Biz-Community (Cape Town)
Issa Sikiti Da Silva
3 August 2007
August is Women's Month in South Africa. As usual, media outlets - broadcast, print and digital - across the country have already started dedicating entire pages to 'women's issues'. However, SA's media watchdog, the Media Monitoring Project (MMP), has challenged the media to move away from simply debating those issues and start doing 'the right thing': celebrating the achievements and painting a positive picture of 'those who stand behind every successful man'.
"Instead of the media merely concentrating on so-called 'women's issues' and only on the celebrations that are set to take place on 9 August 2007, we challenge the media to fill their papers, radio broadcasts, television schedules and news programmes with women making contributions to their communities and driving social change," MMP executive director William Bird said.
Often unnoticed
In SA, women's positive contribution towards community development more often goes unnoticed, ignored by the media and swept under the carpet.
And a few good deeds that get press coverage are mostly those that are done by high-profile female personalities.
But this year, the MMP is calling upon the media to focus not only on so-called celebrities, women in business and government, but rather on 'ordinary' women and the role they are playing in effecting social change.
Suggestions
The following are some of the MMP's suggestions that can help the media to rise to these challenges:
Use women as sources in every story
Allow women engaged in social change initiatives to tell their own stories
Fill entire news bulletins and newspapers editions with contributions from women
Make women editors for the day (it worked with Mandela, why not his wife?)
Use the same news agenda, but apply a woman's perspective to each item
Stories that reflect the diversity of roles that women hold in all sectors of society, from business to academia to sports. Include women commentators, teachers, doctors, lawyers, community leaders, among others
Encourage advertisers to participate. Advertisers can use this opportunity to be creative and come up with different, positive portrayals of women
Diversify images and photographs of women
Use exclusively women photographers, designers, producers, talk show hosts, DJs and directors
And lastly, approach famous and so-called 'ordinary' women to be guest writers for National Women's Day.
Furthermore, Bird said that an annual monitoring exercise on media coverage conducted by the MMP over the past eight years during the period in and around the National Women's Day shows that there has been a consistent increase on 'women's issues' for the period preceding the commemoration of the day.
"While such coverage tends to give women some of the credit they deserve, much of it still fails to celebrate and represent the diversity of women in SA," he concluded.
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