By: Valerie Tonn
As a current journalism major and public relations concentration, I have had experience writing feature articles, press releases, and news articles. With these documents, comes the need to quote individuals in order to strengthen your writing. This credible individual must be related to the document, for example if it is an article about a university professor whom has experience working for a top company, then you might choose to get a quote from a student who has had the professor, or an employee who works at that company.
Within the news industry currently, their is a lack of equity in representation, with women and minorities utilized as credible sources, guests, and with their own platforms to speak (Lind, 2023). For example, men are often utilzed as sources for women related issues like abortion and reproductive healthcare (Lind, 2023). A study has even found that a higher amount of women then men, are dying and fighting in wars, but yet they aren’t cited as private citizens or authority figures and given the opportunity to report on war issues (Lind, 2023). Additonally, guest on Sunday Morning news are primarily men, with women only consisting of 13.5 percent (Lind, 2023). Women representation though can be broken into segments, as white women are given more coverage then minority women, as seen when women go missing, the coverage for white women is significantly higher (Lind, 2023).
Now what can we do about this misrepresentation? Well working on initiatives like the 50:50 ratio that news companies like BBC have in order to fight gender disparity and increase women representation to be equal to that of men (Rattan et al., 2019). Doing things like looking at what you can do yourself, looking at the data within your company on women representation, and believing that others when given the opportunity to change will do so (Rattan et al., 2019). This method has allowed for BBC to have 500 of its branches utilizing the 50:50 method along with 20 media partners (Rattan et al., 2019). With persistence society can alleviate some of the gap between men and women, and with an understanding of the extra disparities minorities face outside of this gender war (Rattan et al., 2019).
References:
Lind, R. (2023). Race/Gender/Class/Media: Considering diversity across
audiences, content, and producers, 5th edition. New York, NY: Routledge
Rattan, A., Chilazi, S., Georgeac, O., & Bohnet, I. (2019, July 8). Tackling the underrepresentation of women in media. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/06/tackling-the-underrepresentation-of-women-in-media
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