media

So here’s to the latest women about to be demonized in the media: Michelle Obama. My heart goes out to her, and so will my pen (or keyboard, whatevs). Meanwhile, check out this piece in Women’s eNews by Sandra Kobrin, “Michelle: Hold Your Head High; We Got Your Back.”

And by the way, for an expanded version of Courtney’s comments from yesterday’s forum on media coverage of the 2008 elections, do check out “Generation Y Refuses Race-Gender Dichotomy” in AlterNet today. An excerpt:

The million-dollar question: How, with a generation bent on individuality and multiplicity, do we confront racism, sexism and all the other insipid -isms that have been brought to light by this unprecedented campaign? To my mind, we must continue to use novel interventions — like the Women’s Media Center’s great montage “Sexism Sells, but We’re Not Buying It,” the brand-new blog Michelle Obama Watch, and the evergreen experts at Racialicious — to educate people. We must use humor — as my group blog Feministing often does, as the brilliant Sarah Haskins does on Current TV, as Ann Telnaes does through cartooning over at Women’s eNews. (Note: It’s not just the boys — John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and the Onion crew — that know the power of a laugh.)

We must take our roles as media consumers dead seriously, calling television executives and newspaper editors on their misguided choices and celebrating them when they get it right. In an increasingly corporatized media landscape, it is your dollar, not your disgust, that will most readily get big-wig attention. Don’t buy sexist magazines, don’t tune into to racist radio, and don’t watch reductive, recycled infotainment being pawned off as news.

But most of all, it seems to me, we must continue to push for a deeper, more authentic conversation overall. We must let the mainstream media know that we don’t want to debate “reject” or “denounce” for 24 hours or go on witch hunts for Geraldine Ferraro or Samantha Power. We want to understand what these women were trying to say. We want to explore the real issues. We want to, as my co-panelist Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now so brilliantly put it, call into question the whole idea of empire. The debate shouldn’t center on the quandary: How can we make our empire more effective? But, do we want to be an empire in the first place?

And we must demand that our candidates rise to the occasion, as I believe Obama did so beautifully with his speech on race following the Reverend Wright controversy. He brought that conversation to a new level, and we are all better off for it. We need to continue to push for that kind of brazen truth-telling — about gender, certainly, about class, for sure. That’s what politics is supposed to be about — not partisanship or strategic spinning, but honesty and uplift. Call me naïve, but that’s what the young are supposed to be, right?

From Soundbites to Solutions: Bias, Punditry, and the Press in the 2008 Elections, jointly sponsored by the WMC, The White House Project, and the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education

Panel II – How the Media Influence and Reflect Political Realities, moderated by Geneva Overholser, Director of the School of Journalism at the U of Southern California

Overheard, here at the Paley Center:

William Douglas, White House Correspondent: “I look at this campaign season so far and I’m both encouraged and discouraged about how we’ve covered it. It’s because we’ve had two such historic candidates. Speaking from the mainstream print journalism world, I think we’ve done ok. We’ve actually written about issues that we haven’t had the opportunity to look at durnig previous campaigns, in large part because the candidates have been traditional candidates. We’ve looked at race and gender somewhat differently than we have in the past, because we’ve had to.”

Juan Gonzalez, Columnist, New York Daily News: “I’ve been extremely disappointed by the shallowness of the approach to all these issues. It’s been seen as conflicts between campaigns, between individuals. There’s been far less focus on the institutional, and on what these two candidates are actually going to do….In the foreign policy arena, for instance, the media has failed to differentiate between the candidates’ different attitudes toward American empire. Do the candidates urge the American people to have a smarter empire, or to end this domination over people of the world? I look forward to seeing how we improve our coverage during the general election.”

Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director, Annenberg Public Policy Center: “‘It was a charming speech. There was no stridency to it. Maybe she has a new speech writer.’ We need some consciousness raising here if a commentator feels it’s ok to deliver those three sentences!”

Chrisitane Anamapour, Chief International Correspondent, CNN: “To think that in this country, this supposed beacon of democracy, you can be sexist in reporting without accountability, is astonishing to me. Even in places like Iran, where there’s an Islamic fundamentalist revolution, the number of times people have said to me ‘Well, we have more women in our Parliament than you in America have in your Senate.’ And in Europe, people say to me the same. Women have been breaking those barriers outside the US for a long, long time in some countries that you in the US have believed to be benighted and backward….”

Pamela Newkirk, Associate Professor of Journalism, New York University: “When I left the daily media 15 years ago, I wrote about the impact African Americans have had on mainstream American media. I found that race matters, and what we learned on this campaign is that gender matters for sure, but let us not forget that race still matters. With the nomination of Barack Obama, there’s a perception out there that we’ve overcome race. But both of these areas still have a long way to go. Bill O’Reilly called for a lynching party for Michelle Obama, but last I checked, he still has a show.”

The first panel, “Candidates, Campaigns, and the Politics of Bias,” is underway. Overheard here at The Paley Center:

Celinda Lake, Political Strategist and President of Lake Research Partners: “Polling shows the voters feel 2 to 1 that the media has been unfair to Obama in terms of race, and that the media has been hardest on age, vis a vis McCain. There’s not as much sense of unfairness around gender.”

Dr. Susan Carroll, Senior Scholar at the Center for American Women in Politics: “The media failed to educate the public about ways that gender considerations affected HRC’s campaign. For instance, research shows that women are seen to be less qualified to hold public office than men, even when they have more credentials and experience. So HRC made experience central to her campaign. But by emphasizing this, she ceded the issue of change to Obama. But it was something she had to do to counter negative ingrained stereotypes. The media didn’t acknowledge this.”

Dr. Ron Walters, Professor of Government and Politics, University of Maryland: “The race comments from Bill Clinton, HRC, and Geraldine Ferraro—I don’t believe all that was an accident. It was a strategy by Obama’s opponents. Obama’s campaign hoped it would go away, but it didn’t. Fox news made sure it wouldn’t, by bringing Rev. Wright into the picture. And other networks jumped right in.”

Courtney Martin, author and columnist for The American Prospect, and feministing.com blogger: “There’s been a 109% increase in youth voters in this election. That’s profound. Youth are excited about this election, but they are not excited about partisanship. Chalk it up to Facebook, chalk it up to our tendency to see ourselves as individual projects, but we just aren’t into party politics.”

Patricia Williams, Columnist, The Nation, and Professor of Law, Columbia University: “Again, we see in this election, all the women are white, all the men are black. Race was gendered and gender was raced in this primary. Michelle Obama, Asian men, and others were left out of this conversation entirely.”

Up next: Panel II…

Soundbites to Solutions Conference – Post #1

A full house. The panelists have gathered. Pat Mitchell, co-chair of the WMC’s board and President and CEO of The Paley Center for Media, is introducing. Mitchell notes, “You cannot escape the fact that the media is full of examples of the kind of stereotyping about women that we had all hoped had disappeared in the ‘enlightened’ 21st century. I think the same can be said about race.”

Carol Jenkins, President of the WMC, notes that the media was totally unprepared for the first woman, the first man of color, and now the oldest man(!) running. ”What they took as their solution was to embed pundits. But those pundits’ opinions have blurred the facts,” says Jenkins, noting that we’re here today to sort out the soundbites and get to the solutions.

Marie Wilson, President and Founder of The White House Project, reminds us that you can’t be what you can’t see. The WHP’s focus on studies of the media–remember that one that found male talking heads outnumber female talking heads 9 to 1?–shares the WMC’s mission of getting more women in the media.

Dori Maynard, President of the Maynard Center for Journalism Education, asks that our intent today be on understanding each other. To that end, there will be instant polling of the audience, to find out who is in the room, and what participants think. The responses will be a catalyst not only for the panelists, but also for a report that will be prepared following today’s event.

Commence instant polling! Here’s the breakdown from the first few questions:

(The racial breakdown appeared on the screen way too fast – I didn’t get it, sorry!)

The audience here is 91 percent female and 8 percent male (1 percent other). 51 percent of those here make over $100,000.

And now, the clincher:

Did the media demonstrate an ability to accurately report and inform across the fault lines of race? 81 percent say no. Across class? 76% say no. Across gender? 92% say no. Across age? 68% say no.

Next up: the panels. The first one this morning will focus on politics (”Candidates, Campaigns, and the Politics of Bias,” and the second will focus on media (”How the Media Influence and Reflect Political Realities”).

I’m getting ready to live blog today’s conference, From Soundbites to Solutions: Bias, Punditry, and the Press in the 2008 Elections, jointly sponsored by the Women’s Media Center, The White House Project, and the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. The crowd is gathering…Stay tuned!

Note: I’ll also be posting over at Majority Post.

For those of you here in NYC, join me tomorrow from 9am-12 for a stellar event, and one whose theme I will be touching on, actually, during campus talks this fall. The event: “From Soundbites to Solutions: Bias, Punditry, and the Press in the 2008 Elections.” Sponsored by the White House Project, the Women’s Media Center, and the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, the event is free of charge, and open to the press and the public. But seating is limited. To register, click here.

For those of you nowhere near NYC, there’s a chance I may be live blogging part of it (wireless pending), so come back tomorrow for the scoop.

I’m taking off for the weekend soon and before I go, I wanted to leave you with the new video from the Women’s Media Center. Do check it out. It’s well done. I particularly like the creepy music and the sassy quotes interlaid with the medley of media clips.

Says Carol Jenkins,

“As our new video shows, the media’s sexism is not specific to a candidate or campaign. But the presence of a woman, front and center on the national political stage, has sent shockwaves through a media grappling with ongoing problems of diversity. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has cast a spotlight on the institutionalized sexism that The Women’s Media Center was founded in 2005 to combat, providing us with a unique moment to examine ourselves and the media we consume.”

Nice, WMC!

The second class of PWV is well underway, and already I miss being a part. So yesterday I sat in–ok, lurked–on a Progressive Women’s Voices conference call with Janus Adams, the Emmy Award-winning author/historian, publisher/producer, creator of BackPax children’s media. Janus herself was one of four children selected to end de facto segregation in New York in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. These days, in addition to hosting a talk show, she writes a weekly column, her latest one titled, “25 Books that Changed African-America–Book #4.” In case you’re wondering, Book 4 is Freedom’s Journal, a newspaper launched on March 16, 1827 by Samuel Cornish and John B. Russwurm. These two launched not only a newspaper, but the history of African-American journalism as well.

David Crary, an AP reporter I admire and a winner of the 2008 Council on Contemporary Families Media Award, had a piece up at Yahoo news last week called “Feminists Sharply Divided Between Clinton, Obama” that is one of the few truly thoughtful pieces on the divides in a MSM venue I’ve seen. Thank you, David, for being interested in the issues and not in the alleged fur and claws.

Four quick hits, thanks to Rebekah over at the Women’s Media Center, below. To subscribe to the WMC’s daily newsfeed–which I highly recommend for those looking for a way to keep up with women-focused news headlines–click here. (And next roundup I post, I promise to include links!)

Woman Gains Silver Star — And Removal From Combat
Washington Post: In Afghanistan as well as Iraq, female soldiers are often tasked to work in all-male combat units — not only for their skills but also for the culturally sensitive role of providing medical treatment for local women, as well as searching them and otherwise interacting with them. Such war-zone pragmatism is at odds with Army rules intended to bar women from units that engage in direct combat or collocate with combat forces.

Women As Catalysts For Change: New Organization Starts Micro-Lending Fund
Fairfield University Mirror: Nine students and their professor have direct micro-lending to women entrepreneurs a reality by creating the Sustainable Equity for Women (SEW) Fund. The SEW Fund lends money to female entrepreneurs in developing countries to aid their business ventures.

Iranian Feminist Faces Lashings, Jail
Australian News: Iran has handed a feminist a suspended sentence of 10 lashes and six months in prison, the Kargozaran newspaper has reported, in the fourth such punishment for a women’s rights activist in Iran within weeks.

The Folly of McCain-Care
The New Republic: In just the last few weeks, this issue has started to become a political liability for McCain, thanks mostly to Elizabeth Edwards, who–in addition to being a well-known cancer patient–is also a well-known policy wonk.

(Image cred)