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A book on gender reporting examines how women often Objectivity is the ideal all journalists strive for. We believe that our training equips us to distance ourselves as we report on a whole range of situations and comment on everything from films to fires to terrorism. Yet, scratch any journalist and you will soon discover that this objectivity is precisely that – a desirable norm that cannot be easily attained. Only the more honest will admit that there can never be anything like "objective" journalism and that everything that we write is ultimately mediated by our own hidden or open biases. The choices we make in terms of what we include and what we leave out, the choices we make about what we emphasise, the choices we make about who we speak to and those we ignore, the choices we make about the stories we follow through and those we drop – all these are not dictated by some absolute or objective norms. Sometimes, they are dictated by the orientation of our particular publication or media organisation. But more often than not, journalists subliminally make their own choices.
And thereby hangs the tale of gender-sensitivity. Why should we write an entire book on gender-sensitive reporting? Why do journalists need to read this? Why are we suggesting that there is a slant that is needed, that would not make journalists more biased than they already are but would perhaps make them more balanced and would help them to tell that part of the story that they otherwise overlook? `85 When Ammu Joseph and I researched the coverage of women’s issues in the media in the 1980s for our book Whose News? The Media and Women’s Issues (Sage, 1994/2006), we could see why certain of the issues we studied received more attention from the media than others. It was clear to us that there was an unwritten hierarchy of news. If women’s concerns fitted into the hierarchy, then they received attention. Otherwise, they were relegated to the features sections. We had argued then that what was needed was not just more attention, and fairer coverage, of what might be called "women’s issues", but the "feminisation" of news. We suggested that all news coverage had a women’s angle to it and this had to be integrated into news reporting. At that time, we articulated this specifically in terms of women’s perspective and not in the larger gender perspective that has emerged over time. So, what we are suggesting here, as a step beyond what was suggested in Whose News? is the "gender-isation" of journalism if you will, something that applies to reporting, editing and feature writing. So, where and when does the "gendered lens" fit? At all times, in all kinds of reporting, or only when you cover an issue relating to women alone? We suggest that a gendered lens allows you to gain deeper insight into all issues that we cover as journalists because events, policies, politics, business etc impact men and women differently, just as they do the poor and the rich. Hence, understanding what determines the difference can help us to see dimensions of a story that would otherwise be overlooked. Take a mundane subject like agriculture, covered routinely by those assigned the Agriculture Ministry at the Centre, or by reporters sent out to cover a drought or a massive crop failure. Can there be a gender dimension to this? Apparently, there can, as women do over 60 per cent of the agricultural work. Hence, policies and programmes, as well as disasters, have a specific impact on women that might be missed out if we assume, as most do, that the farmer is usually a man. Or take business. The business pages of most major newspapers are monochromatic – they depict men in suits from the corporate sector, they carry stories about men as achievers – or sometimes as crooks – and they analyse business and the economy as if women do not exist. Yet, millions of women are involved in a variety of formal and informal businesses – from home-based work to export, IT, engineering and more. If they are featured, they appear in the magazine sections or features sections as exceptions to the rule. Their work, their problems as businesswomen or as women professionals, the difficulties they face accessing finance, the discrimination they face at work, the jobs they are denied by virtue of being women or their achievements despite all that is ranged against them are rarely accorded the same status as that of men. In fact, women are largely invisible from business pages. What contributes to this invisibility? It is not necessarily deliberate. It happens because journalists do not understand how patriarchal systems work, how they determine what women can and cannot do, and how patriarchy reduces the value of women’s work to such an extent that it appears to have no value at all. This deliberate downgrading of women’s work results in it not being acknowledged as significant, or important, and, therefore, ignored by the media. It is precisely because we want to take away this curtain of invisibility that we believe journalists need to understand what is by meant by terms like "gender" or "patriarchy". Does gender-sensitivity apply only to feature writing? Can it apply to the way news is covered, to the sense conveyed in headlines, to the choice of photographs used, to what news story is followed through and which is dropped, to the choice of people quoted in stories? We believe that such a perspective is not a stressful, artificial add-on, something that you do only if you have a boss who insists, or if as a student you are asked to do an exercise that incorporates gender-sensitivity. Our own experience over several decades as journalists has taught us that this is how you can be a more effective, credible and serious journalist. To illustrate this further`85 the book`85 looks specifically at areas that journalists have to cover – such as sexual assault, including rape and molestation cases, environmental issues, such as the impact of deforestation or climate change. How does one cover a subject like sanitation by incorporating a gender angle, is there something different about the way we look at health from this angle and do disasters and conflicts impact men and women in the same way? Also, is there more to gender in a business story or a political story than mentioning the exceptional women who are now featured all the time in the media? These are questions we asked as we thought of some of these subjects and explored how they could be covered in greater depth if the additional factor of gender was woven in. — WFS (Excerpts from Missing:
Half the
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