Newspaper reports on women tend to focus on successful or prominent women rather than ‘ordinary’ people.
This was the main funding from a report published recently.
The Media Monitoring Project researched newspapers in South Africa as part of its Women’s Day campaign to get the media to show their support for women by focusing not only on the prominent women in government and business, but especially on ‘ordinary’ women and their roles in effecting social change. This includes women who successfully entered the workforce in previously male dominated environments, as women were, and to some extent still are, excluded from some of these workplaces.
The report stated that the media tended to continue in the ways of the past and concentrated on prominent women and did not cover ‘normal women’ engaging in acts to change society.
Women’s Day on 9 August 2007 was a national day for South Africa and so not marked in Swaziland. However, a study of the Swazi Press would reveal that things are not much different in the kingdom.
To see whether the newspapers in Swaziland were any different to those in South Africa I surveyed a week’s worth of papers (13 – 19 August 2007).
The first thing I noticed was how few reports and articles that had women as central characters were published at all. In the Swazi Observer I counted 12 over the entire week and in the Times of Swaziland I counted only eight. There were three in the Weekend Observer and one each in the Swazi News (published Saturday) and the Times Sunday.
In the Observer only four of the stories involved ‘ordinary’ women of which two concerned women in rural community development projects. One was about women receiving a donation for HIV work and the final story involved a court case.
The stories involving ‘prominent’ people in the Observer included stories about the king’s wives, finalists in the Business Women of the Year Award (all from urban companies as far as I could tell), the Deputy Prime Minister (a woman) urging women to take a lead in development and the Minister of Tourism (also a woman) who was nominated for an ‘achievement’ award.
In the Times, all but one of the stories were about ‘ordinary’ people, but most were about women who had suffered misfortune, for example as victims or perpetrators of crime. The only ‘prominent’ story was about the Business Woman of the Year nominations.
The Weekend Observer had three stories, which concentrated on women and all were about prominent women (a princess, the director of Women and Law of South Africa and the chief executive officer (ceo) of the Observer group of newspapers). The Observer ceo was reported saying that women in Swaziland are still marginalized. The irony of her statement is there for all to see when you consider how little her own newspapers do to represent women in their pages.
The Swazi News only had one story about a woman and this was about a US singing star who was due to tour South Africa.
The Times Sunday only had one story that featured a woman and this was about an ‘ordinary’ woman who witnessed a shooting.
These statistics should make worrying reading for the editors of Swaziland’s newspapers. What they show is that hardly any stories about women (prominent or ordinary) get into their papers.
Last week the results of the 2007 Swaziland population census revealed that there are more females than males living in Swaziland. That’s an awful lot of people being ignored by the newspapers.
Also, research by Gender Links into what people in Swaziland said they wanted to see in their newspapers has revealed they want to see more stories about women.
This leads me to conclude that if Swaziland’s newspapers want to have healthy sales figures editors need to rethink their news agenda very quickly.
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