Can a free media be only a male domain?

An ‘independent press’ in the declaration is defined as ‘ a press independent from governmental, political or economic control or from control of materials and infrastructure essential for the production and dissemination of newspapers, magazines and periodicals’.

The Windhoek Declaration and many of the media advocacy movements for a free and independent media in Southern Africa rightly concentrate on the external factors that can censor and curtail the media’s pivotal role of providing freedom of expression and access to information to the public. What the Windhoek Declaration and media advocacy groups forget, however, are the internal biases and prejudices of the media practitioners themselves, which also influence the choices made when providing access and expression to all citizens. There also is no mention of safeguards to prevent the media from fostering stereotypes and promoting stigma of certain groups through the use of language and images. How not to take for granted that the notion of citizenship is automatically inclusive of women in Southern Africa’s patriarchal societies is also missing in the declaration, which is based on the principles of freedom of expression for all.

News is the result of countless judgement calls, rather than some abstract truth, and these judgements may, and can, be affected by biases inherent in media practitioners.1 Editors, journalists, sub-editors, photojournalists etc., do not enter the profession bias-free. And while media ethics — based on the principles of accuracy, fairness and a balance representation — seek to keep media practitioners’ own prejudices in check, an examination of ‘who’ is missing in the media reveals the need for a widening of the factors that hinder the development of a free and independent media.

This article looks at how gender biases and prejudices are a strong form of censorship in the Southern African media, leading to a situation whereby the media do not provide access to expression to more than half of the region’s population: women. Gender biases and prejudices have become so endemic to the newsgathering and editing processes that virtually all news is told through the voices and perspectives of men. The media, therefore, limit women’s personal freedom of expression and curtail their democratic right to communicate.

Tanzanian journalist Matilda Kasanga argues, ‘Democracy is enhanced when the media comprises practitioners who have concern for decency and uphold democratic ideas. The role of such media is promote democracy by advocating equal access to resources and services for every individual; fighting and crusading for justice; and, fair play for all members of society’.2 One way the media ensure democratic processes take place, is when in their editorial content they give equal access to all citizens regardless of sex, race, ethnicity, age, etc. to air their views and to convey their realities.

As Dr Athalia Molokomme, High Court Judge in Botswana and former Head of the Gender Unit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), poignantly asks: ‘What in the end, could be more central to free speech than that every segment of society should have a voice? And what more fundamental and cross cutting fault line is there in every one of our societies than that between men and women?’3

The gendered nature of news
A gender analysis of the media in Southern Africa reveals that through its newsgathering and editing processes, the media silence a large segment of the region’s population. And, media also make invisible the voices of men who are ordinary (for lack of a better word) workers, farmers, labourers, villagers, miners, etc., which like the majority of women, comprise the rank-and-file of the citizenry. Many people do not have access to expression in the media, and when they are likely to see or hear themselves, what is reflected back are often, negative, one-dimensional stereotypes.

One of the key findings of the 2003 Southern Africa Gender and Media Baseline Study (GMBS) produced by Gender Links, a South African-based non-government organisation which advocates women’s equal access to expression in and through the media, and the Media Institute for Southern Africa (MISA), is that 83% of those who speak in the media are men, while women constitute only 17% of the sources in the media, despite being 52% of the region’s population. Furthermore, 89% of the men speaking in the more than 25,000 news items monitored in the print and broadcast media in 12 countries during one month, were in positions of prominence or formal authority, mainly politicians.4

Prominence has become a main news criterion in the majority of the Southern African countries’ media. Therefore, those in positions of prominence or leadership, the majority of whom are men, are the makers and sources of news. As an editor of The Noticias newspaper said during the workshop to review the GMBS findings in that country: ‘When a reporter returns from a story, the first thing an editor asks is: “Did you interview the Minister of the boss?”’

Media practitioners involved in the newsgathering and/or editing processes have also internalized that women’s roles are predominantly as wives, mothers or having their identities in some way attached to men. The only categories in which female views were dominant, according to the regional GMBS findings, were those of beauty contestants, sex workers and homemakers. At the time of the study, the regional proportion of women in Parliament was 18%, yet they comprised only 8% of the MPs sourced by the media. Older women were virtually invisible, because to the extent that women’s voices were accessed during the one-month monitored, they were likely to be in the 35-49 year bracket for both the print and electronic media.5

This ‘silencing’ of voices is no different in the state-owned or privately owned media. This means that there are factors more influential than external forms of censorship, profit-motive, or ownership at play in determining who makes news and who speaks in and through the media in Southern Africa.

The United Nations Decades for Women, which began in 1975 focused on the media as a key institution in advancing equality and women’s development, and in the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, the media are included as one of the Critical Areas of Concern. But for a long time, the media were expected to cover issues of gender and gender equality, without any steps taken to ‘engender’ the media. Both media and gender activists failed to link democracy, freedom of expression, governance and issues of gender justice to the editorial content of the media. Priority was given more to the employment patterns of women and men, especially in media management, than to the influence of gender biases on newsgathering and other media processes.

When women and men enter the newsrooms, they walk through the doors with years of socialisation that have given rise to gender values and norms, which for most people, become ‘just the way things are done’ without question. These unchecked gender biases, however, influence how media practitioners do their work and are a powerful form of censorship. For example, when accessing sources for stories, both women and men journalists are socialised to believe that only men are leaders and men should be the spokespersons, even when women are in the same positions as men. The former director of the MISA national office in Zimbabwe often relays her experience of journalists phoning and asking to speak to her junior male colleagues for a quote on media laws or freedom, even though her position in the organisation is well known.

Potential women sources, on the other hand, may also recede into the background when approached by the media, because although they know they are competent and know the issues, years of socialization tell them to retreat from the media, because women should not be ‘too visible’, or ‘too talkative’. Women are ‘told’ to go about their work without drawing too much attention to themselves in the public space.

In Whose news? Whose views? Southern Africa Gender in Media Handbook, three observations are made with regard to gender equality and freedom of expression:

‘Gender equality is entirely consistent with freedom of expression. Nothing could be more central to this ideal than giving voice to all segments of the population. When women comprise more than 50 percent of the population, but only constitute 17 percent of news sources, censorship of a very real kind exists.

No right is absolute. There are bottom lines of decency that guide all definitions of free speech. The objectification and portrayal of women in the media as sex objects often crosses this line.

There are often double standards applied to women and men by the media. The way in which women are objectified and their physical attributes highlighted in the media have become accepted in ways that do not apply to men.’6

What the editors have to say
From July to September 2003, Gender Links and MISA facilitated workshops in 11 of the GMBS countries for members from the media, media associations, non-governmental organisations and government, to devise national action plans to initiate advocacy processes around the national findings of the study. These workshops created the opportunity for editors to respond, and for more dialogue and in-depth discussions on how to achieve a more balanced and diverse representation of women in the media, as well as ways to increase women’s access to expression in and through the media.

While Southern African editors, the majority of whom are men, did not refute the GMBS’ findings, they offered reasons which illustrate how gender biases can influence the newsgathering and editing process. Many of the women and men editors put the onus on women to ‘make news’ if they want to be accessed by the media. But if the trend so far is a gauge of what is meant by this statement, then to ‘make news’, women must step out of the socially constructed roles for women and be ready to face the punishment in the media for doing so; they must engage in what is considered as ‘deviant’ or ‘unacceptable behaviour’ for a woman; they must become embroiled in controversy or conflict with each other (‘women fighting women’); and/or they must be ‘victims’ of gender-based violence or poverty. In these cases, they are sure to ‘make news’.

Some of the editors’ responses during these workshops also illustrate how coverage assignments in newsrooms can be influenced by gender biases. Historically in Tanzania, male editors there said, news reporting has been a male domain and editors therefore continue to send men to cover political rallies and many of the ‘hard news’ issues. Unless editors change their attitudes and begin to send women to cover politics and other ‘hard news’ areas such as economics and finance, women will not get experience in these areas and will be disadvantaged in the newsrooms, the editors concluded. A male editor of a daily newspaper in Malawi, which has a staff compliment of 30, of whom only two are women, admitted that he would not assign a female journalist to cover a political rally, because of the likelihood of violence and the need to ‘protect’ women from harm. He admitted that this was a personal bias when given, in a follow-up discussion, numerous examples of women who cover wars worldwide.
And, while many editors generally accept that the media should be a catalyst for change by highlighting the social injustices and social ills in a society, this view of the media’s role seems not to extend to how women are portrayed, accessed, or not accessed, by the media. ‘The media are simply a mirror of society and will reflect the reality that prevails in society, and therefore should not be blamed for the negative reports (on or about women) which is the reality,’ said a male South African editor.

Many media houses continue to resist changing the way they depict women arguing that women as sex and beauty objects sell newspapers. Rather than focusing on changing news values to promote gender equality in editorial content, editors and media owners continue to cite profit as having more weight than social responsibility.

Steps towards change
International media consultant and researcher Margaret Gallagher says ‘a wide-scale social and political transformation, in which women’s rights — and women’s right to communicate — are truly understood, respected and implemented both in society at large and by the media’ is required to fundamentally change the media’s content, which now reflects a masculine vision of the world and of what is important.7 Consistent work on several of the strategies outlined in the follow-up action plans to the GMBS, has started in order to transform the editorial content in the media of Southern Africa. These strategies and activities also coincide with the tireless efforts by activists in the region to ensure pluralistic politics and the continued growth of a free and independent media. Some of these strategies include the following.

Many of the gender gaps in the media’s processes are due to the lack of clear editorial and employment policies, which can guide and correct how the media does its work and employs its staff. It may take years of interrogating and deconstructing gender norms and values to change attitudes, but in the meantime, gender and media activists can campaign for the media to institute policies and guidelines that can bring significant changes in future GMBS findings. Many media houses in Southern Africa have mission statements and style manuals, but few have clear, written editorial policies that can direct who is accessed, and how groups are portrayed in the media. Gender Links is pioneering the mainstreaming of gender into the editorial and employment policies of a print and broadcast media house in Southern Africa as models for adaptation and application in other countries.

A starting point in any media training or re-training should be to review the definition of news. News is more than what is happening now, or what a prominent person does or says. The editor of an African news service in South Africa gave one definition of news, which opens the door for the media to use a gender lens to bring insightful analysis to many issues. News, he told participants from civil society to a 2002 Gender Links workshop on Reporting on Gender Violence in South Africa’s Mpumalanga Province, is also a ‘new perspective on an issue’.

Coupled with putting in place policy structures that make the media more inclusive in its processes, media owners and practitioners need training to understand gender and a gender analysis framework that is situated in transformation, rather than accommodation; and they must understand how these conceptual tools can change how they do their work. The incorrect belief both inside and outside the media that ‘gender equals women’ has to be dispelled. But critically important is for the media to understand, and to convey, as Karen Ross points out: ‘… arguing for a society in which sexual difference is no longer constantly invoked as the determinant of differential treatment is not the same as arguing for the abolition of gender distinctions’.

Ross says that ‘care must be taken to develop an inclusive gender politics which at the very least acknowledges manifest and implicit differences between women along the traditional fault lines of ethnicity, race, disability, religion, class, sexuality, age.’8 In other words, in sourcing, portrayal and in other regards, the media should reflect, and not obfuscate, the ‘many’ women that exist throughout Southern Africa’s societies.
Also, gender training that only leads to awareness is not enough for the media. Training must help media practitioners translate gender into the newsgathering, editing and packaging processes. The media is one institution where those within must have practical knowledge and skills to combine with conceptual understanding, so that gender is integrated into the journalistic work at all levels. This calls for the development of training curriculum, modules and manuals that mainstream gender into news issues.

Another training need in the equation for transformation is to equip gender and media activists and the public with basic media literacy. A better understanding of how the media does its work and how to engage with it, can begin to breakdown the barriers that make women in particular, shy away from the media.

Gender and media activism in Southern Africa
Media women’s associations have been in place in many Southern African countries since the early 1980s. The focus of these groupings was primarily to bring women media practitioners together in professional bodies whereby they could address their problems and needs in the media. Some associations even created alternative media to give a voice to women in rural communities (an example of this was the Development Through Radio Project by the Federation of African Media Women-Zimbabwe).
The Tanzanian Media Women’s Association (TAMWA) has long combined gender and media activism. During the past two years, media and gender activism has taken root in many other countries. Gender and Media Networks in Botswana, Lesotho, Mauritius, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland and Zambia, and the initial development of a networking mechanism in Zimbabwe, have grown out of the GMBS findings and recommendations. The Southern African Gender and Media (GEM) network coordinated by Gender Links and MISA, was launched in September 2004 during the first Southern Africa Gender and Media Summit held in Johannesburg, South Africa.

These networks comprise media practitioners, activists from NGOs, researchers, lawyers and others committed to the goal of gender equality in the media, and they play pivotal roles in media monitoring, advocacy and teaching media literacy to the public.

Gender must be mainstreamed into media activism and gender activists too must focus more on the media. This cross-section of two important processes currently underway in many Southern African countries, can ensure that freedom of expression in and through the media is guaranteed for all.

Article adapted from presentation at the April 2004 EURICOM Colloquium on ‘Communication and Culture – Censorship and Democracy’, Slovenia.

Notes
1.It Ain’t Necessarily So, How the Media Remake Our Picture of Reality, David Murray, Joel Schwartz and S. Robert Lichter, Penguin Books, 2002, p. 12.
2. ‘Obstacles and challenges facing the media in Tanzania’, Matilda Kasanga in Politics and the Media in Southern Africa, Occasional Papers, November 1999, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung.
3. Whose news? Whose views? Southern Africa Gender in Media Handbook, edited by Colleen Lowe Morna, 2001, p. 35.
4. Gender and Media Baseline Study, Regional Report, edited by Patricia A. Made, Alice Kwaramba and Colleen Lowe Morna, published by Gender Links and the Media Institute of Southern Africa, March 2003.
5. Gender and Media Baseline Study, Regional Report, edited by Patricia A. Made, Alice Kwaramba and Colleen Lowe Morna, published by Gender Links and the Media Institute of Southern Africa, March 2003.
6. Whose news? Whose views? Southern Africa Gender in Media Handbook, edited by Colleen Lowe Morna, 2001.
7. Margaret Gallagher, Gender setting – New Agendas for Media Monitoring and Advocacy, Zed Books in association with WACC, London, 2001, pp. 7-8.
8. Karen Ross, Women, Politics, Media, Uneasy Relations in Comparative Perspective, Hampton Press, Inc. Cresskill, New Jersey, 2002, p. 14.

Patricia A. Made is a Zimbabwean-based editor and media trainer. She has been involved in training, policy and research initiatives on gender in the Southern Africa media, and has worked at the management level on mainstreaming gender into the editorial policy and operations of Inter Press Service (IPS) global news agency. She also was one of the contributing researchers to the 2003 publication ‘Ringing Up the Changes, Gender in Southern African Politics,’ and has edited several gender training manuals for the media.