Media and Gender Justice-Ammu Joseph

Posted On: 2008-06-24 11:21:03 By: SCMI

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Media and Gender Justice

 Ammu Joseph[1]

Since I am the first to speak on the topic, let me begin by highlighting the fact that there are several aspects to the theme of the workshop: gender and media justice – even if one leaves out the entertainment media, including cinema, and advertising, as I am going to do today:

• The first and most commonly discussed aspect concerns media content: the representation of women and men, and coverage of events/issues of particular concern and relevance to both, in media content -- both news/current affairs and entertainment

• The second relates to women’s access to the media as media professionals (journalists, directors/ producers, camerapersons and other technical personnel, and so on) – including and especially, in the current context, their access to decision-making within media organizations.

• Then there’s the issue of women’s access to and relationship with the media as citizens and audiences – which includes their right to information and communication (i.e., their right to get appropriate/relevant information and analyses, as well as entertainment, from the media, and to be able to communicate their knowledge, experiences, concerns, opinions and perspectives through the media)

• And, finally, possibly the most neglected aspect of the subject is the impact on women of laws and policies relating to the media and communication (e.g., the Broadcast Bill and Content Code), including new information and communications technologies (generally known as ICTs), as well as other media-related trends and developments at the macro level (like media globalization)

Each of these is equally important and, of course, they are inter-related. But, although I have done some work on all of them, I don’t think I’d be able to do justice to the complexities of each within half an hour. So I’ll confine myself mainly to the so-called news media and news coverage, particularly in the print media, although I will also touch upon community media towards the end.

Before I begin I would like to place on record, and in fact emphasize, the fact that gender, whether in the media or otherwise, is not exclusively a women’s issue, particularly since the construction of femininity and masculinity are closely linked. I firmly believe that the ways in which men are portrayed in the media place expectations and limitations on them that adversely affect their lives and those of the women and children in their lives as well as other people and society in general. And such portrayals are also not compatible with gender equality.

In fact, I’m about to start work on a long-delayed edited volume on masculinities and the media, for which I will be seeking articles and papers by men, especially young men, on how they perceive the way they are portrayed and the manner in which manhood and maleness are defined by the media. However, for want of time, I will focus primarily on women and the media this morning.

The first question I’d like to address this morning is: why bother about the media, are they at all worth worrying and trying to do something about? I’m sure most of you will agree that the mass media today are omnipresent and omnipotent, if not omniscient. As I see it, the media are increasingly playing the role once played by family, community, religion and formal education: not only disseminating information and knowledge, but also shaping values and norms, moulding attitudes and behaviour, and influencing the very process of living.

As the late American academic George Gerbner pointed out time and again, the stories the media tell -- now virtually around the clock and through multiple channels of communication – “weave the seamless web of the cultural environment that cultivates most of what we think, what we do, and how we conduct our affairs.”

In addition, the news media especially have traditionally played a key role in democracy by creating what is known as the “public sphere,” where issues of importance to the public are discussed and debated, and where information essential to citizen participation in national and community life is presented.

The increased commercialisation that is now perceptible in the media – which of course is an integral part of media globalisation -- make them less able and willing to cultivate and nurture this public sphere, which is indispensable to democratic society. As we all know, democracy critically depends upon an informed populace making political choices. For this to happen, it is clearly important that a wide range of political viewpoints, as well as the interests and concerns of all sections of society – including the least powerful – be represented in the media.

So I would argue that anyone who is at all concerned about society, democracy and justice must pay serious attention to the media. Unfortunately, very few – even among intellectuals and activists -- do so: most seem to be content with wooing the media or complaining about them.

To get to the topic at hand, women, who constitute at least half the world’s and the average country’s population (though not ours, as you probably know), are certainly not proportionately or properly represented in the media today. While certain, relatively small categories of women tend to be almost over-represented in our media now; the large numbers that make up other, especially disadvantaged, categories continue to be under-represented. In addition, there is considerable misrepresentation of women, the realities of their lives, their interests and concerns, their opinions and perspectives.

Of course, more or less the same thing can be said about other categories of people who are not among the bold and the beautiful, the rich and the famous, or the powerful and the pampered – including men who belong to various out-groups, however numerically strong those groups may be – e.g., dalits, people with disabilities, workers in the informal sector of labour, etc. But the fact is that even within this context women tend to be further marginalised.

The point is that journalism sets the context for national debates on important current events and thereby affects public perception of issues across the socio-economic and political continuum – not just what are widely seen as “women’s issues.” By determining who has a voice in these debates and who is silenced, which issues are discussed and how they’re framed, media have the power to maintain the status quo or challenge the dominant order.

Unfortunately, mainstream media content still, by and large, reflects a masculine (and upper class, upper caste, urban, etc.) view of the world and of what is important. As a result many issues that are particularly crucial to women’s lives feature low down in the scale of what is regarded as newsworthy – e.g., a recent WHO report has revealed that India is at the top of the charts for maternal mortality: how often do we see the media addressing the issues that lead to more Indian women dying during pregnancy and childbirth than almost anywhere else in the world?

When women do appear on the media’s radar, they tend to do so as desirable consumers rather than as full-fledged citizens who are affected by and must have a say in all the events and issues that make news, as well as the many that don’t.

Many of us who indulge in media-watching -- a habit that is probably injurious to our mental health – believe that in some ways the situation in the media today is worse than it was a couple of decades ago. In fact, the period covered in the original edition of my first book, Whose News? The Media and Women’s Issues (co-edited with Kalpana Sharma) – that is, the late 1970s to the late 80s -- now appears like a golden era, when some kind of a liberal consensus still operated in the media and there was some acceptance of the social responsibility of the press.

Today, in the brave, new, market-driven world of Indian media in the age of globalization, even news is increasingly being packaged and presented as entertainment. As celebrity and lifestyle journalism has slowly but surely seeped into influential sections of the news media, the realities and concerns of ordinary citizens -- as opposed to consumers -- have naturally been pushed to the margins. There are, of course, exceptions but they serve mainly to prove the rule.

Women are no longer missing from the Indian media, whether as media professionals or as subjects or even sources of news. In fact, the media now tend to be replete with images of and references to women. The question today is not so much “Where are the women?” But “Who are the women?” Also, “When and where do they appear?” and “What are they shown saying and doing?” In other words, “How are they represented?”

The women most prominently and consistently covered by present-day media tend to be, in the main, movie and TV stars, beauty queens and models, fashion designers and impresarios, successful entrepreneurs and professionals, controversial or glamorous politicians, well-heeled philanthropists, stylish sportswomen, and sundry entertainers and socialites -- with a few celebrity writers, artists, performers and journalists thrown in for good measure.

In addition, advertiser-sponsored supplements celebrating the ‘World of Women’ regularly publish profiles of ‘the progressive woman’ and ‘the wonder woman’ along with tips on beauty, fitness, health and travel that appear beside corresponding ads. Even International Women’s Day has been adopted, shorn of meaning and placed alongside Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and so on, as an occasion for celebratory consumption.

Of course women also make it to the news pages and bulletins as victims of crime or conflict, disasters or atrocities and, occasionally, as recipients of charity or beneficiaries of social welfare or income-generation programmes. However, in the age of 24x7 TV news and sound-bite journalism, their stories tend to be not only oversimplified but often also sensationalized, even dramatized. Indeed, basic professional norms such as protecting the identity of victims -- of sexual crimes in particular – are all too frequently flouted. Further, just as the media tend to celebrate individual women “achievers” and generalize their accomplishments, they are apt to valorize individual women “survivors” and gloss over the structural, systemic roots of their suffering.

It appears that women have to be victims of sob stories or heroines of success stories to be sure to catch the attention of the media these days.

I admit that so far I’ve presented a rather negative appraisal of the representation of women and coverage of gender-related issues in the Indian news media today. Yet I would be among the first to acknowledge that significant sections of the Indian media have played an important role over the years, and especially in the last quarter of a century, in the spread of information and ideas about the status of women in society and the need to improve it.

There certainly has been a perceptible increase in gender consciousness in the media, not only among individual journalists -- of both sexes, though especially female -- but also, to some extent, within the editorial hierarchy, now headed by members of the 1970s generation that was witness to the emergence of contemporary women’s movements in the country. It is another matter that journalists, including editors, are no longer always the final arbiters of media content, with business compulsions increasingly influencing editorial decisions in an ever-widening range of media organizations.

Media coverage has definitely helped to generate public awareness of at least the most obvious of the multiple problems facing women, such as violence of various kinds. Such coverage has also led to public recognition of at least some strategies to help women overcome these hurdles, especially the less complicated and contentious ones such as education, healthcare, income-generation, savings and credit and, to some extent, legislation.

For example, the media’s growing openness to at least some women-related issues could be seen in the fairly wide coverage given to the Domestic Violence Against Women (Prevention and Protection) Act, passed late last year – in terms of both news reports and editorial comment. Of course, some of the reports tended to trivialize the issue with leads saying: wife beaters beware, and so on. Soon afterwards there were also a number of reports on cases filed under the new law in different parts of the country. However, subsequently there has been little follow up on those cases or on the many problems – including budgetary and administrative ones -- that continue to make it difficult to implement the law. And this is one of the problems with media coverage of such issues: lack of consistency and follow-up.

Similarly, every now and then the media get quite agitated about another violent crime against women: rape. But the cases most likely to become causes Celebes today are crimes committed in one of the metropolitan cities, especially Delhi with its high density of “national” media, involving a victim (and/or an offender) from the middle or upper classes. As commentators have pointed out time and again, both the media and their “target audiences” are most likely to get agitated when crimes, including rape, affect “people like us,” while crimes against the poor, the powerless and the distant tend to receive little, if any, media and public attention.

You may remember some of the high profile rape cases that received quite a bit of media attention in recent times: the case of the young call centre executive working with a multinational company in Bangalore, the Marine Drive case where a college student was raped in a police chowki in Mumbai, the Dhaula Kuan case -- again involving a woman working in a BPO -- in Delhi, etc.

In fact, “mainstream” media coverage of rape (and many other forms of violence against women) over the past quarter of a century has generally conformed to a predictable pattern: long spells of routine reports regularly, if randomly, culled from police handouts, broken by brief periods of intensive and extensive coverage catalyzed by one or more cases that happen to grab the imagination of the media and the public – usually in that order. Another problem is that gender has really not been integrated into general news coverage.

Take, for example, coverage of disasters and conflicts. At an international conference on the media’s role in the post-tsunami scenario in April 2005, a journalist who questioned the scant coverage of women’s concerns in the aftermath of the December disaster was told off by a male resource person for being “too gender sensitive” and advised by a fellow female participant to shed her “women’s ghetto mentality.” "This sort of thinking isn't going to get you anywhere,” the latter cautioned her. “People died, not just women. Why should the media concentrate on the women?"

Yet it was not long before it became abundantly clear that gender was indeed a critical factor in the tragedy, as well as in the relief, recovery and rehabilitation process that followed. So, yes, people died -- not just women. People suffered, succumbed, survived, recovered, rebuilt -- not just women.

Nobody would be stupid enough to suggest that the media focus exclusively on women. But it is surely not unfair to propose that the media – in their vital role as the Fourth Estate, the watchdog of society, defenders of the public interest -- must attempt to reflect the experiences, concerns and opinions of diverse sections of the population, including the female half of the human race?

Yet, despite the well-documented gender differences in the impact of disasters and conflicts, and despite the fact that women and children constitute the majority of victims seen in the media’s representation of disasters -- natural and otherwise -- media coverage of recurring disasters across the world (including Hurricane Katrina and the South Asian earthquake that followed in the wake of the tsunami) continues to be, by and large, gender-blind.

Before I close I would like shift the focus from the so-called mainstream media and try to perk us all up with a story about the way poor, Dalit, rural women are using the media, often with much more sensitivity and effectiveness than many media professionals. This is a story that may now have a happy ending with community radio finally, at long last, gaining some legitimacy, although the law passed last year is still hamstrung with all kinds of bureaucratic controls.

A decade ago, these women in rural Andhra Pradesh faced multiple jeopardy as poor, illiterate, rural women from dalit communities. They had little access to the media even as listeners and viewers. They were, however, members of the sanghams (voluntary, village-level women’s collectives) associated with the Deccan Development Society, a 20-year-old grassroots organisation working with socially and economically disadvantaged rural communities in AP.

In 1997 sangham women from 75 villages decided that they needed their own media to express themselves, facilitate dialogue across rural communities, document and analyse local events and issues, and convey information and ideas to the outside world.

The seven women who completed the ten-month video training course have since gone on to make over 100 films on issues like food and agriculture, natural resources and displacement, genetic engineering and livelihoods. They have been commissioned by other organisations to make films and have also been involved in training rural women in other countries.

In 2001 they established an independent, rural, women’s media collective, the DDS Community Media Trust. “Who would have thought that I, who once worked with a sickle, could have gone so far?” asks Humnapur Laxmamma.

The women continue with their original occupations – primarily in agriculture and animal husbandry -- when they are not wielding their cameras. But they have no doubts about the relevance of media work and the importance of being able to determine media content and style.

According to Edulpally Manjula, they cover events and issues of particular interest and concern to their communities, which are rarely reflected in mainstream media. Further, they use the familiar, local dialect that both they and their audience are comfortable with, rather than the formal version of Telugu used by mainstream media. They have also coined interesting names for different kinds of shots: the Patel shot, the slave shot and the sangham shot.

Also, they point out, fellow villagers are more at ease talking to “people like us” about problems than they would be with strangers. In addition, says Laxmamma, as rural reporters they are often better placed to record and report on events that mainstream media professionals, based in urban areas, may not be around to capture. These opinions are echoed by women from A.P.’s Chittoor district, who work with Navodayam, a magazine for rural women published under a government-initiated anti-poverty project popularly known as Velugu (light in Telugu).

Although these reporter-editors are literate, they are poor and, predominantly, dalit – like their primary audience.

According to Manjula, they make it a point to highlight the talents and achievements, work and activism of ordinary women, thus boosting their self-esteem. They also tap older people in the village for folk songs, proverbs and stories, so that younger generations have access to these fast disappearing aspects of local culture.

According to Bharati, the magazine serves as a link between women and the government, spreading awareness about official schemes and programmes and relaying villagers’ needs and concerns to the authorities. They also report and promote action on issues like child marriage, child labour and domestic violence, publishing success stories to encourage more intervention in such problems by women and their self-help groups.

Their involvement in rural journalism has not only made them more confident but improved their status in their communities. “Earlier, the rare letter I received came care of my husband,” says Ratnamma, smiling. “Now I get letters addressed to Ratnamma, Navodayam reporter.” All 14 of the Navodayam women and six of the CMT women had come to Bangalore earlier this year to participate in the 5th annual meeting of the Network of Women in Media, India.

For the Navodayam reporters, it was their third experience of interacting with urban colleagues in the NWMI; the CMT women had met some of us when we went to Pastapur on a field visit after the 3rd annual NWMI meeting held in Hyderabad in 2005.

To conclude, the primary reason why it is important for all those concerned about democracy and human rights in general, and gender equality and justice in particular, to continue to focus on gender and the media was pinpointed in an editorial in the daily paper brought out by gender/media activists during the Beijing Plus Ten review meeting at the UN in New York in March 2005: “Institutions that are not changed cannot become agents of change. Just as gender has to be mainstreamed in government it has to be mainstreamed in the media.”

Over the past few years citizens across the world have been slowly but surely waking up to the notion that they have a stake in the media, that it is important for them to be critically aware of the media, and that they need to intervene in media matters. This new awareness is based on a growing consciousness about the power and influence of the media today. In many places media audiences, long presumed to be passive consumers, are beginning to turn active, seeking recognition as citizens who have a right to be heard on all issues relating to the media.

This kind of consciousness and action are not yet evident in India, despite the fact that we have the Supreme Court on our side (in its landmark 1995 judgment in the Cricket Association of Bengal v the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting case, which affirmed that the air waves are public assets meant to be used for the public good). I believe that one of the urgent tasks before civil society in India is the development of a media reform movement.

I would like to end with two quotations from two African women which, I believe, effectively sums up the rationale for media activism:

“What, in the end, could be more central to free speech than that every segment of society should have a voice?”

Justice Athalia Molokomme Attorney General, Botswana

“When every voice counts we can stop counting the voices.”

Colleen Lowe Morna Executive Director, Gender Links, South Africa

 

[1]Ammu Joseph is an independent journalist and author based in Bangalore, writing primarily on issues relating to gender, human development and the media.  Among her publications are five books: Whose News?  The Media and Women's Issues (Sage, 2006), Women in Journalism:  Making News (Penguin, 2005), Terror, Counter-Terror:  Women Speak Out (Kali/Zed, 2003), Storylines: Conversations with Women Writers and Just between Us: Women Speak about Their Writing (Women’s World India/Women Unlimited, 2003, 2004).