Paris, November 2013

Wendy Kristianasen

To judge by various speeches at this year’s Feminism in London 2013 Conference things could be looking up in the area of gender equality and the media.Finn Mackay, addressing the conference, noted that “The last couple of years have seen a sea change in the representation and visibility of feminism in our media and culture. Almost every day there seems to be some form of feminist response or commentary in our media. …. We have managed to direct attention to those issues we think are important, we have managed to make news, not just comment on it.”

This is clearly very good news. However, women, in one way or another, are still targets both for easy sensationalism – which of course sells papers and draws TV audiences – and for straightforward commercialisation by way of advertising revenues. This is not new, of course. But, ominously, control of the media continues to fall into fewer and fewer hands. If we go back a decade and look just at the United States, we find – and I quote from an article by Serge Halimi in my own paper Le Monde diplomatique– that: “Since the 1980s, control of the US media has grown ever more concentrated. By 1996 the two largest radio chains owned 115 stations. Today they own more than 1,400. Meanwhile the number of station owners has dwindled by a third. In 2003, 10 giant companies reign over the information age. Three companies own half of the stations in the US. Clearly, something has to be done. And it will be. But not what you would expect. “In the words of Bernie Sanders, one of the most progressive members of the US House of Representatives at the time: "One of our best-kept secrets is the degree to which a handful of huge corporations control the flow of information in the US. Whether it is television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books or the Internet, a few giant conglomerates are determining what we see, hear and read. And the situation is likely to become much worse."

That trend has continued. And, as the global financial crisis has hit hard, the media have grown increasingly reliant on advertising revenues. Not just in the United States, but in Europe and all over our globalised world.

How does that affect women?

As we all know, in an age dominated by celebrity, lifestyle and fashion, women sell products – not just female clothing and cosmetics, but mobile phones, cars, washing powders, holidays, chocolates, kitchens, iPads, breakfast cereals, washing machines, coffeemakers, vacuum cleaners, sofas, wallpapers. They reflect the modern couple’s aspirations, our desired life style. Women as sexual symbols, evoking glamour and romance.Women as the mothers of happy healthy children.Women as wives, producing the latest culinary delights, or relaxing on that desirable new sofa.That goes not just for TV, and newspapers – and their ubiquitous pull-out colour supplements – and the glossy magazines – but also, increasingly,for online publications too.

News editors may bestumbling along way behind these overwhelming commercial constraints of our globalised world, but they know, too, that womensell stories.

They are powerful symbols. Take MalalaYusufzai, the 16-year old Pakistani schoolgirt from the Swat Valley, who refused to comply with Taliban warnings against girls going to school. Shot at by the Taliban, half dead, her face painfully reconstructed, she continuedher campaigning for girls’ right to education. And through the intense media exposure and the distinguished awards it helped her win, her story has done something positive to expose, and perhaps help remedy, a situation as intolerable to most Pakistanis as to those in the West.

Or take the young female activist, Tawakul Karman from Yemen.As part of the first phase of the Arab Spring Karman rose to fight for women’s rights from deeply traditional, tribal Yemen as part of the Arab Spring. Again, media coverage did much to help empower her, and help her play her part in ousting one more Arab dictator.

But there are dangers too. And here I will again quote from my own paper on two other prominent cases. Three years ago, we wrote:

“Bibi Aisha was on the cover of Time magazine last month, a young Afghan woman with no ears or nose; it is claimed that she was deliberately mutilated because of the Taliban. In Iran, SakinehMohammadiAshtiani has been flogged, and sentenced to death by stoning, for adultery. Forces opposed to the Tehran regime rallied in response to a much-printed photograph of her face.

“These images provoke thought, but about what? Not the ferocity of Afghan Islamists: the Soviets had already experienced that before the western powers armed the fundamentalists (with the blessing of the media). And there was nothing about the nature of President Ahmadinejad’s regime that we did not already know – electoral rigging by his supporters, and punishments, including death, for his opponents.

“These images may not make us think. They may actually prevent us from thinking, by – intentionally or not – using a powerful symbol (a mutilation to be avenged, an execution to be averted) to promote dangerous strategic plans (continuing the war in Afghanistan, imposing sanctions on Iran). The more powerful the symbol, the less people will question the plan: the heart demands what the head might reject. Time claims that Bibi Aisha’s ordeal shows ‘what happens if we leave Afghanistan’.”

There are further issues to consider in regard to the impact of politics and political agendas on the media. While the media’s task is to report, expose and challenge such agendas, it is not always a one-way street. I’ll give just one example.A few years ago I was writing on the situation of Muslims in Britain. It was a sensitive moment. We had experienced the London bombings in 2005, and the Muslim community felt itself under suspicion.This sensitive climate did not stop the then government under Tony Blair from weighing in. A former British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, suddenly “discovered” – and amplified in the columns of the press – the menace of the niqab! Suddenly, in the words of Tony Blair, it had become “a mark of separation”. Never mind that Britain had been until then quite proud of its multicultural model. The target of all this attention wasa young Muslim teaching assistant, AishehAzmi. The23-year-oldcame from Dewsbury, a townin the

north of England with a high Muslim community which had hit the headlines at the time of the London bombings (not least because it was home to one of the bombers). Azmi had been sacked for wearing the niqab in the classroom of the UK primary school which had engaged her. Were Muslims trying to subvert our children, we were encouraged to ask? The rest of the government, including Tony Blair himself, weighed in to pass judgment.

The niqab was an easy target. And the decision to raise the issue and create a storm, willingly amplified by the media, came at a difficult moment as Labour figures were positioning themselves for the announced post-Blair era, and as Britain’s disastrous foreign policies in Iraq were unravelling. Labour sensed it was losing the voters over the Iraq war, and was perhaps looking to the white working-class vote, while gambling it could retain the core of its massive Muslim vote it had traditionally enjoyed.

This distraction from the uncertain ”war on terror” and the unending bad news from Iraq was of course short-lived.However, the Azmi case was significant because,of course, if Azmi had been a man, there’d have been no story.

And if the media had bothered to do their homework, there would not have been much of a story either.For the truth behind the“story” was that the Muslim community in Dewsbury itself agreed with the decision to dismiss Azmi – on the simple grounds that she had not worn the niqab to her job interview.

Probably most of you here today will be familiar with the crude depictions of women in the UK tabloid press. Page Three of The Sun, with its daily diet of full-page topless ladies, is but the most graphic example of the sensationalism of the popular end of our print media. However now, in the UK, after revelations ofthe many, quite shocking abuses of personal information in the tabloid press, we are perhaps at last beginning to address the problem. Last week, following the findings of the Levison Report and the closure of the News of the World, we saw the start of what promises to be a long trial, that of Rebekah Brooks, editor of the News of the World and later The Sun, and Andy Coulson, her successor at the News of the World – both charged with criminal conspiracy to hack phones.

Also last week, a new system for press regulation came into being. This is an attempt to bridge the gap between direct government control and the independent self-monitoring body favoured by the print media itself. The question is: can the press regulate itself? The Guardian newspaper is in the vanguard of those print media who believe that – whether it concernsthe variouswhistleblowers of state secrets (The Guardian was one of the original partners in the redaction and publication of Wikileaks data), or of them illegal disclosures of personal information -- the press can – and must – take on the role of regulating itself. These print media argue that government control is not in keeping with democracy, since freedom of expression and free of the press are fundamental democratic values. Yet, thus far, self-regulation by the press has not produced very impressive results. Even so, I believe that self-regulation – in conjunction with robust human rights laws, and a decrease in the prohibitive cost of bringing a legal action against a newspaper – must be the way forward for the press. After all, in any democracy freedom of the press is fundamental, along with freedom of expression. Does the new system of press regulation now under way in the UK mean that the problem of the exploitation of women by the media is about to disappear? The answer is No.As a journalist, producer of print media and a woman, I’d certainly like us, the press, to do better. But listening to the discussions here in the last two days only reinforces the fact that allour societiesstill have a long way to go towards gender equality. We need women to become robust enough – economically, socially and politically – in order toradically change the balance of forces between the genders. Only then will they properly be able to defend themselves from exploitation, sensationalism and commercialism at the hands of the media. WK