A House of Lords committee has criticised the BBC for having too few female
news presenters and reporters. However, argues Neil Lyndon, there are
areas of the media where women exert near absolute monopolies
By
Neil Lyndon: Last week we heard again - for what felt like the hundred millionth time -
about the under-representation of women presenters and reporters in coverage
of news and current affairs on TV.
The House of Lords communications committee chided
the BBC, telling it to do better because of its "special status"
and its "dominance as a news provider".
The BBC protested that they'd been doing their best on this front for many
years but - after giving themselves a lacerating self-flagellation - they
promised to try even harder.
I am genuinely baffled. Do their Lordships actually watch BBC TV news? What
level of female representation would they deem acceptable? An absolute
monopoly? If you keep half an eye on the numbers of men and women
reporters/presenters on BBC TV news (I do), you can't fail to notice that
men are becoming, increasingly, the disappeared.
I would bet good money that female presenters actually outnumber males now on
the news department's payroll; but, even in senior reporting positions, it
is not uncommon to see an unbroken succession of women reporting from
war-zones, Presidential press conferences and economic forums.
On 8 November 2014, I noted on Twitter, "Presenter and every reporter,
including sports, female on BBC TV midday news. Weather presenter male."
The fetching young man who was showing his best side to the camera in front
of the weather map would no doubt have been described as "eye-candy"
by girl-power enthusiasts.
Feminists have been advancing an organised front on the media for more than 40 years. In the early 1970s, "Women in Journalism" became one of the earliest organisations to promote the career interests of ambitious women. It was very quickly followed by "Women in Television", "Women in Publishing", "Women in Advertising" and so on.
Many of the sisters who were banding together to push for appointments, promotions and cushier pensions under these banners had enjoyed their first experiences of collective action in organisations that were meant to advance the interests of the poor, such as the Claimants' Union.
In its earliest years, the women's movement had adopted explicitly Marxist lingo to support the cause of proletarian revolution. Progressively, however, those unselfish (if profoundly implausible and touchingly jejeune) concerns were shucked off in favour of a decidedly bourgeois movement, one of whose main purposes was to boost the career interests of decidedly middle-class ladies.
They have got their way in spades, not just at the BBC. No single interest group in our time has enriched and entrenched itself more successfully. Women are predominantly in power in many media organisations. If you trawl through the personnel of the top independent TV and radio production companies in the UK, you'll find women frequently outnumber men.
Outside of the electronic media, women already exert near absolute monopolies. Britain's leading book publishing houses are gynocentric from front to back and from top to bottom. Next time you're on a plane, run your eye down the masthead (list of production staff) of the in-flight magazine. You might not find a single man.
It's more than 20 years since a young guy who had just graduated from a media studies course told me that he was certain that his sex put him at a disadvantage in applying for jobs with the BBC (he went on to make award-winning films as an independent).
Not long later, a woman who was a senior executive at Gannett (US publishing giant) told me that women like her operated an unspoken code that put Ivy League white boys at the back of the queue for jobs.
To my certain knowledge, many women in senior positions in the media and PR have actively favoured women for appointments and promotions, justifying their sexist prejudices as some form of recompense or balancing for the past exclusions of women (as if boys born today share an ineradicable collective and personal guilt for those alleged and deeply questionable crimes).
At the same time, men have been falling over themselves for almost half a century to apologise for being men and rush to help women and marginalise themselves.
A few years ago, I was in a public debate with a well-known TV executive who indignantly declared "In 1971, there was not one female film editor at London Weekend Television [where he was then working]". He presented that fact as if, in itself, it shone a searchlight on a monolithic male resistance to employing women. "So what sex were the people who then started employing female film editors?" I asked. "Why, er, men, of course," he stammered. QED, comrade.
So long as neither sex is being favoured at the expense of the other, I couldn't give a monkey's whether a report on the price of oil is presented by a reporter in a skirt or trousers, and the same goes for a report on Man U v Liverpool. It does more than slightly irk me, however, that their Lordships went on from fretting hen-headedly about women in news TV to make fatuous observations about men being interviewed as experts more often than women in news programmes, "despite the fact," as the committee observes with devastating originality, "that women make up just over half the population".
Yeah, right. And have you observed through your wigs, my Lords, that the half of the population of which you speak exerts a near absolute monopoly of discussion over a wide range of subjects which are of vital personal and social interest to men? Did you count up how many times males were asked to discuss their personal experiences of divorce, child-rearing or education? Did anyone examine how many times men were interviewed on TV as experts on, say, domestic violence, rape or sexual abuse?
On all of those essential issues the routine habit of the mainstream media is to turn to women for opinion and commentary, both as experts and as sources of personal stories. Men, increasingly, don't get a look in.
Source
Feminists have been advancing an organised front on the media for more than 40 years. In the early 1970s, "Women in Journalism" became one of the earliest organisations to promote the career interests of ambitious women. It was very quickly followed by "Women in Television", "Women in Publishing", "Women in Advertising" and so on.
Many of the sisters who were banding together to push for appointments, promotions and cushier pensions under these banners had enjoyed their first experiences of collective action in organisations that were meant to advance the interests of the poor, such as the Claimants' Union.
In its earliest years, the women's movement had adopted explicitly Marxist lingo to support the cause of proletarian revolution. Progressively, however, those unselfish (if profoundly implausible and touchingly jejeune) concerns were shucked off in favour of a decidedly bourgeois movement, one of whose main purposes was to boost the career interests of decidedly middle-class ladies.
They have got their way in spades, not just at the BBC. No single interest group in our time has enriched and entrenched itself more successfully. Women are predominantly in power in many media organisations. If you trawl through the personnel of the top independent TV and radio production companies in the UK, you'll find women frequently outnumber men.
Outside of the electronic media, women already exert near absolute monopolies. Britain's leading book publishing houses are gynocentric from front to back and from top to bottom. Next time you're on a plane, run your eye down the masthead (list of production staff) of the in-flight magazine. You might not find a single man.
It's more than 20 years since a young guy who had just graduated from a media studies course told me that he was certain that his sex put him at a disadvantage in applying for jobs with the BBC (he went on to make award-winning films as an independent).
Not long later, a woman who was a senior executive at Gannett (US publishing giant) told me that women like her operated an unspoken code that put Ivy League white boys at the back of the queue for jobs.
To my certain knowledge, many women in senior positions in the media and PR have actively favoured women for appointments and promotions, justifying their sexist prejudices as some form of recompense or balancing for the past exclusions of women (as if boys born today share an ineradicable collective and personal guilt for those alleged and deeply questionable crimes).
At the same time, men have been falling over themselves for almost half a century to apologise for being men and rush to help women and marginalise themselves.
A few years ago, I was in a public debate with a well-known TV executive who indignantly declared "In 1971, there was not one female film editor at London Weekend Television [where he was then working]". He presented that fact as if, in itself, it shone a searchlight on a monolithic male resistance to employing women. "So what sex were the people who then started employing female film editors?" I asked. "Why, er, men, of course," he stammered. QED, comrade.
So long as neither sex is being favoured at the expense of the other, I couldn't give a monkey's whether a report on the price of oil is presented by a reporter in a skirt or trousers, and the same goes for a report on Man U v Liverpool. It does more than slightly irk me, however, that their Lordships went on from fretting hen-headedly about women in news TV to make fatuous observations about men being interviewed as experts more often than women in news programmes, "despite the fact," as the committee observes with devastating originality, "that women make up just over half the population".
Yeah, right. And have you observed through your wigs, my Lords, that the half of the population of which you speak exerts a near absolute monopoly of discussion over a wide range of subjects which are of vital personal and social interest to men? Did you count up how many times males were asked to discuss their personal experiences of divorce, child-rearing or education? Did anyone examine how many times men were interviewed on TV as experts on, say, domestic violence, rape or sexual abuse?
On all of those essential issues the routine habit of the mainstream media is to turn to women for opinion and commentary, both as experts and as sources of personal stories. Men, increasingly, don't get a look in.
Source
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