Her-nalism - Village Magazine

42 April 2015

T le a s t one Su nd ay ne w sp ap er

always adorns its male-dom-

inated business section with

an attractive, often skimp-

ily dressed woman. The

weekend lifestyle supplements of sev-

eral Irish newspapers lean on their

female correspondents to reveal their

personal lives and ideally to remove as

much clothing as possible for personal

features.

Stephanie Roche’s appearance at the

‘Puskas’ attracted as much attention to

the gawpings of Ronaldo and Messi, as

for the skill manifest. Her goal-scoring

prowess somehow required that she

appear in her underwear in a photo-

shoot for another Sunday.

For bright young women leaving

university, journalism must seem a

tantalisingly desirable career. After all

everyone knows our newspapers and

magazines are full of female bylines.

Women can make their name early, so

that they are established in their work

before having children. And talent is

so transparent that the world of media

must of course be a true meritocracy.

On April 18 female journalists will

meet in Ballybunion for the annual

‘Women in Media’ event. Some might

survey this bright and conﬁdent gather-

ing and wonder why on earth they need

it. Some men, particularly, will watch

in horror or amusement, though more

conﬁdent men might approve. But if you

look at women journalists as members

of yet another profession where few get

the top jobs or have a say in the culture

and tone of their work, you will under-

stand why female journalists must do

it.

Joan O’Connor is one of the organ-

isers and when asked why she ﬁrst set

the event up she says: “Put simply, as the

mother of two young girls I look forward

to reminiscing with them in time to

come about how and more importantly

why we felt the need to set up Women in

Media way way back in 2013”.

The Global Media Monitoring Project

(GMMP) maps the representation of

women and men in news media world-

wide and its research has been carried

out in ﬁve-year cycles since 1995. The

1995, 2000 and 2005 studies revealed

that women are grossly underrep-

resented in news coverage and the

depressing result of this under-repre-

sentation is an imbalanced picture of

the world, in which women are often

absent, resulting in news that presents

a male-centred view of the world.

On 10 November 2009, 1,281 news-

papers, and television and radio stations

Where they appear in the media women are often

adornments, scripted, or presented as carer or victim.

By Lorraine Courtney

Her-nalism

Also in this section:

Dr Julien Mercille 44

Fidelma Healy-Eames 46

Facebook and data 47

Mobile journalism 48

Media and the Banking Inquiry 49

MEDIA

April 2015 43

Only 24% of

the people

heard or read

about in print,

radio and

television

news are

female

“

programmes in the latest survey and

both had disappointing ﬁgures. Sun-

day’s ‘This Week’ had just 12 percent

female participation and on Sunday

12 October it actually had an all-male

line up, with two male presenters and

six male guests. ‘Saturday with Brian

Dowling’ had a female representation

of a very low 17 percent.

Today FM also registered improved

inclusivity with ‘The Last Word’ increas-

ing from 14pc female representation

in 2010 to 28pc in 2014. Keaveney

and Gibbons found little evidence of

progress in addressing gender balance

at Newstalk. ‘The Pat Kenny Show’ fell

from 35pc to 17pc while ‘The Right

Hook’ dropped by 15pc to only 5pc. The

only show to improve was their break-

fast one.

Sports coverage proved a big issue.

It was almost always dealt with from

a male perspective and ignored female

successes in sport. TG4 was an excep-

tion to this and does have signiﬁcant

coverage of women’s sporting events.

A notable syndrome was that female

voices are frequently heard reading

scripted items (such as the weather and

traﬃc reports) and women were also

far more likely to be heard discussing

topics like health, education, caring,

cooking etc, perpetuating redundant

stereotypes of the female as carer or

victim.

Another issue was the current aﬀairs

programmes surveyed often allowed

men to talk over and interrupt women

as they gave their opinions, undermin-

ing the female panellist’s input.

were monitored in 108 countries for

the fourth GMMP. The research cov-

ered 16,734 news items, 20,769 news

personnel (announcers, presenters and

reporters), and 35,543 total news sub-

jects. Only 24% of the people heard or

read about in print, radio and televi-

sion news are female. In contrast that’s

more than three out of four of the people

in the news are male.

However, this is a signiﬁcant improve-

ment from back in 1995 when only 17pc

of the people in the news were women.

But despite a slow but overall steady

increase in women’s presence in the

news over the past 10 years, the world

described in the news remains mostly

male.

Where they do ﬁgure in the news,

women remain embedded in the ‘ordi-

nary’ people categories, in contrast

to men who continue to predominate

in the “expert” categories. They made

up 44pc of persons interviewed in the

news in this kind of role compared to

just 34pc in 2005. Despite the gains,

only 19pc of spokespersons and 20pc of

experts are women. In contrast, 81pc

of spokespersons and 80pc of experts

in the news are male.

Since 2000 the percentage of sto-

ries reported by women compared to

those reported by men has increased in

all major topics except for science and

health stories. Nonetheless, stories

by male reporters continue to exceed

those by female reporters in all topics.

The changes range from three to eleven

percentage points, the highest increase

being in ﬂuﬃer stories on celebrities

and the arts. Men report 67 percent of

stories on politics/government, 65 per-

cent of stories on crime/violence and

60pc of stories on the economy. The

percentage of stories on science/health

reported by women declined sharply

between 2000 and 2005 from 46 per-

cent to 38 percent.

So how do we compare? The ﬁrst Miss-

ing Voices survey, monitoring female

expertise on radio panels here, was car-

ried out in 2010 and has been followed

by similar surveys in 2012, 2013 and

October 2014. Researchers Lucy Keav-

eney and Dolores Gibbons found that

RTÉ Radio 1 made deﬁnite progress.

‘Today with Sean O’Rourke’, ‘News at

One’, ‘Drivetime’, ‘Late Debate’ and ‘The

Marian Finucane Show’ all increased

their representation of women during

the four-year period.

However, they have included two new

There’s a gaping hole when it comes

to research on the numbers of women

working in print here but if we accept

the global norms, according to research

published by the American Society

of News Editors, 36pc of those work-

ing full-time in daily newspapers are

women.

A study carried out by the Association

of Women Journalists in France showed

that women journalists choose six per-

cent more stories on women than men

journalists do, and so the idea that seri-

ous newspapers should cover the whole

human condition, and not just the polit-

ical, economic and cerebral part of it,

is probably the biggest contribution

that female journalists have made.

This approach does not exclude men,

but women at last have given men the

licence to admit that these stories are

important too. As a result, broadsheet

newspapers are now more rounded and

better reﬂect their readers’ lives.

The choice of story angle, the choice

of interviewee, the use of language and

the choice of images all have a bear-

ing on the messages that emerge in the

news. Women want better links with

other women. We want the conﬁdence

and strength in numbers to stand up

to the male culture that holds ﬁrm in

so many areas of the industry. We want

our concerns to be heard, on anything

from family friendly policies to the por-

trayal of women in the media. And we

want the same opportunities as men:

in our careers, our wages, and our abil-

ity to inﬂuence the news agenda, the

budgets and the policy-making of the

publications we work for.

There are still more men than women

in public life, women transgressing

accepted social and moral codes are

deemed more newsworthy than male

equivalents, and a premium is placed

on a woman’s appearance. The point,

however, is that despite what may

often seem the best intentions and even

amidst the growing coverage now given

to so-called ‘woman-friendly’ stories

(pro-family,work / life balance etc) the

media does, still, get it so very wrong.

The public may not expect their media

to do more than society, but they can

certainly expect them to keep up.

Against a background of distorted,

sexist and often even lurid portrayals

of women, “Where are the female inﬂu-

encers?” remains the question and at

least 50 percent of us are waiting for

the answer. •

Stephanie

Roche in

the

Sindo