edia is still an all man’s land

By Sarah O'Donnell (CUP) Newspapers, magazines and television gramming continue to carry negative and

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en non-existentcoverage of women.

”’The main problems with the media’s ‘erage of women are under-representation, arrow range of representation and misrep- entation,’’ said Lynn Hissey, a professor of men’ sstudies and communications at Simon ser University.

Women make up 52 per cent of North herica’s population, but only about one-

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third of characters on television carry the dou- ble X chromosome. During prime time, the number of major femalecharacters shrinks to

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The inaccurate representation of women on television is compounded by the narrow range of women who are portrayed.

*’Virtually all women on television are white, and this would be truce of film as well,” said Hissey. She also noted that the women portrayed on TV seem to be well-off, consum- ing fairly heavily,conventionally attractive, slim, relatively tall, able-bodied and hetero-

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sexual.

Hissey cited Roseanne and Murphy Brown as excellent examples of current TV programming because of the way they deal with real gender issues and women’s con- cerns. Both of these shows were created and produced by women.

To achieve more programs of this cali- bre, Hissey said it is necessary to get more feminists working in the various media.

Encouraging independent produc- tions [by women] is also important so that shows aren’t so reliant upon advertisers and their pressures. Advertisers are enormously powerful in regards to what kind of images we’ re getting and what we’ re seeing,’’ Hissey said.

Television is not the only culprit re- sponsible for the mis representation of women.

Media Watch, a national group which analyzes media content, found only 28 per cent of the bylines in newspapers were women’ sin a 1992 study of the Canadian newspaper industry.

”’We know that graduates from jour- nalism programs right now areabout 50-50,”’

said Media Watch volunteer Josey Mills, but the number of women’s bylines ‘“doesn’t re- flect the number of journalism graduates or the population.”

Under-representation is particularly obvious in certain facets of news coverage. For example, ‘‘authoritative sources whoare quoted are usually 90 per cent men,”’ said Hissey.

In the hopes of eliminating these imbal- ances, groups such as Media Watch are trying to encourage news sources to quote more women experts in their stories.

Many magazines also lacka significant amount of women-centered content. Most of the staff at-Canada’s national magazine, Maclean’s, ‘‘felt that Maclean’s has a lack of sensitivity in its portrayal of women,”’ accord- ing to a 1992 staff survey.

According to Mills, these trends have not been improving in recent years.’ It’s pretty frightening, the trends don’t change,’’ she said. ‘‘There are no significant yearly changes when we do the content analysis.”

(Source: The Ubyssey, University of British Columbia)