Women of Color Ignored in Media Coverage of Missing Women, Girls

Shortly after “runaway bride” Jennifer Wilbanks returned to her Georgia home after a nationwide search for her ended with her admission that she had balked at going through with the marriage, two writers produced columns alleging that had Wilbanks been a woman of color, the wall-to-wall media coverage given to white victims never would have materialized.

Douglas MacKinnon, a white male, former press secretary to U. S. Senator Robert Dole, addressed the news media in the Chicago Tribune May 8: “Your continual focus on, and reporting of, missing, young, attractive white women not only demeans your profession but is a televised slap in the face to minority mothers and parents the nation over who search for their own missing children with little or no assistance or notice from anyone.”

And in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution the same day, editorial page editor Cynthia Tucker wrote that of missing minorities, “only a small sliver get the Wilbanks/Laci Peterson/Lori Hacking treatment.”

To read these stories online in their entirety, use these links: Chicago Tribune and Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Rice Lifts Numbers of Women in News, But Overall Coverage of Women Still Lags

With the ascension of U. S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to that post, and heightened visibility of other women in Congress and in President Bush's cabinet, women have appeared at the center of political news coverage more frequently. However, when it comes to business coverage, women are all but invisible. For example, in The Wall Street Journal, the total share of coverage of female protagonists did not exceed 11% in the last 15 months, according to a study by the Media Tenor Institute for Media Analysis.

The overall share of coverage of women in U.S. media increased by a small margin in the first quarter of 2005, compared to 2004. For further information on this study, Contact: Isadora Badi at i.badi@mediatenor.com

Women Reporting War: Conditions Often Unsafe, Unsavory, Unsettling

A high number of women war reporters have suffered physical attack or intimidation while covering conflicts, according to a survey by the International News Safety Institute.

More than half of those who responded to the poll by the International News Safety Institute (INSI) reported sexual harassment and a significant number said they had experienced sexual abuse. Several of the women called for self-defense to be made an intrinsic part of safety training. Requests were also made for female trainers on “hostile environment” training courses.

Overall, however, a majority of the women -- all experienced international war reporters in print and television -- said they did not believe they should be treated any differently from their male colleagues when it came to issues of safety in the field of conflict.

Read the full report at www.newssafety.com/stories/insi/wrw.htm.

Women’s ‘Tribunal’ Caused Tsunami at Japan Broadcast Giant NHK

Haruko Watanabe filed this special report from Japan about the controversy over edits of a special film on World War II “comfort women” exploited and abused by Japan’s military forces of the time:

Editing of the “Women’s War Crime Tribunal” to eliminate footage of victims’ testimony caused a tsunami at NHK (the BBC of Japan), leading to the resignation of its powerful head, Katsuji Ebisawa, in April and restructuring of the public television network’s top decision-making body. However, the fatal blow that triggered changes at the network was massive cancellations by subscribers angry over revelations that the documentary had been altered to soften evidence of Japan’s crimes against comfort women, who were mostly Korean, Chinese and Indonesian.

NHK apparently revised a 2001 documentary program of a mock trial of Japan’s sexual violence during World War II because of political pressure from the ruling LDP (Liberal Democratic Party). The mock trial found the late Emperor Hirohito guilty of crimes against humanity and urged the Japanese government to compensate the sexual slaves of the Japanese military.

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