A tool for Change: Global Media Monitoring Project 2005

In May 2003, the WACC Women’s Programme held a GMMP Consultation meeting which was attended by 14 people from around the world.

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. A total of 71 countries took part in the first study, co-ordinated by one of the pioneers in ‘media watching’, the Canadian NGO Media Watch. The results of GMMP 1995 were presented at the Women’s NGO Forum in Beijing in September 1995.

Five years on, the WACC Women’s Programme co-ordinated a more extensive and qualitative GMMP study. GMMP 2000 aimed not only to assess changes in worldwide representations of women by the media since 1995, but also to improve and build upon the original study by involving more organisations in the research and by making the study more contextual. The actual monitoring day on 1st February 2000 generated tremendous excitement and solidarity among participating groups. Volunteers coded their monitoring sheets together; some held press conferences; and all of them fed back news of their monitoring work to the rest of the global volunteer network through WACC. As the French monitoring group put it, GMMP “is changing the way we ‘read’ the media… and it will help us to show other journalists how and why things need to change”. Preliminary results of GMMP 2000 were released in time for Beijing +5 events in June 2000 and the final results, including detailed country tables and qualitative analysis by region, were published in a book entitled Who Makes the News?.
Since their release, the results of GMMP 2000 have been used in a myriad of ways by gender and communication groups around the world. In Malta, for example, the Gender Advisory Committee of the Broadcasting Authority uses the results in their research and training programmes and in Bolivia, the country’s most important women’s communication network, has used the GMMP 2000 methodology to carry out a project on ‘Monitoring the Image of Women in Advertising’. Since 2000, GMMP has in many ways developed a momentum all of its own. From use in academic articles, to providing the methodology for new monitoring projects on advertising or ethnicity, from the grassroots to policy-making circles, GMMP has become a tool for change. For this reason and in response to calls from gender and communication groups worldwide, the WACC Women’s Programme has decided to co-ordinate a third GMMP, to be held in 2005.

Two of the participants at the GMMP Consultation meeting share resource materials from their organisations.

Just as GMMP 2000 improved upon the original study in 1995, so GMMP 2005 aims to build upon the process that culminated in GMMP 2000. As such, one of the key aims of GMMP 2005 is to make the project more participatory. It was for this reason that in May, the WACC Women’s Programme organised a consultation meeting with a group of men and women from the different WACC regions, all of whom participated in GMMP 2000 and have been active in using the report Who Makes the News? in their work on gender and media. Hosted by the communication NGO, Women’s Media Watch, in conjunction with a gender and media consultant based in Cape Town, the meeting was attended by representatives from Guatemala, Japan, India, South Africa, Namibia, Cameroon, Israel, Canada, Belgium and the UK.

More of a round-table discussion than a formal meeting, the four-day consultation meeting was marked by an enthusiasm for and strong commitment to GMMP, with participants freely sharing ideas on how to move the project forward. The meeting began with an overview of the past GMMPs provided by the Director and the Programme Officer of the WACC Women’s Programme and was followed by feedback from the participants on the experience of GMMP in their countries and regions. As the participants charted the successes and challenges of GMMP 2000, the sense of GMMP’s worldwide impact emerged ever more clearly. Over the four days, participants reviewed the methodology of the 2000 project with a particular focus on the coding materials, discussed the data analysis and final report and began to plan a strategy for the publication and dissemination of the results in 2005.

The ideas and plan that emerged from the discussions at the consultation meeting will make for a very different GMMP from either of the first two. Perhaps the most significant development is the commitment to ensure that the results of GMMP 2005 can and will be used as a tool for advocacy and lobbying. Participants in GMMP 2005 will be asked to develop an advocacy strategy for lobbying media at national and regional level and will be provided with support from WACC to do so. One way of supporting participants in their advocacy work will be the setting up of an interactive GMMP website, which will include, amongst other things, tips, advice and templates on advocacy activities. Much of the existing monitoring material will be revised for GMMP 2005 in order to develop a more extensive qualitative analysis which will provide context to the quantitative results. GMMP 2005 also aims to reach a much larger number of countries than in previous years and will be co-ordinated, not only centrally by WACC, but also with the help of regional and national co-ordinators. In addition to the global reports produced in 1995 and 2000, GMMP 2005 will also produce national reports and executive summaries in the form of pamphlets to aid advocacy activities. These reports will be launched nationally following a co-ordinated international launch of the global report.

With the new ideas and plans which stemmed from the Cape Town consultation meeting, GMMP 2005 is looking to be an increasingly ambitious project which aims not only to empower those involved but also to provide a tool to contribute to changing the portrayal and representation of gender by the mainstream media throughout the world.
If you would like to take part in GMMP 2005 or require more information, please contact the Co-ordinator of the WACC Women’s Programme: women@wacc.org.uk