Farid Esack
A SECOND LOOK
So racism in the media is a problem … It bloody hell is. When reading a newspaper (in case it skipped your blinkered chauvinist eyes until then), just wait until you get to the last four pages of any newspaper and you are confronted with an even bigger problem – sexism. If the news and editorial pages portray images of whites, usually male, as the movers and shakers and women as the victims, then the sports pages portray men – black and white – as the sole possessors of raw skill and physical prowess.
From its inception three years ago the Commission for Gender Equality (CGE) has received complaints from readers about sexism in the media.
Acknowledging that we are dealing with the product of at least two millennia of gender stereotyping we dealt with these complaints at three levels:
First, immediate responses through letters to the editors followed up by a telephone conversation to ensure that it does not become just another letter to the editor. This would invariably lead to setting up a meeting to chat through broader underlying issues.
Second, acknowledging that the media is both the product of and a shaper of our social environment, the CGE recognised a need to engage the media earnestly and confront them with the gap between their editorial commitments to gender equality and how they cover gender and women’s issues in terms of space allocation, ways of portrayal – written and pictorial, news and advertising and the content of the coverage.
At an official CGE level, this engagement takes place in two ways. We have an annual conference on gender and the media – we have had three thus far – to which we invite about 100 editors, journalists and other media workers ranging from the Press Ombudsman to the gender groups monitoring the media. The invitations are just that and there is no drama of subpoenas masquerading as such. There are the few usual ”unavailables” but very many senior editors, local and national, do respond, as does the ombudsman.
At the conference the CGE presents most of its research in a well-produced publication. Rather than dealing with a nebulous accusation of sexism in the media, each of these research pieces deals with a specific area of gender and the media. That is, portrayal of violence against women, portrayal of women during the elections, coverage of gender issues and so forth.
Panels are set up to present and discuss these findings and the audience responds. Other panels comprise editors and senior journalists who share the insights into how things work in the newsroom, the difficulties that they face in dealing with gender, what they are doing about it and advice on how the CGE and women can push their own struggle further in the media. We may even analyse specific cases ranging from the way the media dealt with former Gauteng safety and security MEC Jessie Duarte to the great success that Pan Africanist Congress MP Patricia de Lille has with getting positive media coverage.
As to the ”non-availables”, they – and a host of others – receive copies of our research publications and of the proceedings of the conference. We haven’t quite gotten to the stage where we appoint spies to check up whether they actually read it.
The second leg of this ongoing formal engagement with the media is the acknowledgement that this annual conferencing is a permanent form of fire- fighting; that mindsets need to be changed and at an earlier stage.
Discussions are thus at an advanced stage with Rhodes University’s school of journalism for a joint project where the CGE will partner an annual six-month semester that is an intrinsic part of the degree course. This course will deal specifically with sexism and the portrayal of women and gender in the media.
The CGE is also fortunate in that it had a CEO, Colleen Lowe-Morna, who actually comes from the media world, who initiated and was the driving force behind all of these programmes. And this brings me to the third level of our engagement with the media. No less than three prominent CGE persons, including Lowe-Morna, have or had regular columns in a host of newspapers ranging from the Cape Times, Beeld and Die Burger, to the Daily News, and the Sunday Independent where they regularly tackle gender issues head on – including gender in the media. As if that is not enough, some of us frequently do the thing ordinary readers and listeners do – write to the editor or call in to a radio talk show.
Have we achieved anything? I daresay a fat lot. Just look at the way coverage of Women’s Day has shifted from patronising (”Be nice to your chick”) to a serious focus on the challenges of gender equality. The amount and quality of coverage around the annual 16 days of activism on ”No Violence against Women” has vastly improved in the past three years. Overall, we have come a long way.
How much of it can be attributed solely to us? I don’t know. But that is not the point. The bottom line is that we avoided the evil perpetrator (media), morally righteous victim (CGE) mode, acknowledged that we are all in this mess of sexism together and that we need to collectively find ways of dealing with it in the most constructive manner.
I believe that the CGE, in respect of dealing with the media, has found a way to deal with an illness where the remedy will not aggravate the disease.
While Farid Esack is a commissioner with the Commission for Gender Equality, this article is written in his personal capacity