The Media Monitoring Project (MMP) is again challenging the South African media on their coverage of National Women’s Day.
For the past six years, the MMP has monitored media coverage during the period around National Women’s Day.
Last year’s challenge was won by the Mail & Guardian, says MMP director William Bird, because of the M&G‘s “creative ways to mainstream women in the paper, including female journalists, sources, female perspectives, diverse images of women, famous and ordinary women as authors and contributors”.
The MMP’s reissued challenge involves assessing print and broadcast media during the week preceding National Women’s Day, which falls on August 9, as well as on the day itself and on August 10.
Bird expects this year’s challenge to be better than last year’s.
“I am very optimistic about the way it is going. I can give the example of the shift there has been in the past five years in the way women are being represented and how many times the media used a woman as a source.
“During the 1999 elections, we had been monitoring the media for six weeks; we looked at 8 000 news stories. At that time, 9,9% of the sources used in the media were women.
“We did the same thing again during the general elections of last year. This time the amount of women used as sources increased to 23%. We notice a consistent, sizeable and substantial increase in the coverage of women and women’s issues.”
In the long term, Bird thinks, creative media attention on Women’s Day will open up the subject for readers and draw their attention to gender issues.
“On Women’s Day, you’ll see revolting advertisements saying ‘Buy your wife some flowers’ or ‘Buy new pots and pans’. Instead, I would like to see something different, like a radio station having a woman on air all day or making a woman run a newspaper for a day.”
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