I am always conscious of the danger of what I call ‘disaster porn’ reporting. It’s the foreign correspondent equivalent of what Duncan Campbell in his analysis of British crime/court reporting calls “marmalade droppers” – stories that shock the reader or viewer over the breakfast table. Then it’s over and you’ve had your fix of prurient guilt.

There is a challenge there in how to cover a story. I found myself challenged when I did the South Africa story last year on ‘corrective rape’ – with gangs targeting lesbian women. Was it patronising? Was it racist, as some men I met suggested, to go on about African men and rape? But the fact was, the story was not being covered in South Africa and the women’s group campaigners were so pleased to have someone keen to cover the issue.

The piece was focused on what the women themselves were doing. I met a network TV reporter outside the Johannesburg high court on my first day’s filming about a protest over delays to rape trials, who told me editors weren’t interested in the rape of some lesbian township women because there’s so much violent crime in South Africa already. I’m fascinated by how the poorest always get neglected and I was able to make that part of the story. The day after it ran the South African High Commission in London rang up to ask for a transcript. Some South African bloggers also picked up on the embarrassment for the authorities (whose complacency was implicated in the report) as I’d deliberately linked the story to the tourist drive for the upcoming football World Cup finals.

Crucially you need time – not two minutes – to give all that context. I had nearly seven minutes. And I do feel while there are some terrific foreign correspondents, (the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen and C4’s Jonathan Miller spring to mind) there are still far too many ignorant ones who go in with an arrogant attitude and little empathy. Some of the accounts I’ve heard from producers over the years about the insensitive questions or attitudes to traumatised people are really shocking.

I actually think, gender balance is not a problem with our foreign coverage. It’s not just that Lindsey Hilsum and I report (incidentally, most of our foreign producers are female). At most broadcasters there are a few chaps who are clearly obsessed with military hardware, but compared to the 1990 Gulf War, I think we’ve all come a long way. Coverage of the troops in Afghanistan nowadays is fascinating for how it combines the military with the civilian, and the diplomatic and political points of view.

As I said at the panel discussion, there’s a real reluctance by editors and some presenters (almost exclusively male) to run domestic stories about women as victims of crime. A refusal to join the dots on the failures of the criminal justice system. I strongly advocate not linking stories to International Women’s Day, because they’re then regarded as droppable ‘diary’ items. A story is a story in its own right, and that’s the way to improve coverage, not to seek out a once-a-year tag that people can then ignore.

In foreign news I would say we at Channel 4 News seek out strong stories. More broadly I would say women’s magazines probably do more to focus on women abroad as victims than the traditional news media. We do a discussion maybe once a year about women/workplace issues. The rest of the year it’s clearly not on the editorial agenda! And interestingly they once ran what I certainly felt was an inappropriately lighthearted interview about prostitution with a male escort. A lot of viewers complained, but the (all male) editors clearly hadn’t thought it would be offensive.

Health and education – two other issues that are gender neutral, but actually interest and often have a special female focus – are strikingly absent from our regular coverage. Our health correspondent is currently on maternity leave, which is part of the picture. I think it’s a problem more broadly in British journalism, but it’s odd, because these are issues that really interest the public and are big political battlegrounds which more Westminister-obsessed editors should appreciate.

This is also a question about ‘guestbooking’ interviewees and who we speak to. There is a problem when senior producers at major broadcasters turn too often and too quickly to the familiar old faces – especially politicians and political commentators. I make a huge effort, and I know our mostly female full-time guestbooking producers do too, to try and expand our contacts book and get more diverse guests – not just female. But it’s a grind and it’s frustrating when good suggestions are ignored for the quick familiar ‘get’.  Having said that, once a good new face is used, they’re quickly picked up and used a lot by several broadcasters. Yasmin Alibai-Brown’s broadcast career began that way. I remember interviewing her at Newsnight back in 1993!

But the other question is about what stories we cover. Never mind specifically female union reps, British broadcasting does relatively little on a whole load of stories and therefore jobs: union issues (except the black and white of say the British Airways strike) , manufacturing and indepth science reporting in particular. If we did more on these issues, we’d inevitably get more women in more jobs on air.

Commenting on feminism and fashion and the recent story about Cambridge female undergrads’ scantily clad photos, Berry commented that:

“Girls can be highly intelligent and interested in being seen to be attractive – the two aren’t mutually exclusive”

For starters, not really a problem. Perhaps the idea of ‘being seen to be attractive’ is problematic (to me this suggest pampering to the rest of society’s/men’s version of what this means) but I do support the move away from the ‘blonde-bimbo’ vs ‘ugly geek’ dichotomy.

And then Berry claims:

“We must resist the impulse to judge women, to judge them harshly and judge them narrowly”

Lovely. Again, an idea I can get my head around.

But then when an article in The Guardian titled Girls should be ‘realistic’ about careers and motherhood – schools group head appears, the plot thickens…

Teenage girls need to be taught a heavy dose of realism – that it may not be possible to be a perfect mother and a career woman, the president of the Girls’ Schools Association (GSA) will say next week.

Berry is now implying that girls need to be realistic about their futures. That there is ‘nothing wrong’ with mothers not working once they have children. Firstly, what kind of empowering message is that to young women? That they can be all they want to be but will have to re-think all that once they think about starting a family? Why are we telling girls to be ‘realistic’? Why are we accepting that as the reality that women are often placed into positions in which they are pushed back into the private sphere once they give birth? Instead of telling the generation of tomorrow to wise-up about the way the world is, how about educating them on how to change that world?

And you know that what lies beneath this is a discourse of ‘bad working mothers’. Considering we weren’t meant to be judging women for their choices Berry…

Laura

Links to the two articles:

Fashion not a betrayal of feminist ideals
Girls should be realistic about motherhood and careers

Derek from Kent in the comments seems to have also picked up on the underlining messages promoted in this piece…

This article proves yet again that women should be AT HOME, not at work. It would solve the unemployment crisis instantly. Also a man will be happier at work knowing that there is a nice hot meal waiting for him when he gets home.

…and to think all we need to do to solve unemployment is to get women back into the home. Now why didn’t we think of that?

Only in The Daily Mail.

Laura

This year is the centenary of the Girl Guides. I was a Brownie but never made it as far as the Girl Guides (the association seemed at odds with my increasing desire to become a rock star). I did love being a Brownie though and I think part of this was because it challenged preconceptions of what it meant to be a ‘little girl’. At times yes, we indulged in activities and chores deemed female but there was a balance as we also were encouraged to take part in things that perhaps in our homes, or at school, would be seen as boyish (such as orienteering, camping, climbing trees). Brownies went well with my Enid Blyton world I guess, my nostalgic side sighs at the moves to modernise the association.

Where you a Brownie or Girl Guide? What are your thoughts?

Laura

For more on the Girls Guides Centenary see here.

Recent newspaper coverage at:
The Daily Express
The Guardian
The Independent
The Telegraph

While traipsing through the Times website I came across two stories about men, one was featured in the women’s section and the other firmly placed in the mens.

The first article, Same sex adoption: our new life as Dad and Daddy, is just a really wonderful article written by one of said Dad’s. The article follows their adapting to life with a new, it bursts with love and pride and all these good things. But it’s in the women’s section. A story about two men, about fatherhood, is deemed of no interest to men? Or is it simply that a story about families is of better interest to a female readership? It just seems like a missed trick to show the diversity of men, that it’s not all cars, sport, fashion…

The second article, We Can’t Help Staring!, is not only total gender stereotyped drivel that hopes to firmly place men in their place as misogynist, idiot sex droids, but is illustrated with the ill-famed image of Obama supposedly checking out a young ladies arse… which, you know, he wasn’t

It would seem the Times are pretty sure how they want their men, and that is entirely tied up in tired old stereotypes that forge the tired old idea of women, the occasional nags who should know how to please all men or suffer lonliness and ridicule.

Charlotte