Feminist Peace Network

We will be continuing to post reports on International Women’s Day as they come in this week, including reports of gatherings in Brazil, London, Los Angeles and New York. There has been little mainstream media coverage of International Women’s Day, the reports we have come from other bloggers and independent news sources. Carolyn Byerly, a professor at Howard University, has an excellent post on Women’s Voices that examines this issue. In a study of IWD coverage that she conducted 2 years ago with American University’s Danna L. Walker she found that,

“Among the four major national dailies (LA Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Washington Times), two major news magazines (Time and Newsweek), a major Spanish-language weekly (El Tiempo Latino), a major Black newspaper (Chicago Defender), and six broadcast news sources (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and FOX), that Walker and I examined, we found only 17 print stories and 3 broadcast programs (all on CNN).

Most of the print stories fell into four categories.

• International stories of women outside the US. One story, e.g., by the LA Times was about police crack-downs on Turkish women trying to celebrate IWD.
• Conflict-oriented domestic stories related to the activities of the Bush administration’s representatives at the Beijing+10 UN women’s conference going on in New York. Most of these focused on the administration’s efforts to place anti-abortion measures on the agenda of that week-long event, scheduled to coincide with IWD.
• Domestic feature stories about women in which IWD was used only as a convenient hook. One example was of a new woman chef at a local elite restaurant.
• Small announcements of local IWD activities (e.g., an event at a local college).

All of the broadcast coverage we found was on CNN and comprised several 15-50-second pieces about either First Lady Laura Bush or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaking about IWD, but always in relation to policies the Bush administration was sponsoring in other parts of the world. Ironically, neither woman has had any connection to the women’s movement (one wonders if reporters even cared who was speaking for women in this instance). Neither Mrs. Bush or Ms. Rice said anything about women in their own nation, even though there was much to say, both about what women were achieving and contributing, and what still keeps them second-class citizens.

One clear exception to these trends of ignoring IWD was found in the Spanish-language newspaper El Tiempo Latino, a Washington DC weekly owned by the Washington Post Company. Numerous short and long articles, accompanied by photos and placed on the front page of El Tiempo, celebrated women of varied social classes, nationalities, occupations and accomplishments.

A second exception was found in the feminist source, Women’s eNews, which circulated two stories related to IWD. One of them was an overview of the politics of the Beijing+10 meeting at the UN in New York; the other, a first-person account of publisher Rita Henley Jensen’s travels and observations of women’s status in Saudi Arabia. Though the first of these was conflict-oriented, it also offered in-depth examination of the meaning of the UN women’s meeting, and included a historical look at the abortion controversy in the US from different perspectives.”

Byerly and Walker’s research is something that should be followed up on in upcoming years.  In the meantime, FPN is proud to be an active part of the independent feminist media that is making sure that this important annual event is recorded.

One interesting note–I’ve had a Google Alert for International Women’s Day for several weeks.  Despite the fact that Feminist Peace Network has had numerous stories about IWD, they are not showing up on the alerts, although many of our stories on other issues can be found via Google.  I have no idea why this is happening, but it is an indication of how stories can be invisibilized even by webcrawlers…

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