Europe - Media Negative Portrayals, & Inadequate News Coverage of Women

WUNRN

24/03/2009

PACE - Media Negative Portrayals & Not Enough News Coverage of Women in Europe

Strasbourg, 24.03.2009 - “The media have enormous potential to foster gender equality, but they tend to perpetuate negative portrayals of women, focusing for the most part on their physical or emotional attributes and confining them all too often to stereotypical roles”, said Doris Stump (Switzerland, SOC) today at a hearing held in Paris by the PACE’s Equality Committee. “The media have a key part to play in shaping individual identities, particularly among young people, and the constant clichés purveyed by the media become rooted in the collective sub-conscience, casting each gender in a fixed role”, said Ms Stump.

The first step, however, is to ensure media coverage of women, as the hearing revealed that they are patently under-represented. In Europe, women do not make the news; they appear in only 21% of news on average, and when they do, it is mainly because of their celebrity, not their skill or expertise. Among Europe’s women politicians, the Swedish attract the highest media coverage with a representation rate of 28% (in Italy, the figure is 2%).

The French public radio station, France Inter, grants on average 27% of its speaking time on air to women and 73% to men, while the proportion of photos of women and men in the French daily and weekly press is similarly edifying: 17% are of women, 53% of men. Lastly, on French television, women are on screen for 37% of the time and men for 63%, while speaking times are 32% for women and 68% for men.

Another example of the alleged low news value of women was highlighted by Ms Stump in the following terms: “The media focused very little on the fact that 15 of the 16 victims of the Winnenden massacre were girls; if the victims had been black, would we still be in any doubt about the killers’ motives?” “It is essential to redress this imbalance and combat all forms of sexism in the media. This implies enlisting the help of a whole series of stakeholders including media professionals, authorities, audiovisual regulators and civil society to devise codes of good practice and promote an editorial line which takes account of gender issues”, said the parliamentarian at the end of the hearing.

PACE hearing on ‘Combating sexist stereotypes in the media’

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