of coverage in South Africa (Duncan 2013b). This problem is not only endemic to South Africa, but in most regions of the world.
In 2014 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released its report, ‘World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development’, which highlighted the global extent of the matter. Women constitute less than a quarter (24 per cent) of the persons heard or represented in traditional news media, but, even worse, women comprise only a fifth of authoritative news voices quoted in the news (20 per cent of experts and 19 per cent as spokespersons). News outlets looking for expert comment or interviewees on matters of societal, legal, political or economic importance will consult a man about 81 per cent of the time (UNESCO 2014). Women working in the media sector, who are best placed to increase the gendered diversity of news media reporting, are often shifted to ‘soft news’ beats, relegated to covering topics traditionally considered to be more feminine, such as celebrity gossip or fashion news, while their male colleagues report on the important stuff, such as politics and the economy.
In 2018, I was asked to assist with the editorial work on the more recent 2018 edition of the UNESCO World Trends report. While studying the findings compiled for each of the six world regions, I discovered how the position of women in the media sector and their levels of representation had not only stagnated rather than improved since 2014, but in some regions and contexts had actually regressed (UNESCO 2018).
I was later asked to attend the UNESCO World Press Freedom Day Conference held in Accra, Ghana, and speak to the contents of the 2018 report. While the UNESCO report covers a range of topics, including media freedom, independence, diversity and the safety of journalists around the world, it was the stagnation and in some places the regression of women’s positions in the media that most startled me. Here we are, talking about approximately 52 per cent of all peoples, in the twenty-first century, and after decades-long myriad efforts by global, multilateral and non-governmental organisations to curb the under-representation of women in the news, as well as support the promotion of women media workers, but all the while very little appears to have changed. Women journalists are still predominantly paid less than men. Only one in four media decision-makers are women, one in five experts interviewed are women, and one in three reporters are women – and these will likely not be assigned to ‘hard news’ coverage (UNESCO 2018). On this, I said:
Women’s potential for the advancement of media diversity and pluralism is more nuanced and multi-layered than simply promoting more women to senior management level within media organisations. The broader representation of women, by women, stands to not only increase media profits (by behaving more inclusively toward more of the audience) but improve the overall health of the media ecology and markets. Women do not write about the world in the same way as men, but that does not mean that the only things that they have something to say about are lifestyle issues like fashion or celebrity gossip. Women think, feel, know, give-a-damn, and write, about things like politics, corruption, war, and the law just as well as men do – albeit and thankfully, quite differently from them (Reid 2018b).
Some of the members of the audience smiled. Most of the audience, and especially the women present, clapped. The collection of men in the audience, who visibly frowned, grunted with disapproval and/or shook their heads, did not escape my notice.
It would be easy to assume that these global figures are skewed mostly by the inclusion of numbers from media systems that operate in countries that are undemocratic or authoritarian regimes. But, the statistics for women’s inclusion in the media is only a few percentage points higher in most so-called democratic countries. A stark reminder that we still have a long way to go in encouraging the naturalisation and societal acceptance of a broader representation of women’s voice(s) in the dominant media surfaced recently in the United Kingdom. On 3 September 2018, the BBC broadcast the first episode of its new lunchtime political discussion programme, Politics Live. The show is anchored by a woman, Jo Coburn. The panel was comprised of two members of parliament, the BBC’s political editor, The Guardian’s joint political editor and a journalist from the Daily Telegraph. That is an admirable collection of persons for a panel, the purpose of which is to discuss politics. As luck would have it, all of the invited panellists for that day also happened to be women.
The social media backlash from men was immediate. Male social media users accused the panel of being a stunt, saying that the show was gimmicky, too politically correct and compared it to a UK daytime celebrity news and lifestyle talk show called Loose Women. The Politics Live editor, Rob Burley, publically defended the fact that the panel featured five women in a manner he would have undoubtedly not had to do if it had featured five men (Lyons 2018). Still, even today, dominant societal discourses are so deeply imbued with the patriarchal naturalisation of male voice that a mere instance of the representation of women’s voice(s) is considered offensive.
Another often misrepresented collection of voice(s) is public protestors. A study conducted by academics at the University of Cape Town (Wasserman, Bosch and Chuma 2018) examined the media’s coverage of community protest action in South Africa, and explored the views of the activists involved in arranging the protests.
Tellingly, the 2018 study found that while journalists ‘approached the protests from the conventional “news values” perspective which they considered natural, activists felt that the mainstream media somehow short-changed them and their causes by either misrepresenting them or highlighting the voices of authorities and other “official” sources while at the same time marginalising ordinary citizens’ voices’ (Wasserman, Bosch and Chuma 2018: 379).
In the case of South African activists, the overwhelming sentiment was that while the media played an important role in covering the protests and keeping them on the public agenda, the manner of coverage was ‘top-down’ in that it privileged elite voices and frames of reference while marginalising the ordinary citizens on the ground. While some activists viewed the media as an essential part of modern politics, others said that the media did not speak to the audiences they were trying to reach, so in these instances, it was considered marginal (Wasserman, Bosch and Chuma 2018: 380).
Perhaps the most iconic example of the dominant media’s misrepresentation of the stories of the poor in post-1994 South Africa surfaced with the reportage of the Marikana massacre. On 12 August 2012, a large group of miners, who had been striking for a period of six days, gathered together to protest their low wages on an open patch of arid land close to the Lonmin mine near the town of Rustenburg. After a tense stand-off between the miners and the police, the miners began to disperse. At that moment, the South African Police Service (SAPS) opened fire on the dispersing protestors, shooting 112 of them, wounding 78 and killing 34. What made the massacre more appalling was that this was not a simple case of spontaneous panic on the part of the police officers present. Initial news media reports gave a shocked South African public the impression that the police had opened fire in panic, perhaps because they believed that their own lives were in danger from a group of slowly approaching miners, and, by the time a ceasefire had been called and obeyed, 112 protestors had unfortunately been shot. The official SAPS version of events maintained that the police officers on the scene acted in self-defence.
But this is not what really happened. What really happened is much more horrifying. The first volley of gunfire, and the only shooting incident initially reported in the news, downed only a small group of miners. The remainder of the 112 people shot were thereafter quite literally hunted down by SAPS officers as they tried to run away, many of them shot in the back. This second and brutal round of killings was not reported by the press.
It was an academic, It was an academic (not a journalist), Peter Alexander, who first alerted us to the full extent, nature and character of the police killings on that day. He and his team of researchers worked the scene, recorded evidence and collected eyewitness accounts (Alexander et al. 2012). Finally, almost a month after the massacre, an independent journalist, Greg Marinovich (2012), writing for the independent publication Daily Maverick, reported on the second killing sites where many
