Media and Gender Monitor

This issue focuses on the Global Media Monitoring Project - GMMP 2005 - and features contributions from GMMP participants worldwide. GMMP was born out of the WACC 1994 international Bangkok conference on “Women Empowering Communication”. Following the first GMMP, organised by MediaWatch, Canada in 1995, the WACC Women’s Programme co-ordinated a second GMMP in 2000. Since then, from the grassroots to policy-making circles, GMMP has become a tool for change. With an even larger number of organisations and countries participating, an extensively revised quantitative and qualitative analysis, its own website www.globalmediamonitoring.org ), and national and regional as well as a global reports, GMMP 2005 is set to be an even more exciting and ambitious global project than ever before.GMMP 2005 is supported by the Open Society Institute, United Methodist Church, USA and FinChurchAid, Finland.

Asian Strategies for Media Monitoring, GMMP 2005. As women’s organisations and gender activists the world over are preparing for the ten year anniversary of the UN Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 and the Beijing +10 review of the Beijing Platform for Action which will take place at the United Nations in New York next year, the WACC Women’s Programme and its partner organisations are celebrating an anniversary of their own. In 1994, in collaboration with Isis-International, Manila and the International Women’s Tribune Centre (IWTC), WACC held the first ever international conference on women and communication entitled ‘Women Empowering Communication’ (WEC) in Bangkok. This issue's Forum looks at Women Empowering Communication + 10.

The Global Media Monitoring Project Award Nomination. The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) will be 10 years old in 2005 and while numerous gender and communication activists, policy makers and academics have over the years recognized the importance of GMMP as a tool for change, to date there has been no formal recognition of the project. All that changed at the end of last year when the nominations committee of the Feminist Scholarship Division of the International Communication Association (ICA) selected GMMP as their nominatation for the ICA award of Most Important Applied/ Public Policy Research Programme. Karen Ross (University of Coventry) in the UK, was then responsible for putting the nomination package together on behalf of FSD.

A Tool for Change: Global Media Monitoring Project. From 7th – 10th May, in Cape Town, fourteen men and women from around the world came together to discuss the launch of a project which has been described as ‘one of the most extraordinary collective enterprises yet organised within the global women’s movement’ – the Global Media Monitoring Project, or GMMP as it has come to be known.

GMMP was first conducted in 1995 after the idea for a worldwide day of media monitoring of the portrayal and representation of women was developed at the WACC conference ‘Women Empowering Communication in Bangkok in 1994.

Global Media Monitoring Project. Bombs reign down, shots are fired nearby and the camera closes in on a woman huddled in a doorway, crying and cradling her injured child. At home, the viewers feel sympathy for these victims of war, just as they have for countless other women and children many times before. This woman and her child could be from anywhere; the violence raging around them about anything, for this is the standard fare of conflict reporting.

Despite the fact that Women and Media was identified as one of the 12 critical areas of concern in the Beijing Platform for Action in 1995, there has been little change in mainstream media; the perspectives on women are rarely nuanced, especially in conflict situations.

Networking for Peace. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are evolving at breakneck speed as the industrial society that marked the 20th century rapidly gives way to the information society of the 21st century. Within this context, the international community has become increasingly focused on the linkages between ICTs and development. ICTs are now seen as the magic solution to the problems of economic development, healthcare and education as well as strengthening civil society, promoting democracy, and making governments more accountable. At the same time as ICTs are promoted as the panacea to the curse of underdevelopment, there is a recognition that those who most need the boost that ICTs can provide are least able to take advantage of it.

The archive of Media and Gender Monitor currently onlyshows covers from all the previous issues of MGM, full texts will soon be available, thankyou for waiting.