Blog 1: Ellie Silverman

The Nieman Report released a study this month, which reveals the disparity in leadership positions for women in news organizations. As a journalism and government and politics double major, this study struck a cord with me. How is the media supposed to serve the public as watchdogs when these media outlets underrepresent half of the world’s population? In the scope of international relations, politics is regularly discussed using masculine terms, but I believe that increasing women representation in news organizations will change the discourse around the issues facing the world today.

Looking at newsrooms, women represent 35 percent of newspaper supervisors, according to the 2014 American Society of News Editors newsroom census. In radio and television, women are even less represented, making up 31 percent of television news directors, 23 percent of radio news directors, 20 percent of television general managers and 18 percent of radio general managers, according to the 2014 Radio Television Digital News Association survey. Across the globe, men occupy 73 percent of top management jobs, according to the Global Report on the Status of Women in News Media survey, which included more than 500 media countries in approximately 60 countries.

Despite these troubling statistics, women have made strides in the media with notable people like Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, Christiane Amanpour and Connie Chung reporting the news. Yet the very public ousting of the New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson and unexpected departure of Natalie Nougayrede, editor in chief of France’s Le Monde, in May, reminds us that women still have a long way to go. Abramson was the first female executive editor of The New York Times and was fired less than three years after she was appointed to the position. Nougayrede, despite great achievements, felt pressure to step down from her high position.

In 2011 the documentary Miss Representation aired and aimed to expose the under representation of women in leadership position in American society as well as the media’s limited portrayal of women. I believe this narrow view of women in the media can be directly traced back to the lack of women represented inside these media organizations. The documentary states that women own only 5.8 percent of all television stations, 6 percent of radio stations and hold 3 percent of clout positions across all mainstream media. These low numbers can be correlated with the fact that only 20 percent of news articles are about women and in Nancy Pelosi’s four years as Speak of the House she was not on the cover of one national weekly magazine, while in John Boehner’s first four weeks as speaker of the House he appeared on five covers.

Without attention from the media, women in politics are being denied their voice on the national and international scale. The public deserves to be informed, without a gender bias from the male dominated media. Issues facing politics on a global scale cannot be solved unless both male and women voices are involved in the conversation. Each side can bring diverse and creative solutions to the table. However, this equality cannot happen unless women, half of the world’s population, are accurately represented in the media serving the news.

Sources:

http://www.e-ir.info/2013/03/17/how-significant-is-the-contribution-of-feminism-to-ir/

http://blog.ted.com/2013/12/13/beyonce-samples-chimamanda-ngozi-adichies-tedx-message-on-surprise-album/

http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/09/from-nieman-reports-where-are-the-women-in-leadership-at-news-organizations/

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-jill-abramson-was-fired

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2014/09/the-rise-and-fall-of-women-editors/

http://therepresentationproject.org/resources/statistics/