TV Guide’s Oct. 9 – 15, 1999 cover story, titled “How Women Took Over The News,” paints a pretty then-vs. -now picture of gender equity in the newsroom, in which “Women are on every beat, in every aspect of news, as fixtures in jobs traditionally held by men.”
Way back when, TV Guide reminisces, women were “second class citizens in TV news,” subjected to age and gender discrimination, and Diane Sawyer “got into journalism… the old-fashioned way” – by wearing “pointy bras” and lots of hair spray. Not so anymore, TV Guide asserts, now that Sawyer shares the news media spotlight with Katie Couric, Christine Amanpour, Claire Shipman and other visible female journalists who are “setting the news agenda for America.” TV Guide attributes their success to a journalistic “revolution” that reached “critical mass in the last decade.” As proof-positive of this female victory, TV Guide tells us that ABC nearly doubled its number of women correspondents from 1991 to 1998.
What the story doesn’t give readers are the raw numbers – which disprove this gleaming image of journalistic gender parity. According to a 16 year longitudinal study by Joe Foote of the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, ABC employed only 14 women correspondents (19 percent of the total) in 1991. By 1998, that number rose to 26 female correspondents (still making up only 39 percent of ABC‘s news roster).
As for the news landscape as a whole, female reporters made up only one-third of the correspondent corps and covered only 28 percent of stories in 1998. Sure, female journalists fare better now then they did in the days of legally sanctioned gender discrimination – but they are still outnumbered two-to-one by their male counterparts.
And when it comes to news women behind the camera, a 1998 Radio Television News Directors Association/Ball State University survey found that only 20 percent of local television news directors were women. Worse still is the issue of news ownership–a 1998 Broadcasting and Cable survey found no women heading the Top 25 media or television groups, broadcast networks or major cable programming companies. So much for women “setting the news agenda for America” by taking over “every aspect of news.”
TV Guide also says that the influx of powerful women in journalism has generated a “journalism of empathy,” changing the “face and focus of the stories we care about the most.” What does this mean? Sawyer explains: “The definition of hard news is changing, and what was soft news is now hard news – for instance, a story about day care and its effect on women’s productivity can be a lead story on the news with Peter Jennings. It’s what women in the newsroom and women at home care about more than what’s happening in Sri Lanka.” TV Guide further clarifies what they consider the “undeniable” influence of women over the news agenda: “more emphasis on such story topics as child care, education, health and the moral aspect of politics.”
That domestic programs like child care were ever considered “soft news” is as misguided as Sawyer’s notion that women do not care about international politics, such as what might go on in Sri Lanka. Packaging education and health stories as “women’s issues” while framing world politics as “universal” stories is simply bad journalism. The fact is, when media report the news as if women mattered, issues such as child care, domestic violence, health care and poverty and are all considered “hard news.” And when media report the news as if women think, women are understood to be equally invested in coverage of foreign affairs, economics, science and technology.
TV Guide’s upbeat conclusion is that, no longer held back by institutional sexism, female journalists have come “a long way, baby.” But when the female audience is so shallowly perceived – and women in the news corps still trail their male counterparts in large numbers – there’s clearly still a long way to go. The more women (and people of color) succeed in the newsroom, the greater their perspectives can be felt in the ways the news is written and reported – which is why we need more stories about the necessity of increased access to every aspect of journalism, not cheery rah-rah-rah pieces indicating that the battle for journalistic parity has already been won.
ACTION: Think there’s something wrong with TV Guide’s cover story on women’s supposed journalistic coup? Tell them so. Write to Editor-in-Chief Steven Reddicliffe at:
Editor in ChiefLetters DepartmentTV GuideRadnor, PA, 19088
Fax: 212-852-7470
TV Guide prefers letters to include the writer’s name, address and home phone number, and they prefer direct mail as opposed to fax. If possible, please send a copy of your letter to:
FAIRJennifer Pozner, Women’s Desk Director130 W. 25th Street, NYC NY 10001 Fax: 212-727-7668jpozner@fair.org
