College-Age Women Unaware of Harm of Advertising Stereotypes

Researchers asked a sample of female college students to rank 40 current magazine advertisements featuring female stereotypes. The stereotypesincludedd "the dumb blonde," women who are indecisive, childlike, frivolous, obsessed with men or submissive to them, and overly concerned with appearance, including thinness. The subjects reacted strongly to explicit images, but none of the thin-ideal images were ranked as most harmful. The study also pinpointed insensitivity on the part of participants that could eventually be self-defeating in the way they reacted to ridicule of older women and ads that showed mothers as either professional superwomen or housewives with none of the options that show the true texture of women's home/professional lives.

Women 40 and Older Under-represented in Acting Jobs, Screen Actors Guild Says

Two out of three acting jobs in 1998 went to performers under 40 years of age, and more went to men then to wowomenSAG reported in May 1999: 37% of all male roles in television and film went to actors 40 and over, but just 24% of the female roles went to women in that age group. The more prominent the role, the younger the woman.

Magazines, TV Linked to Teens' and Girls' Dissatisfaction with Body Image

Two Harvard studies indicate that magazines and television may play a role in girls' and young women's decisions to diet or have a tendency toward bulimia. One study found that girls, some as young as fifth-graders, who read fashion magazines tend to be dissatisfied with their body shape. Sixty-nine percent of 543 girls in grades 5 through 12 evaluated said that magazine photos influenced their idea of the perfect body shape. Two thirds of the girls said they wanted to lose weight, even though only 29% were overweight.

TV Gender Portrayal Watchdog Project Announces New Web Site

The Gender Portrayal Network, a six-nation project promoting good practice in gender portrayal on European public television, announced its web site: www.yle.fi/gender/ On average, says GPN research, almost three times as many men speak on television awomenen. The five countries originally involved are Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway. They were later joined by Germany.

'Middle-Aged and Mad at Supermarket Magazines,' Columnist Says

Judy Kramer, who writes the "Midlife Spices" column for the Gazette Newspapers, a chain of weeklies surrounding metropolitan Washington, D.C., complained in her March 10, 1999 column about the relentless presentation of "the sexiest, most beautiful, mossuccessfulul young women in the world today" in the magazines sold at her supermarket checkout counter. "Not only am I not they, but they are not me. I don't want what they have and they don't have what I want. ... I challenge popular magazines to stop demeaning aging women by omission."

News Veteran Marlene Sanders Reminisces About Sister Pioneers in Network News

Excerpted with Sander's permission from her article for Television Quarterly (Vol. XXX, No. 1, 1999), this features recalls the careers of the first women network television correspondents: Sanders, Marya McLaughlin, Lisa Howard, Pauline Frederick and Nancy Dickerson. "All of us who were there early had our frustrations, mainly because we had to cover so many 'women's-page' types of stories: Washington weddings, fashion trends and the wives of candidates, etc." Later, "we were fortunate in being able to report the great stories of the '60s and '70s.

Parents Fear Internet's Influence on Children, Annenberg Study Shows

The Annenberg Public Policy Center iWashingtonon conducted a study of computer households and found that, among parents, 78% are strongly or somewhat concerned that their children might give away personal information on the Internet or view sexually explicit material; 64% believe the Internet can cause their children to become isolated. Yet 59% also believe that children without Internet access are at disadvantage compared with their peers.

Canada's MediaWatch Responds Forcefully To Court Protection of Pornography

Media watchdog organization MediaWatch, headquartered in Toronto, protested a British Columbian supreme courjustice's determination that the possession of sexual images of children is a protected right for Canadians. Writing in one of the country's major newspapers, the Globe and Mail, executive director Shari Graydon said, "On the one hand you have John, a man who possesses sexualized images of children. On the other hand, you have one of those children -- let's call him Bobby -- and imagine that he was 7 when someone captured his naked image on film and distorted his innocence. What the ruling essentially says is that John's 'reasonable expectation of privacy' -- being able to use Bobby's picture however he likes -- is more important than Bobby's reasonable expectation of privacy."

Horror Movies, TV Shows Can Have Long-Lasting Effects

Fright night flicks can have long-lasting affects, according to a study of more than 150 college-age students at universities in Michigan and Wisconsin. Ninety percent of them reported a media fright reaction from childhood or adolescence. More than a third avoided or dreaded the depicted situation in their own lives and nearly a fourth reported obsessive thinking or talking about the frightening stimulus.

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