Media Watch-Media and Gender Justice

Start Date:2008-01-23  End Date: 2008-01-27

---

20 students and senior friends of the SCMI Media Watch Group met on the 23^rd to 27^th of January 2008 at the SCMI Programme Centre, Bangalore. This workshop is a continuation of the previous workshop on the same theme, “Media and Gender Justice”, but in this workshop we had more focus on the Media Watch aspect of the issue.  

 

As we started the workshop, we had an extensive presentation of the works that they had done during the three months they had in between the two workshops, and it is amazing that as students they had learnt so much and were so sensitive about the issue. Most students brought clippings of advertisements and news matters in local and national newspapers and journals, where they feel that women are portrayed in an indecent and stereotypically ‘lower than men’ or ‘women at home’ manner. We also had an interesting discussion on how they felt as they were ‘watching’ the media, their experiences and the knowledge gained in the process.

 

In this workshop we had several sessions, focussing on the Media Watch aspect. Sessions like Portrayal of women in advertisements, news media, internet, films/movies, community radio etc. The students were able to understand the whole politics behind media, especially newspaper, and were introduced to new and alternative media like community radio. At the same time, we also had training on being a ‘media watch dog’. The participants are now the members of SCMI Media Watch Group, and we had learnt how to use the internet as a tool, how to write letters to the editor, how to make a newsletter, how to use camera (both still and movie) and so on. With these skills learnt in the workshop, we hope that we may change the world and particularly make noises on how women have been portrayed by media.