For A Fair Cause?
This book is for all those who have ever picked up a copy of `Femina or Savvy and insisted that it is just railway station reading. And felt that combination of embarrassment and disdain at the premise that a certain kind of writing will appeal to the female reader. As the 90s turn gender stereotypes on their head, today even a womans magazine would not be caught dead trying to suggest that flower shows, fashion statements and film gossip is of specific interest to women.
And yet a crucial question remains. Has the effort to shrug off myopic and banal assumptions about what constitutes womens writing and reading created a new problem? When the media casts off one layer of traditionality, does it risk the danger of reinforcing a far more traditional notion of news hierarchy...one that overlooks vital issues for women worldwide?
It is this extremely tricky and complex question the book under review tries to address. The authors speak extensively of the American medias often controversial attempts to define certain subjects as womens issues. In the early seventies the Chicago Tribune launched a regular daily page called Womanews a rather confused editorial arrangement where Betty Crockers cooking recipes wrestled for space with Betty Friedans feminist propositions. But as the womens movement grew, such gender-based constructs were greeted not just with skepticism, but with intense ideological opposition. As public pressure mounted, and the paperwithdrew the page.
Over the next few years, however, journalists writing for the paper were faced with a different kindilemma.Politics, military confabulations, even sex scandals made it unfailingly to the front page; but stories related to gender, human development, education, population and even the arts were relegated to inside pages.
As the classic distinctions between what was perceived as hard news and soft (and therefore more appropriate for women) news reasserted themselves, it became clear that in the hierarchy of news, such issues would never find prime position. In fact Hard news, in the way that it was defined, was seen as being symptomatic of a media that had for long been controlled exclusively by men. An overwhelming number of journalists at the Tribune began to demand an identity for the stories that they felt directly touched the lives of thousands of people. Finally the Womanews page was relaunched. Its character, though very different from what it had been ten years ago, was still confused and its contents hotly debated. But each day it would bring under one banner issues ranging from domestic violence and sexual harassment to film and book reviews. The page was a resounding success.
The authors admit that there are inherent problems with such experiments and acknowledge that this could end up reinforcing gender divides of the worst kind. But at the same time they succeed in making a strong case for the need to create alternative an independent spaces for issues that could become invisible otherwise. Although the references and examples are purely American, the conflict is one that is universally identifiable.
It is a dilemma that confronts media managers and feminists alike, and in particular plagues the woman journalist. For women in todays newsworld, it is often imperative to rebel against a stereotypical branding of their abilities. Typically this means that a story on sexual abuse or medical malpractices may be as important and challenging to them as the fall of the UF government but more and more women reporters will choose the latter, not just to subvert the sterotype, but also because in the news hierarchy one is a banner headline, the other possibly a box item on the third page.
The argument made by the authors of Race, Gender and Mass Media is that the politics of representation will always be inextricably linked to ownership and control figures. Many examples in the book are set against the backdrop of the fact that most media in America is owned and run by individuals who are both white and male. In this context the authors also document how much and how little has changed in the way Hollywood films and TV soap operas portray Black Americans. Once again the parallels are inescapable. In India religious minorities are often subject to the same cliched representation. Rarely are the protagonists of our Hindi films Muslims or Christians. While the heros space is more than not inhabited by an Amit, Vijay or Raju, the muslims more often than not are wise old mullahs or qawalli singers, and chrisitians are benovolent priests or school principals.
This book is an extremely interesting read, not just for people directly connected to the mass media, but for all those who believe that the images that we construct not just reflect reality, but carry the power to alter it.