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SESSION B.6 : TRAINER'S NOTES

NEWS, GENDER AND POWER.

Objective:

  • To consider alternative feminist critiques of patriarchal media.
  • To analyse the alternative views on objective and subjective facts.
  • To consider in what circumstances community media might advance the cause of gender and media power.

Radio, newspaper and television news are now accepted as crucial to defining the important issues of the day.

Many would also accept that the production of this 'news' is not a neutral or 'objective' process.

Analysts stress the way in which media reporting is structurally circumscribed by patterns of ownership in media industries and influenced by;

  • 'News values',
  • 'Hierarchies of credibility',
  • 'Journalistic routines' and
  • 'Dominant cultural assumptions'.


All of these issues deservedly receive rigorous scrutiny. But for the purpose of this module we will look at the less well-examined issue of the gender-politics of these processes.

Within this journalistic orthodoxy, rigid limits will continue to marginalize those on the lower slopes of the hierarchy of credibility, and this still includes women speakers, women's issues and women's ideas.

Feminist researchers committed to recasting this orthodoxy have sought to develop counter positions and to expose the shortcomings of such discourse around the notion of 'truth', or rather how the gendering of this discourse by journalists is discernible in the ritualised practices of 'objective' reporting.

Offer the participants three feminist approaches in the spectrum of this analysis. Describe these thus;

  • Will reporting facts remove gender bias?
  • Only women can speak for women in the media.
  • Objectivity legitimises patriarchal control.
  • Break them into groups to discuss and report observations.
  • It will probably be best to allow participants join the group/issue of their choice.
  • Give about half an hour to allow opinions to form.

Materials:
The three position papers.
Pens and paper.

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