Who makes the news? Promoting gender equality in and through the news media

Abstract

Women in bikinis posing on a beach, heart attacks and snoring. What’s the connection? Well, to most of us none. Yet one Turkish television news report on 1 February 2000 deemed it appropriate to illustrate a serious story on scientific research into the link between heart attacks and snoring in women with footage of scantily clad women posing on a beach! It is stories like these that have come under the microscope in three international media monitoring projects over the last 10 years. When the first Global Media Monitoring Project (or GMMP as it has come to be known) was conducted in 1995, few of those involved could have imagined that it would develop in the way that it went on to do. Ten years later, with the third such project now complete, the enormous significance of this international initiative is clear. These three projects constitute the most extensive global research of gender in news media ever undertaken and as such they provide an enlightening example of the importance of media monitoring as a tool for change.