The Women's Media Center: Making Women Visible and Powerful in the Media (Repost)

You can reach the WMC website by clicking here.

This is a great article that was produced by the WMC that (despite
having a lot of words) has a lot of great statistics and graphs (read: pictures)
that depict the incongruencies of women in media.
I highly recommend at least skimming through it.

Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, and Robin Morgan founded the Women’s Media Center in 2005¹. The WMC is a non-profit progressive organization that promotes the visibility and power of women in the media. The WMC was started as a reaction to the fact that there is a severe under- and misrepresentation of women in all sectors of mainstream media². The group’s mission is to monitor the media, making sure that women are being equally represented on all platforms. The WMC also produces their own content and trains girls and women to be strong players in the media industry.

In the WMC, women make themselves the head players, which means that they get to reshape the pedagogical influence that mainstream media has on the public. Women take their place as the “namers,”³ which in other words means that they take ownership of the circumstances of our world; they decide what to name an occasion or a new trend. They decide how a story will be presented and, essentially, what information the public will have easy access to (thankfully, the WMC provides a wide array of information that would not usually be covered by mainstream broadcasting). Overall, it can be agreed that the Women’s Media Center is a necessary media outlet that allows individuals to gain honest, thought provoking information from an alternative news source.

As bell hooks stated in “Making Movie Magic,” “Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world.” (hooks 6). This is precisely what the WMC allows its participants to do; it gives people everywhere the opportunity to see their world represented in different ways, spoken about in different contexts, and most importantly, it allows its participants to take on a different role rather than just a media consumer. This is in opposition to what mainstream news does. 

Conglomerates pay the mainstream news networks to have corporate insights and beliefs portrayed as unbiased, honest information. They do not give the public an option to hear the full story because they only support the information that they agree with. Though I am sure that the majority of broadcasters would support unbiased journalism, they also need a job and they cannot report the news the way that they deem honest because they risk offending the people who own the network. This is the main reason that women have such little place in mainstream news. Those in charge of the corporations (rich men) not only push their female counterpart’s interests to the side, but also present these women as the “sophisticated version” of scantily clad car models, except instead of cars they sell the influence of corporations.

Corporations take reporters such as Robin Mead from a 

news reporter and turn her into a salesperson.

This is a major concern that the WMC sought to address when they first started operating. Even from a visual standpoint, the women in charge of the WMC do not look the same as the mainstream news anchors.

Julie Burton (President of the WMC)

Michelle Kinsey Bruns (Online Manager)

This is a conscious effort to create equal representation of everyone and everything in the media. Alternative news sources, such as the WMC, usually do not put physical attractiveness at the forefront of their public influence. One shouldn't listen to the news simply because there is a bubbly woman wearing a lot of makeup and hairspray delivering it to you. The women of the WMC, as well as women of other alternative news sources, probably do not want to be known for being the prettiest women in the industry. They want to be known for their journalistic integrity and their efforts to create a level playing field for women in media.

The WMC enables women to become the authors and auteurs of their reality (Humm 94). Women should be able to write about the world in a way that will present fairness to all, and in a way that does not objectify them as mainstream media does. Women are to be put in a place where they can direct happenings so that the public can understand the urgency of local, national, and international events. The reason that the WMC is so necessary is because it presents the perspective of the less represented half of the human population. By rounding up these women and giving them a platform to inform the public of important, yet understated, happenings in the world, everyone is able to get smarter about things they did not know before. The public can be confident that corporations aren’t manipulating the information they are being told. Consumers of the media do not have to make themselves ignorant by disregarding the news altogether, with the notion that all news is biased and owned by conglomerates. The public can now not only rely on this form of alternative media, but they can participate and identify in their news, as well.

Sources:

hooks, bell. "Making Movie Magic." Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies. 

Humm, Maggie. "Author/Auteur: Feminist Literary Theory and Feminist Film."Feminism and Film

Mitsu Klos, Diana. "The Status of Women in the U. S. Media 2013." The WMC (2013)

"Women's Media Center." Women's Media Center