News values
the storm, but also reveals the geographical and
cultural breadth of women in media.
Tsering Woeser, in 2010 awarded the prize for
her reporting of events and conditions in Tibet,
stated in her acceptance speech that she saw
herself as a ‘weapon of the powerless’ and that
she had suff ered on their behalf at the hands of
the authorities. Other winners have worked in
countries dangerous for independent-minded
women and dangerous for the trade of journal-
ism: freelancer Vicky Ntetema reporting on
the persecution of albinos in Tanzania; Jila
Baniyaghoob, reporter and website editor,
beaten, arrested and imprisoned in Iran; Belarus
reporter Iryna Khalip, arrested, beaten and
subjected to all-night interrogation; Agnes Tailo,
human rights reporter in Cameroon, abducted,
beaten and left for dead in a ravine.
Among Western winners of the Courage in
Journalism award is Christian Science Monitor
reporter Jill Carroll of the US, abducted in 2006
while reporting in Baghdad and kept prisoner for
eighty-two days. Indeed, if ever there was a grim
test of the equality of the sexes in a profession (in
the front line, not in organizational hierarchies)
it is demonstrated by the fact that women jour-
nalists receive no ‘special treatment’ by those
who punish journalists officially or covertly.
Russian journalist and outspoken critic of
government Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead
in 2006 in the lift of her apartment block, and
TV journalist Olga Kotovskaya ‘fell’ to her death
from a fourteenth-storey building in Kaliningrad
in 2009, only months after freelancer Anastasia
Buburova was shot dead on a Moscow street.
As far as the UK is concerned, Brian McNair
was already writing in 1999, in News and Journal-
ism in the UK (Sage), that ‘as a new generation of
women enters the profession from university ...
young female journalists ... actually appear to be
doing better than men of the same age’. McNair
is of the opinion that while sexism is far from
eradicated, it ‘appears to be on the retreat, with
consequences not just for the gender structure
of the profession but the form and content of
journalism’.
▶Penny Colman, Where the Action Was: Women War
Correspondents in World War II (Random House,
2002); Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner and Carole
Fleming, Women and Journalism (Routledge, 2004).
News values According to Harold Evans, former
editor of the UK Sunday Times and Th e Times, in
his book Th e Practice of Journalism (Heinemann,
1963), ‘news is people’. Long-time journalist and
later, politician, Denis MacShane in Using the
Media (Pluto Press, 1979) sums up what jour-expectations of femininity and at the same time
are expected to meet criteria of professional-
ism.’ While there is no evidence that women
constitute a different group of professionals
from their male colleagues, there were diff er-
ences in the topics and issues that women were
selected to cover.
Sue Curry Jansen in ‘Beaches without bases:
the gender order’ published in Invisible Crises:
What Conglomerate Control of the Media
Means for America and the World (Westview
Press, 1996), edited by George Gerbner, Hamid
Mowlana and Herbert I. Schiller, states that
conditions and prospects for women are equally
disadvantaged in the United States. For Jansen,
the news generally, and international news
in particular, needs to be viewed through the
‘prism of gender’.
She talks of an institutionalized bias towards
maleness: ‘In the United States men write most
of the front-page newspaper stories. Th ey are
the subject of most of those stories – 85 per cent
of the references and 66 per cent of the photos
in 1993. Th ey also dominate electronic media,
accounting for 86 per cent of the correspondents
and 75 per cent of the sources for US network
television evening programmes.’
In international news coverage, ‘women not
only are marginal but also normally absent’.
Jansen says, ‘Under the present global gender
order, policymakers and journalists fi nd it more
manly to deal with guns, missiles, and violent
confl icts than with matters like female infanti-
cide in China’ or ‘the increased trade in children
in the sex markets of Manila and Bangkok in the
wake of the AIDS epidemic ...’
Jansen’s views received support from data
published in April 1997 by the UK Fawcett
Society. During a week’s monitoring of election
coverage during main news bulletins on the
BBC, ITN and Channel 4, it was found that 80
per cent of news gathering and presentation was
carried out by male journalists; and the number
of women featured as spokespersons in the
news was similarly in a minority. Of twenty-six
government offi cials asked for their views, none
was a woman.
Th e picture in the twenty-fi rst century so far
has arguably improved, at least in terms of the
number of women journalists who work in the
most dangerous places on earth to report war,
atrocity, famine and persecution. A glance at
the International Women’s Media Foundation
(IWMF) list of winners of the Courage in Jour-
nalism awards not only illustrates how women
journalists and photographers work in the eye of