Mainstream media discovers women

Until last year, if you hadn't been following the feminist blogosphere, you might not have known much about women. The mainstream media by and large neglected to cover "women's issues," or consider how the news of the day might affect women, or quote equal amounts of male and female sources. In the UK, the major dailies still make a lousy showing, according to an informal tally by Kira Cochrane of the Guardian in her recent piece "Why is Britain's public life dominated by men?"

At the end of the month we averaged all the daily percentages and the results were: the Mail, 68% male bylines, 32% female; the Guardian, 72% male, 28% female; the Times, 74% male, 26% female; the Daily Telegraph, 78% male, 22% female; the Daily Mirror, 79% male, 21% female; the Sun, 80% male, 20% female; and the Independent, 84% male, 16% female.

Stateside, many of the female writers I know and I also do informal byline counts every time I open up a paper or magazine. By and large, we remain unimpressed. Katha Pollitt argues that the solution is more female editors. Is she right?

In my first post for the FT's Women at the Top blog, which ran last month, I looked at the explosion of content focused on women at mainstream media organizations, with a brief rundown here:

Bloomberg News has doubled its quarterly number of women-focused stories since the last quarter of 2010 and published 2,000 stories on women in total over the past year; the International Herald Tribune launched its Female Factor series in early 2010; the Wall Street Journal maintains a Women in the Economy column linked to an April 2011 conference of the same name; Newsweek/The Daily Beast has expanded its Women in the World column (full disclosure: I edit their related Women in the World Foundation site); the Economist will include a Women and Work special report in its November 26 issue; the Washington Post announced it is soon launching a women’s blog; and the Huffington Post launched a women’s site, HuffPo Women, in August this year.

Most of this comment is authored by women (more bylines!) and much of it is edited by women: Tina Brown, Arianna Huffington, Alison Smale of the IHT, Caroline Howard at ForbesWoman, and Lisa Kassenaar at Bloomberg. Another journalist pointed out to me that Pearson, which owns the FT, is headed by a woman, CEO Marjorie Scardino. Click here to read the whole post, and please weigh in with your thoughts on why the mainstream media seems to have discovered women all of a sudden.

The Mainstream Media: Still a Lamestream Place for Women, and other notes on media coverage

From April 8-10, I spent a marvelous three days in Boston for the National Conference on Media Reform, hosted by the non-profit Free Press.  Not only did I have the chance to see my best friend, who's studying for a PhD. at Harvard, and to sample some of Boston's famous ice cream offerings, I attended some fabulous panels at the conference, several of which I reported on for Ms. magazine.

More than a hundred years after the intrepid muckraker Nellie Bly pioneered the genre of undercover investigative journalism, American mainstream media has yet to embrace women as equal players in the industry: as editors, reporters, managers, sources or subjects. You’d think a century might be enough time for a profession that purports to speak truth to power to empower the voiceless in its midst. Not so much. Women hold only 27% of top management jobs, according to a new report [PDF] from the International Women’s Media Foundation. (click here to read about the panels on media policy, reality TV and the sexualization of young girls.)

Meanwhile, you have to wonder why the NYT keeps letting its reporters slime rape victims in its coverage time and again.  Is it a coincidence that the two most controversial articles were written by men?  Not clear.  But a magnificent piece by Washington Post reporter Emily Wax (inexplicably shunted into the "Lifestyle" section -- oh wait, there is an explanation for that, sexism) on female journalists and sexual assault and harassment highlights that in some cases, there *is* a clear difference between male and female reporters:

I think of the time I spent reporting in Congo, when male reporters cringed when I said I was working on a story about a hospital ward filled with women who had to have their vaginas reconstructed because the gang rapes by rebels were so brutal. “I won’t go near that story,” one male journalist said. I couldn’t allow myself to ignore it.

Readers agreed and sent the hospital huge donations.

I don't know if anyone else feels the same way but I am SHOCKED to hear a reporter say he (or she) "won't go near" a story.  I find that an appalling dereliction of duty.  Thoughts?