Network News Expert Sound bites Almost Always White, Male

When the three main U.S. broadcast networks -- ABC, CBS and NBC -- give xavier the opportunity to speak on early evening network newscasts, the speakers are almost exclusively white and male, according to a study by Women, Men and Media released in October. In contrast, comments solicited by the networks from "real people" were far more representative of the American population as a whole.

ASNE Agrees to Include Women in Annual News room Census

The American Society of Newspaper Editors finally agreed to count women in its annual census on news room employment. The issue was voted on on Oct. 20, 1998 at the same time that AISNE adopted a news room diversity mission statement that says that "news rooms must reflect the racial diversity of American society by 2025 or sooner." The new goal replaces ASNE's previously stated position, articulated in 1978, that called for racial parity by 2000 or sooner. The industry has failed miserably in this regard: Minority journalists constitute 11.46% of the professional news room work force while they are 26% of the U.S. population. Some ASNE leaders had felt that adding women to its initiatives for minority advancement would dilute efforts to improve the industry's woeful record on racial parity in news rooms.

Canadian Study Suggests Women's Absence from News Explains Declining Readership

Women are significantly under represented as professionals and as news sources by Canada's leading newspapers, according to study results released in October by MediaWatch, the Toronto-based media monitoring organization. "Women Strike Out" showed that although women are 50% of Canada's population, they appear only 20% of the time in Canadian newspapers. The data from this survey, compared to findings from two earlier MediaWatch reports, indicates there has been no significant change in the portrayal of women by newspapers in eight years.

RTNDF 1998 Employment Report Shows Gains for Broadcast Women

The Radio-Television News Directors Foundation released its latest statistics on women and minority employment in broadcasting in the October 1998 Communicator, the magazine of the Radio-Television News Directors Association. Here are the highlights:

• Radio
  39% of radio stations with news staffs have women on those staffs; 28% of radio news directors are women, up from 23% in the 1997 report. The percentage of women in the radio work force, 31%, remained unchanged.

• Television
  Nearly all -- 99% -- of television stations have news staffs with women. Women news directors are now 23% of the total, up from 14% in last year's report. Note, however, that women are far more likely to be news directors in the smaller markets (36%) and the smaller news departments (45%).

Preoccupation with One's Appearance Takes Toll on Mental Health

Psychologist Barbara L. Fredrickson and colleagues report the results of two experiments that dissect the psychological toll of what used to be dismissed as vanity. The common obsession with appearing young, thin and beautiful isn't harmless, the research shows in studies of more than 350 young men and women. The studies are among the first "to document the psychological costs of raising girls in a culture that persistently objectifies the female body" and socializes women to adopt a third-person perspective on their bodies.

Women's Pages Being Reintroduced to Attract Readers

Women's pages have made something of a comeback in the U.S. after most newspapers dropped them in the early 1970s, says Media Report to Women Editor Sheila Gibbons. They disappeared because many women found their dominant content -- advice on homemaking, food preparation, child-rearing and society announcements -- limited and formulaic. In response, newspaper editors created "lifestyle" sections instead, which usually relied on a mix of news and features about the arts and personalities. These sections were designed to attract a male and female readership. Today newspaper executives are under considerable pressure to try to bring women readers back to the newspaper and to develop the newspaper reading habit among teen-age and young women, who are infrequent newspaper readers. They are addressing this problem in several ways:

• Exploring definitions of news and testing to see if those definitions tend to exclude women's activities.

• Analyzing the tone and content of stories written about women and about men to see if there are differences in the ways reporters write about women and men.

• Re-introducing content just for women in the form of a women's page or a weekly women's section or throughout the newspaper.

How Print Media Framed the Women's Movement, 1966-1986

An in-depth analysis of news articles about the modern women's movement was marginalized by the press, researchers say. The most astounding result of the research is the low number of articles it yielded about one of the most stunning social movements of the 20th century. The women's movement was rarely covered, and when it was, it was treated with humor and puzzlement. Coverage was somewhat comparable across publications sampled, but there is an obvious difference in the way the two groups were portrayed. In particular, the press de legitimized the feminists and legitimized the anti-feminists.

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