Pundit Pickers Prefer Men
Is Woman The Opposite Of Newsmaker?
Jennifer L. Pozner is a media columnist for the feminist newspaper Sojourner: The Women’s Forum and is organizing a non-profit, Women In Media & News (WIMN), a media monitoring, training and advocacy group.
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Steven Rosenfeld produced this piece.
"Just when you think you've heard all the stories from 9/11, more emerge." So said Tom Brokaw on the Nightly News when NBC ran a segment saluting the heroines of Ground Zero.
NBC presented firefighter Lieutenant Brenda Bergman, who described racing into the flaming destruction, risking her life to save others. It was a familiar tale, but sounded different when told in a woman's voice.
Maybe that's because it took NBC nearly three months to discover women rescue workers have served at Ground Zero every day since the attacks. "The fact that the faces of women haven't been in the news or ... in the media is not reflective of reality," Bergman told NBC.
No, it's not. Nor is reality reflected on the networks' top political shows, which frame and influence the public debate. A recent study by the White House Project, a nonpartisan women's leadership group, found women were 11 percent of guests, and just 7 percent of repeat interviewees, on five Sunday morning talk shows between January 2000 and June 2001. Women were underrepresented in every category of guest, from elected officials to private professionals to journalists. This was on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and FOX.
During those 18 months studied, for every one woman, there were nine men with names like Tom (Daschle), Dick (Armey) and Harry (Browne). A post-9/11 study yielded even more pitiful numbers: six weeks after the attacks, appearances by women fell another 39 percent. "Fox News Sunday" and ABC's "This Week," which both interviewed just one female guest after September 11, might as well be renamed "The Man Show."
The networks say they're not being sexist, just pragmatic. "You tend to want to go to a committee chairman or a leader of one of the parties, and right now they're mostly male," Marty Ryan, executive producer of "Fox News Sunday," told The Washington Post. NBC's "Meet the Press" executive producer Nancy Nathan told me that her largely female audience would be "insulted" if she were to "try to manipulate" the news to bring on women, rather than just "delivering newsmakers."
So, there are "newsmakers" and then there are women?
If producers are gunning for guests from the political A-list, they could book women like Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic Whip and ranking member on the Intelligence Committee, or senators like Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate committee on terrorism. But these women are not being called.
The broadcast blackout of women's views also is mirrored on newspaper op-ed pages. According to a survey I did for the media watch group FAIR, women wrote only 8 percent of bylined op-eds for The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today in the entire month after September 11.
Locking women out of editorial forums has serious consequences. Most significant, it skews what's presented as the national consensus, or majority opinion. For example, an early-October Gallup poll showed majorities of women and men both supporting the war in Afghanistan. However, when asked conditional questions about significant combat deaths, prolonged fighting and negative economic effects, women's support for the war fell up to 30 points compared with men. Yet the John Wayne-wannabes who dominated our op-ed pages and Sunday talk shows overlooked this polling data, instead telling us there is no significant gender gap in this "new kind of war."
An informed public and vigorous debate are intrinsic to a healthy democracy. But some of the most influential news outlets continue to ignore half the population. This invisibility of women homogenizes public debate, distorts public opinion, and fails not only women, but America.
This is Jennifer Pozner for TomPaine.com.
Published: Dec 14 2001
