Women, Media and Democratic Society: in Pursuit of Rights and Freedoms
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EGM/MEDIA/2002/BP.1 United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW) Expert Group Meeting on “Participation and access of women to the media, and the impact of media on, and its use as an instrument for the advancement and empowerment of women” Beirut, Lebanon 12 to 15 November 2002 Women, Media And Democratic Society: In Pursuit Of Rights And Freedoms Margaret Gallagher* * The views expressed in this paper, which has been reproduced as received, are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the United Nations. Margaret Gallagher November 2002 EGM/MEDIA/2002/BP.1 CONTENTS Introduction: The Journey So Far 2 Powerful Issues: Media Employment and Decision-making 4 Presence, Role and Power The Glass Ceiling: Obstacles to Advancement The Rules of the Game The Experience of Discrimination Actions and Policies Critical Issues: Media Content and Portrayal 10 Patterns of Portrayal The Disappearing Older Woman Invisible Ethnic Communities The Contradictions of Commercialization Changing Media Content Emerging Issues: Impact of New Technologies 17 Access: Gender and the Digital Divide Production and Content The Internet and Journalistic Practice Spaces of Difference Foundational Issues: Policies and their Implementation 22 Policy, Dialogue and Gender-Awareness Reconciling Rights and Freedoms Conclusion: The Next Decade 26 References 28 1 Margaret Gallagher November 2002 EGM/MEDIA/2002/BP.1 Introduction: The Journey So Far When the Taliban successfully captured Kabul in September 1996, they immediately did two things: they barred women from … any participation in the public sphere, and they banned television. Control over these two elements – women and the media – lay at the heart of the Taliban regime. It is interesting to note that the state of each is increasingly taken as a key index of the democratization and development of a society. Sreberny, 2002, p. 271 Over the past twenty-five years, analytical critique of the interconnections between women, media institutions and media content has come to occupy an ever more central place on the international agenda. This has occurred against a background of dramatic transformations brought about by changes in the global media system. During the early years of the international women’s movement, media issues were generally regarded as secondary to cardinal problems such as of poverty, health and education for women. But by the early 1990s in most regions of the world the media could no longer be dismissed as an élite irrelevance. As the spread of satellite communication introduced previously unimaginable numbers of channels into many countries, the enormous power of the media to influence ideas and behaviour at all levels of society became fully apparent. In parts of the world where media systems had been founded with a mission to educate and inform citizens in the context of social development, free trade principles and deregulation – allied with digital technology – produced profound changes in traditional patterns of media financing and control. The exponential rate of technological change that has transformed media and communication structures globally is reflected in the degree of attention paid to the women- media-communication nexus by the international community. While the media were barely mentioned in the strategy documents of the first three United Nations conferences on women in the period 1975-1985, the Beijing Platform for Action adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 identified the media as one of twelve Critical Areas of Concern. And while in 1995 there was little recognition of the impending explosion of information and communication technologies and their implications for women, five years later these new media had moved centre stage. The review and appraisal of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (Beijing+5, June 2000) acknowledged the effective use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as a major challenge to be addressed in promoting women’s advancement. Today the technological, regulatory, economic and political contexts in which we must situate and analyse women’s relation to media, communication and information systems are highly complex. Indeed over the past twenty years it has become an increasingly daunting task to map out this terrain in a way that adequately reflects the particularity of positions and problems in immensely different social and cultural environments. For example, in the media-saturated world of multi-channel television and 24-hour Internet access experienced by many of us today it is easy to forget that ‘our’ experience is a minority experience; that half of the world’s population has never made a telephone call and that in the poorest regions media access is minimal. In Africa, for instance, just 25% of people have a radio; 8% have a television; one out of 130 has a personal computer; 1 out of 160 uses the Internet; 1 out of 400 has pay-TV (Jensen, 2 Margaret Gallagher November 2002 EGM/MEDIA/2002/BP.1 2002). Media access of women, and of rural women in particular, is even lower. A recent study of female heads of households in rural Zimbabwe (Matewa, 2002) found that only 4% of these women had a television set. Although radio ownership was more common, more than 60% of the radios were not working or were not being used because of lack of power and the high cost of batteries. None of the local shops sold newspapers or magazines, which could only be purchased in the nearest town – over thirty kilometres away. Of course ownership does not necessarily equate with access. The women could listen to radio in the village shops, could sometimes watch television in the homes of neighbours, and could occasionally read a newspaper or magazine brought to them by a visiting family member. But clearly these media experiences are of an utterly different nature from those of urban-based women in high-density media environments. However, the hazards of presenting an overall review of issues and trends in this now vast field are rooted in even more complex questions than differential levels of access and use. One of the most important lessons from feminist media theory over the past twenty years has been that women’s experience of discrimination, and indeed of identity itself, is heavily determined by differences in terms of class, economic status, age, sexuality, religion, race and nation. The inadequacies of ‘women and media’ studies that conflate the condition of white, heterosexual, middle-class women with the condition of all women are now acknowledged, and contemporary media research has tried to grapple with more complex understandings of gender identity and experience. As one African American media scholar has put it: ‘Women of color do not experience sexism in addition to racism, but sexism in the context of racism; thus they cannot be said to bear an additional burden that white women do not bear, but to bear an altogether different burden from that borne by white women’ (Houston, 1992, p. 49). A great deal of contemporary research – including many studies referred to in this paper – still fails to address these issues of interlocking identities and media experiences. Nevertheless, this theoretical understanding must be a constant backdrop against which to appraise the validity of research findings and the policy-oriented conclusions to be drawn from them. Yet another change over the past twenty years is that media culture itself has become increasingly complex. We are witnessing a convergence of media technology and services, a gradual merging of television, radio, print, computers and the Internet. This convergence blurs the boundaries between definitions of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, as well as of ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ media. Alongside this, we are seeing a globalization of media distribution systems, formats and applications which calls into question what have traditionally been considered national media and local identities. A good example of these trends is the phenomenally successful television programme Big Brother, which originated in the Netherlands (see Drotner, 2002). The format revolves around the selection of a group of ‘real’ people (i.e. not actors) who are required to live together in a single household over a period of weeks. Their interactions are witnessed by the viewing public, which each week votes to eliminate one member of the group. The Big Brother format has been sold to most European countries, as well as to Argentina, Australia, South Africa and the USA. In all of these it has been adapted to local cultural norms and production codes – with varying degrees of success. Big Brother is conceived as a composite media text, whose content evolves through the entire range of media and ICTs – television, radio, print, Internet sites, phone-in polls – and whose audience at times becomes transformed into a physical public which gathers 3 Margaret Gallagher November 2002 EGM/MEDIA/2002/BP.1 outside the Big Brother house to witness dramatic events. Big Brother illustrates not only the convergence of media technologies, but also the emergence of new forms of media expression, and new relationships between media content and media audiences. These convergences and shifting boundaries make it increasingly problematic to maintain the distinctions that have traditionally characterised the study of women and media internationally – women as media producers, women in media content, and women as media users. Having said that, the remainder of this paper will attempt to maintain some of these broad distinctions, which continue to be helpful in shedding light on empirical trends and emerging issues around the world. Nevertheless, these separate concerns should be understood as belonging to a more complex conceptualisation of the structure and process of gender portrayal in the media, the cultural and economic formations that support this structure and process, the social relations that produce gendered subjects, and the nature of gendered identity.