justice for Sotomayor,” and a call to support media justice for Sotomayor. The video compiles clips from recent coverage of Sotomayor and features political cartoons, including the June 22 cover of the National Review.

Unfortunately, coverage like this is nothing new, and the Women’s Media Center expects that mainstream media outlets will continue to produce racist and sexist coverage of Sotomayor as her confirmation hearing begins in the Senate this week.

Over and over, I have angrily switched off my FM dial while asking myself, “Why does our media system persistently devalue women in positions of power in the United States?”

But switching off the dial and asking “why?” isn’t enough. In a world saturated with sexist portrayals of women on the street, in stores and on our clothes – we cannot escape mainstream commercial media that degrade women.

What we can do is stand up and say “Enough.”

We can make changes to a media system that produces such disgraceful content. In fact, the organization I work for, Free Press, is doing just that. Along with our allies like the Women’s Media Center,  we are working to transform the media landscape in the United States so we get the news we need and deserve, instead of some railing pundit’s sexist and racist tirades.

At Free Press, our mission is to create a better media environment by changing policy. Every day, we fight sexism and racism in the media by working toward policies that will give more people access to an open Internet, get more voices on the airwaves, support quality journalism and build a world-class public media system that can counter the mainstream media and help eliminate gender bias in our media discourse.

If you have had enough, please sign the Women’s Media Center statement supporting media justice for Sotomayor. And sign up to become a Free Press e-activist so you can stay up-to-date with the latest media policy action alerts.

When we collectively move beyond “why” and into action, we can make a difference. We can create the media we want by changing the current system.

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News for Sale

This morning, Politico reported (http://bit.ly/Vgax1) that the Washington Post was offering lobbyists “off-the-record, non-confrontational” access to the paper’s own reporters and editors for a whopping fee of $25,000 to $250,000.

According to Politico, a promotional flyer for the first “Washington Post Salon,” focusing on health care, promised lobbyists an “exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done.” In addition to access to reporters and editors, the paper promised to hand-deliver Obama administration officials and members of Congress to any lobbyist willing to pay for access.

But within moments after news of the promotion hit social networks and blogs, the Post cancelled the plan.  “This should never have happened,” Katharine Weymouth, publisher of the Post, said in an article on the paper’s site. “The fliers got out and weren’t vetted. They didn’t represent at all what we were attempting to do. We’re not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom.”

The crisis in journalism has sparked unparalleled experimentation and innovation from new and old newsrooms alike. But this kind of “pay-for- access” model should be a non-starter in newsrooms, and it’s good to see leadership at the Post acting swiftly to shut down the ill-advised scheme.

With the advent of the 24-hour news cycle and an unprecedented drive to maximize profits at media conglomerates, we have seen too many examples of news organizations forgoing their independence in exchange for a place in the halls of power. These Washington Post salons would have taken this one step further, auctioning off its access to corporate lobbyists.

If held, this kind of an event would have been an outrageous violation of journalistic standards. While we know that journalism is in crisis around the country, and that the economic downturn has collided with fundamental technological, cultural and ideological changes, the future of journalism is not in selling access to reporters and contacts to the highest bidder.

The backlash against the Post was swift, spreading across social media and fueled by the marketing materials that seemed blind to the inherent conflicts of interest in this model. The promotional flyer for the salons said that these events  “are extensions of The Washington Post brand of journalistic inquiry into the issues, a unique opportunity for stakeholders to hear and be heard.”

Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli took up the issue of journalistic ethics in the Post’s article, saying, “We do not offer access to the newsroom for money. We just are not in that business.”  He went on to say that the newsroom was never involved in this plan, nor would it have taken part in such an event.

Yet, the fact that this idea got as far as it did is another example of how Big Media serve corporate interests instead of the public interest. The notion of holding these events suggests that for the Post, the real stakeholders in the health care debate seemed to be lobbyists and the companies they represent, not the American people whom the Post is supposed to inform,  educate and represent.

It’s telling that throughout the flyer, the Post reassures corporate representatives that the conversation will be non-confrontational – there will be no afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted here.

The irony of this whole debacle is that journalists and policy makers ought to be getting in the same room more often. But we need them to be working together in search of policy solutions to the crisis in journalism and to ensure that our communities get the information they need – not to trade influence and cash in on their contacts.

If you are on Twitter, use this petition (http://act.ly/6l) to thank the Washington Post’s editors for backing down and reinforce the fact that we need real public interest journalism.

For more on possible policy solutions to the crisis in journalism, download our report Saving the News: Toward a National Journalism Strategy (http://www.freepress.net/files/saving_the_news.pdf ) or visit SaveTheNews.org.

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