Women in Media — And Media in Crisis

Posted on April 6, 2011 at 8:00 am

As Katie Couric leaves her pioneering role as the first women anchor of a nightly network news broadcast, it appears that she arrived just as what was once the flagship of end-of-the-day journalism was shrinking to not much more than a rowboat, and a sinking one at that. Where once Walter Cronkite united audiences and was seen as the most trusted man in the country, most people under age 30 cannot even name the network anchors — they get their news from “The Daily Show.” Is it a coincidence that John Stewart’s show has been sharply criticized for its overwhelmingly male staff? Or that Couric now reportedly will leave news for a talk show?

Perhaps I am especially concerned with these issues because of my recent participation in the International Women’s Media Foundation conference at George Washington University. The event opened with a Kalb Report interview of Diane Sawyer, who spoke about the impact of budget cuts and new media on the nightly news broadcast.

Women from all over the world shared their stories about the way women were treated as reporters, editors, and managers and as sources and subjects of news stories as well. Domestic violence stories at one paper were characterized as “a family tragedy,” until women in the newsroom insisted that they be described like any other homicide: murder. A paper in Norway made a commitment to have at least one photo of a woman on the front page every day — and not an actress. A German newspaper requires that one-half of its staff be female and makes an effort at parity in sources and stories as well.

The IWMF released a major new report, the first comprehensive global study of women in media, covering not just the roles and ranks of women working in the media but the way stories are selected and covered. Conducted over a two-year period, the report is based on data gathered by more than 150 researchers through interviews with executives at more than500 companies in 59 countries based on a 12-page questionnaire. The report found:

In the Asia and Oceana region, women are barely 13 percent of those in senior management, but in some individual nations women exceed men at that level, e.g., in South Africa women are 79.5 percent of those in senior management. In Lithuania women dominate the reporting ranks of junior and senior professional levels (78.5 percent and 70.6 percent, respectively), and their representation is nearing parity in the middle and top management ranks.

The global study identified glass ceilings for women in 20 of 59 nations studied. Most commonly these invisible barriers were found in middle and senior management levels. Slightly more than half of the companies surveyed have an established company-wide policy on gender equity. These ranged from 16 percent of companies surveyed in Eastern Europe to 69 percent in Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Only a little more than half of the news organizations have adopted a policy on gender discrimination.

Conference attendees used the report as a baseline to develop goals and strategies for improvement to take back to their publications. Panel members from around the world talked about the importance of a public commitment to specific benchmarks — without imposing counterproductive quotas — that will cover not just reporters, columnists, editors, and managers but choices of sources and stories.

As with all debates on gender issues, there was a conflict between arguments that women are the same as men and arguments that they are different. A discussion on putting journalists in danger included the “genderized” treatment of the attack on Lara Logan. Participants complained that Logan’s injuries led to sweeping statements that women should not be sent to cover the Middle East, while attacks on male journalists are seen on a case-by-case basis.

But there were also many discussions of the different perspective that women bring to sources and stories, the importance of making women’s points of view available to both male and female readers, and the impact of women as visible, credible role models for the next generation of journalists.

The limited data available from earlier studies show some progress for women in media, more as reporters than as managers. This report, while incomplete due to the refusal by some news organizations to cooperate, especially on issues relating to compensation, provides the first meaningful baseline for measuring future progress.

But the measure of success is a moving target. The conference presentations made it clear that the challenges of strengthening the presence of women in journalism are small in comparison to the transformational changes affecting the industry as a whole. U.S.-based print newspapers, which have relied in the past on advertising and classified ads for the majority of their revenue and are now losing readers to the web, are at a disadvantage over newspapers in other countries with less internet access (so far) and more subscription-based business models.

In a luncheon speech, Ambassador Melanne Verveer, President Obama’s appointee for Global Women’s Issues, spoke about the mobile phone as one of the most powerful factors in providing access to the crucial information that helps women achieve equality. The conference participants recognized that the greatest obstacle to keeping well-researched information available is not sexism but the Gresham’s law-impact of avalanches of free online content.

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Understanding Media and Pop Culture

List: Women Directors

Posted on March 8, 2010 at 10:03 am

In honor of “The Hurt Locker’s” Kathryn Bigelow, who became the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Director last night, and International Women’s Day, here’s a list of pioneering women movie directors.

1. Penny Marshall, who started as an actress (“Laverne and Shirley”), went on to direct films that included “Awakenings,” “Big,” and “A League of Their Own.”

2. Amy Heckerling is the director of “Clueless” and the neglected gem “I Could Never Be Your Woman.”

3. Betty Thomas also started as an actress (“Hill Street Blues”) and went on to direct “The Brady Bunch” and “28 Days.”

4. Nora Ephron, the daughter of successful screenwriters, began as a writer and then went on to direct films like “Julie & Julia,” and “You’ve Got Mail.”

5. Gurinder Chadha directed the international hit “Bend it Like Beckham” as well as “What’s Cooking” and “Bride and Prejudice.”

6. Nancy Meyers also began as a writer and has gone on to direct some of the most successful movies of the last 10 years including “It’s Complicated,” “The Holiday,” and “Something’s Gotta Give.”

7. Penelope Speeris made a successful documentary about a topic considered very male — punk music — in “The Decline of Western Civilization.” That led to her directing the wildly successful “Wayne’s World.”

8. Kasi Lemmons is another actress turned director with “Eve’s Bayou” and “The Caveman’s Valentine,” starring Samuel L. Jackson.

9. Mabel Normand was one of the most gifted comic actors of the silent era and one of the first female film directors. She often worked with Charlie Chaplin.

10. Mira Nair directed “Monsoon Wedding” and the recent biopic “Amelia,” starring Hillary Swank.

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Good Hair

Posted on February 16, 2010 at 8:10 am

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some language including sex and drug references, and brief partial nudity
Profanity:	Some strong and crude langauge
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drug reference
Violence/ Scariness:	None
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	October 9, 2009
Date Released to DVD:	February 16, 2010
Amazon.com ASIN:	B002TOJOY8

Chris Rock’s daughter wanted to know why she didn’t have “good hair.” And so he made this documentary as an answer, exploring the relationship between black women and their hair and hair products and processes — and how that relationship gives billions of dollars to an industry that can be exploitative.

Wildly entertaining and profoundly insightful, this is an exploration of image, economics, history, and standards of beauty. Nearly half a century ago, the ground-breaking “black is beautiful” cultural movement changed the way black and white Americans thought about beauty. It is seldom remembered that the key piece of evidence in the “Brown v. Board of Education” decision that led to school de-segregation was a series of interviews with black children who all said that the white doll was prettier than the black doll, thus showing that segregation was inherently unfair. This movie shows how complex and layered the challenge is and how powerfully media images of beauty can make us feel dissatisfied to get us to spend money to look different.

The movie has interviews with movie stars like Nia Long, Lauren London, and Meagan Goode. Surprisingly, none of them say that they have to have “good hair” to get jobs. They insist that they just like it. Maya Angelou says she had her hair processed for the first time when she was in her 70’s. The Reverand Al Sharpton explains that James Brown talked him into getting his hair processed.

Rock visits the Dudley Hair Products company in North Carolina, one of the few black-owned providers of what some women in the movie call “creamy crack.” He goes to India to discover the shocking sources of the exported hair. He tries to sell black hair but gets no buyers. And he goes to a hair competition and performance event that is simply indescribable.

This is a movie of enormous importance and good will and should be seen by everyone, especially mothers and teen-age daughters, to remind us that all hair is good hair and that beauty is more about how we feel than how we look.

The Women At Disney Studios

Posted on February 13, 2010 at 8:00 am

Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood issue has an article by Patricia Zohn about the “ink and paint” women who worked on Disney’s classic animated films.

Much has been written about the prodigiously talented men who brought Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, and Dumbo to the screen. But if behind every good man stands a good woman, behind Walt Disney and his “boys”–the all-male assembly line–once stood 100. Walt was the impresario of a troop of young women, most under 25–a casting director’s dream of all-American acolytes–who made the screen light up, not with feathered swan dives or the perfect tip-tap of a patent-leather heel, but by making water shimmer or a tail wag just so. It was a job complicated by his unrelenting perfectionism–Jiminy Cricket required 27 different colors–but reducible to a simple imperative of the time: ever nimble but never showy, their job was to make what the men did look good.

She tells a related story in a great Huffington Post piece about another woman who worked behind the scenes — and later went on to appear in movie musicals.

I could not resist the opportunity to interview one other treasured behind-the-scenes woman, Marge Belcher Champion, famous as half of the dancing Champions of screen and stage, but known to Disney aficionados world wide as the real-live model for Snow White.

Champion was only 14 and still in school when she received $10 a day to act the part of Snow White for the Disney animators to use as their model. She later went on to partner with her husband Gower Champion in films like “Show Boat” and “Jupiter’s Darling.” But here she is helping the first Disney feature film come to life.

More About the AMA Performances

Posted on November 25, 2009 at 11:49 pm

Some commenters have criticized my post about Adam Lambert’s performance at the American Music Awards because they say I should not have singled him out. There were other provocative and even outrageous musical numbers in the show. That’s a fair point, but it seems to me there was a difference between Eminem and Lady Gaga, whose entire persona is built around their transgressive, edgy, sometimes offensive material, and Adam Lambert, who did something of a bait and switch on his fans in a manner that impaired the primary reason for his being there in the first place — his ability to sing.
But that doesn’t mean his was the only troubling performance. I thought Trish Kenney at the Huffington Post had a great column on the other performances at the AMAs and what they said about the way women are portrayed (and portray themselves) by rock and pop stars. She wrote about the “brazen entitlement” mutating into rape fantasy, dancers in black panties, writhing, and crotch-grabs throughout the show.

Imagine if an alien landed outside the auditorium Monday night and snuck in for a peek at our culture by watching the AMA’s. What impression would the alien have of women? And our society in general? If the alien had an entrepreneurial spirit, he would immediately go into women’s lingerie, preferably little black panties.