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The three feminist positions we have considered are situated among
a myriad of alternatives being developed by media researchers.
Women in the media will need to constantly challenge the established male worldview of 'the world out there', as established by 'impartial facts', because this is a situation inimical to the empowerment of females. In mainstream media, the hegemonic male voice is exceedingly strong, well established and convincing. Female media activists will need to decide which approach is both valid and likely to deliver the female agenda. Can a single incontrovertible system of 'true knowledge' be established through formalised methods of 'observation' and 'truth gathering'? Is it possible to provide an immediate, empirical, accessible experience of events that will present a bias-free worldview? Or are we, in seeking for an objective truth, reinforcing a hegemonic paradigm of men's orientation towards 'the world of facts'? 'Objective' journalism dictates that only those truths presented by 'legitimate' sources, which fulfil professionally approved criteria of 'accuracy' and 'authenticity' are broadcast as 'factual'. This ensures that some voices, mostly white male, are deemed to have preference over all others, including white females. Perhaps what is required is to establish that each persons truth is always 'subjective' and that the established patriarchal 'truths' are just one of many possible worldviews.
Perhaps also, female activists need to ensure that their media give voice to women's aspirations and experiences without ghettoising women still further. This might call for an alliance between those pursuing a gender case with those of a shared contingency, such as those of age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and alternative political and social perspective. So that, a shared critical analysis of the news values of the 'macho' newsroom, could be mounted. It might mean that we would insist that the hitherto, 'too emotionally subjective' opinions which are currently considered 'too biased' for inclusion in news, could find a place in such output. This would be a more humanly productive approach than for females to seek for more women in the existing systems, through aping male journalism. This latter approach, which suggests leaving the system alone and seeking gender equality, runs the risk of women being assigned the 'soft' news, which they are considered better at, and leaving the 'real' or hard news to the men.
A suitable goal for community media activists would be to seek for a situation where both genders are in balanced media discourse. And where the dialogue was based on an awareness of the subjective truth of all our perceptions. If this lived mediation could be acknowledged in the media, a gender-balanced dialogue of voices, previously all but silenced, could be heard, offering new insights. It could be that media women need to form alliances with male counterparts to encourage a complimentary critique from a male perspective of the power play deployed in patriarchal language. This is more likely to happen in community media than in either of the other two strands, as community media, due to its ownership and management structures, is more accessible to the inclusion of gender as an additional, significant social and discursive category. We need to develop the idea that a media text represents a struggle
among socio-ideological languages, because this unsettles the
established patriarchal myth that there is a language of truth
transcending relations of power and experience, which is currently
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