Asian Strategies for Media Monitoring, GMMP 2005

Ten years since the landmark UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, out of which came the Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA), women have gained tremendous ground for themselves and the girl-child. At the same time, however, women are also being confronted with new challenges to gender equality emerging from a complex set of relationships, from the rise of regressive social forces and fundamentalist ideologies to the use of terrorism and counter-terrorism and the break-neck speed of developments in information and communication technologies.

As the international day of monitoring of the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) 2005 approaches, gender and communication groups worldwide have begun to bring together groups and individuals concerned with the representation of women in the media to raise awareness of GMMP and plan for their participation in the project.

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.

“The event itself has a certain exoticism: two dozen academics from (among other places) Oklahoma and Zimbabwe, Arizona and Peru, gathered in a small Slovenian town to discuss censorship and democracy. But there is nothing exotic about the central question stalking us all. That's as relevant as the morning headlines, as fresh as blood in the sand, or Tony Blair biting his lip. Simply: why is America such a "weak democracy"?”

Extract from the paper by Isabel Moya.
Six hundred thousand women die each year of pregnancy complications and during birth -most of them in Africa and Asia - and they could have been saved, according to the World Health Organization .  That means a hundred and fifty times more deaths than the people killed in the terrorist attacks against the WTC Twin Towers in New York. However, that piece of news doesn't make headlines or generate live coverage. No pictures are splayed on the covers of magazines. Yet this is not a new phenomenon. Since the invention of printing to the emergence of microchips, the different means that have been added up to what we call today mass media have only been used to convey the basics of ideological hegemony, which symbolically, provides the basis for a social relationship of both subordination and discrimination of women. Forms of oppression and silencing have been recycled and made more sophisticated today, but the essence of a social outlay and a way of thinking that invisibilise women and scuff out their voices remains in place.

Extract from the paper by Patricia Made.
A gender analysis of the media in Southern Africa reveals that through its newsgathering and editing processes, the media silence a large segment of the region’s population. And, media also make invisible the voices of men who are ordinary workers, farmers, labourers, villagers, miners, etc., which like the majority of women, comprise the rank-and-file of the citizenry. Many people do not have access to expression in the media, and when they are likely to see or hear themselves, what is reflected back are often, negative, one-dimensional stereotypes.

Extract from the paper by Celia Aldana.

Given that media are crucial in decision-making processes and even in our daily lives, they are of public interest. If their influence is decisive both for democracy and development, if they constitute the public sphere itself, if any distortion in its functioning in turn distorts democracy itself, it is imperative to also make the media accountable and a matter of public debate.

Pocas veces observamos o monitoreamos medios desde las ofertas de entretenimiento, más se trabaja la información. Sin embargo publicidad, telenovelas, programas de humor, shows o reality shows son mercados mediáticos cuyo volumen de emisión y audiencia temporal es mucho más alto en conjunto, especialmente en el medio televisivo. Ver noticieros de alguna manera te coloca en una posición más racional de atención, mientras que en momentos de esparcimiento tendemos a distendernos y a ser más tolerantes con lo que recibimos.

Doors slam and loud voices ring out in the background, as a group of women meet in a tiny office in the women’s section of Pollsmoor Prison near Cape Town, South Africa. But inside the office, oblivious to the distractions, the women, all inmates, are holding an editorial meeting to decide on the content for the next edition of Women’s Link, one of South Africa’s most unusual publications.