2013 Paris Press Presentation

1. Paris, November 2013
Wendy Kristianasen
To judge by various speeches at this year’s Feminism in London 2013
Conference things could be looking up in the area of gender equality
and the media.Finn Mackay, addressing the conference, noted that
“The last couple of years have seen a sea change in the
representation and visibility of feminism in our media and culture.
Almost every day there seems to be some form of feminist response
or commentary in our media. …. We have managed to direct attention
to those issues we think are important, we have managed to make
news, not just comment on it.”
This is clearly very good news. However, women, in one way or
another, are still targets both for easy sensationalism – which of
course sells papers and draws TV audiences – and for
straightforward commercialisation by way of advertising revenues.
This is not new, of course. But, ominously, control of the media
continues to fall into fewer and fewer hands. If we go back a decade
and look just at the United States, we find – and I quote from an
article by Serge Halimi in my own paper Le Monde diplomatique–
that:
“Since the 1980s, control of the US media has grown ever more
concentrated. By 1996 the two largest radio chains owned 115
stations. Today they own more than 1,400. Meanwhile the number of
station owners has dwindled by a third. In 2003, 10 giant companies
reign over the information age. Three companies own half of the
stations in the US. Clearly, something has to be done. And it will be.
But not what you would expect.
“In the words of Bernie Sanders, one of the most progressive
members of the US House of Representatives at the time: "One of our
best-kept secrets is the degree to which a handful of huge
corporations control the flow of information in the US. Whether it is
television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books or the Internet, a few
giant conglomerates are determining what we see, hear and read.
And the situation is likely to become much worse."

2. That trend has continued. And, as the global financial crisis has hit
hard, the media have grown increasingly reliant on advertising
revenues. Not just in the United States, but in Europe and all over our
globalised world.
How does that affect women?
As we all know, in an age dominated by celebrity, lifestyle and
fashion, women sell products – not just female clothing and
cosmetics, but mobile phones, cars, washing powders, holidays,
chocolates, kitchens, iPads, breakfast cereals, washing machines,
coffeemakers, vacuum cleaners, sofas, wallpapers. They reflect the
modern couple’s aspirations, our desired life style. Women as sexual
symbols, evoking glamour and romance.Women as the mothers of
happy healthy children.Women as wives, producing the latest
culinary delights, or relaxing on that desirable new sofa.That goes not
just for TV, and newspapers – and their ubiquitous pull-out colour
supplements – and the glossy magazines – but also, increasingly,for
online publications too.
News editors may bestumbling along way behind these
overwhelming commercial constraints of our globalised world, but
they know, too, that womensell stories.
They are powerful symbols. Take MalalaYusufzai, the 16-year old
Pakistani schoolgirt from the Swat Valley, who refused to comply
with Taliban warnings against girls going to school. Shot at by the
Taliban, half dead, her face painfully reconstructed, she continuedher
campaigning for girls’ right to education. And through the intense
media exposure and the distinguished awards it helped her win, her
story has done something positive to expose, and perhaps help
remedy, a situation as intolerable to most Pakistanis as to those in
the West.
Or take the young female activist, Tawakul Karman from Yemen.As
part of the first phase of the Arab Spring Karman rose to fight for
women’s rights from deeply traditional, tribal Yemen as part of the
Arab Spring. Again, media coverage did much to help empower her,
and help her play her part in ousting one more Arab dictator.
But there are dangers too. And here I will again quote from my own
paper on two other prominent cases. Three years ago, we wrote:

3. “Bibi Aisha was on the cover of Time magazine last month, a young
Afghan woman with no ears or nose; it is claimed that she was
deliberately mutilated because of the Taliban. In Iran,
SakinehMohammadiAshtiani has been flogged, and sentenced to
death by stoning, for adultery. Forces opposed to the Tehran regime
rallied in response to a much-printed photograph of her face.
“These images provoke thought, but about what? Not the ferocity of
Afghan Islamists: the Soviets had already experienced that before the
western powers armed the fundamentalists (with the blessing of the
media). And there was nothing about the nature of President
Ahmadinejad’s regime that we did not already know – electoral
rigging by his supporters, and punishments, including death, for his
opponents.
“These images may not make us think. They may actually prevent us
from thinking, by – intentionally or not – using a powerful symbol (a
mutilation to be avenged, an execution to be averted) to promote
dangerous strategic plans (continuing the war in Afghanistan,
imposing sanctions on Iran). The more powerful the symbol, the less
people will question the plan: the heart demands what the head
might reject. Time claims that Bibi Aisha’s ordeal shows ‘what
happens if we leave Afghanistan’.”
There are further issues to consider in regard to the impact of politics
and political agendas on the media. While the media’s task is to
report, expose and challenge such agendas, it is not always a one-way
street.
I’ll give just one example.A few years ago I was writing on the
situation of Muslims in Britain. It was a sensitive moment. We had
experienced the London bombings in 2005, and the Muslim
community felt itself under suspicion.This sensitive climate did not
stop the then government under Tony Blair from weighing in. A
former British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, suddenly “discovered” –
and amplified in the columns of the press – the menace of the niqab!
Suddenly, in the words of Tony Blair, it had become “a mark of
separation”. Never mind that Britain had been until then quite proud
of its multicultural model.
The target of all this attention wasa young Muslim teaching assistant,
AishehAzmi. The23-year-oldcame from Dewsbury, a townin the

4. north of England with a high Muslim community which had hit the
headlines at the time of the London bombings (not least because it
was home to one of the bombers). Azmi had been sacked for wearing
the niqab in the classroom of the UK primary school which had
engaged her. Were Muslims trying to subvert our children, we were
encouraged to ask? The rest of the government, including Tony Blair
himself, weighed in to pass judgment.
The niqab was an easy target. And the decision to raise the issue and
create a storm, willingly amplified by the media, came at a difficult
moment as Labour figures were positioning themselves for the
announced post-Blair era, and as Britain’s disastrous foreign policies
in Iraq were unravelling. Labour sensed it was losing the voters over
the Iraq war, and was perhaps looking to the white working-class
vote, while gambling it could retain the core of its massive Muslim
vote it had traditionally enjoyed.
This distraction from the uncertain ”war on terror” and the unending
bad news from Iraq was of course short-lived.However, the Azmi
case was significant because,of course, if Azmi had been a man,
there’d have been no story.
And if the media had bothered to do their homework, there would
not have been much of a story either.For the truth behind the“story”
was that the Muslim community in Dewsbury itself agreed with the
decision to dismiss Azmi – on the simple grounds that she had not
worn the niqab to her job interview.
Probably most of you here today will be familiar with the crude
depictions of women in the UK tabloid press. Page Three of The Sun,
with its daily diet of full-page topless ladies, is but the most graphic
example of the sensationalism of the popular end of our print media.
However now, in the UK, after revelations ofthe many, quite shocking
abuses of personal information in the tabloid press, we are perhaps
at last beginning to address the problem. Last week, following the
findings of the Levison Report and the closure of the News of the
World, we saw the start of what promises to be a long trial, that of
Rebekah Brooks, editor of the News of the World and later The Sun,
and Andy Coulson, her successor at the News of the World – both
charged with criminal conspiracy to hack phones.

5. Also last week, a new system for press regulation came into being.
This is an attempt to bridge the gap between direct government
control and the independent self-monitoring body favoured by the
print media itself.
The question is: can the press regulate itself? The Guardian
newspaper is in the vanguard of those print media who believe that –
whether it concernsthe variouswhistleblowers of state secrets (The
Guardian was one of the original partners in the redaction and
publication of Wikileaks data), or of them illegal disclosures of
personal information -- the press can – and must – take on the role of
regulating itself.
These print media argue that government control is not in keeping
with democracy, since freedom of expression and free of the press
are fundamental democratic values.
Yet, thus far, self-regulation by the press has not produced very
impressive results. Even so, I believe that self-regulation – in
conjunction with robust human rights laws, and a decrease in the
prohibitive cost of bringing a legal action against a newspaper – must
be the way forward for the press. After all, in any democracy freedom
of the press is fundamental, along with freedom of expression.
Does the new system of press regulation now under way in the UK
mean that the problem of the exploitation of women by the media is
about to disappear? The answer is No.As a journalist, producer of
print media and a woman, I’d certainly like us, the press, to do better.
But listening to the discussions here in the last two days only
reinforces the fact that allour societiesstill have a long way to go
towards gender equality. We need women to become robust enough
– economically, socially and politically – in order toradically change
the balance of forces between the genders. Only then will they
properly be able to defend themselves from exploitation,
sensationalism and commercialism at the hands of the media.
WK