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Why White Male Dominance of News Media Is So Persistent

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The Women’s Media Center’s recently released report on gender and race representation on major TV news programs is the latest danger sign that U.S. journalism is neglecting whole communities of people. For a nation on the cusp of becoming a white minority society, there is no excuse for men occupying more than two-thirds (68%) of the guest spots, and white people comprising nearly three-fourths (73%) of all guests and commentators on the most popular Sunday news programs.

As the WMC study emphasizes, inclusion matters on these high-profile programs. Diversity is not just about replacing white male faces with female, Black, and brown ones, but rather assuring that questions and issues of interest to those constituencies are part of national discussions on current affairs. The points and perspectives raised on these programs help set the agenda for other journalists and political leaders, and the guests who raise them become viewed as legitimate spokespeople in the news environment. Their absence contributes to omission of information about challenges these constituencies face, and to the silence of those who can speak most knowledgably about them.

WMC’s findings confirm many years of research in this area. More than 40 years ago, sociologist Gaye Tuchman declared that the absence and distortion of information about women in U.S. news was nothing short of “a symbolic annihilation of women.” Tuchman’s research that led to this bold critique has been replicated in one study or another by feminist scholars (including myself) since, and similar research has been done on racial diversity in the news — in both cases showing a consistent absence of women and people of color both in positions of authority within major news outlets and in media coverage.

Among the most recent data on the greatly unequal gender representation in U.S. news can be found in the 2021 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) findings. The U.S. data in that report show that women account for only one-third of the subjects in politics and economy, and less than half of the experts quoted in radio, television, newspapers, online news, and Twitter. Women were found to be only 37% of announcers and presenters in television news. Interestingly, women reporters covered the majority of stories about women. The situation for representation by people of color in top management and editorial roles, as well as news coverage, is similar, as other research shows.

What explains such enduring and troubling patterns of severe gender and racial imbalance in major U.S. news media, especially given the fact that there is no shortage of either women or people of color entering the journalism field who could serve as hosts and commentators on TV news shows?

For at least three decades, women have numbered around two-thirds of the students in university journalism programs, and both mainstream and historically Black journalism programs — including Howard University, where I taught for 17 years — graduate significant numbers of new nonwhite reporters and editors each year. A pool of qualified individuals for guest spots is also in abundance when we consider the expansive diversity among leaders in government, business, health care, and other fields, and the academy’s teeming female and nonwhite force of deeply knowledgeable scholars in every discipline.

My own study of gender and racial exclusion in news these last three decades, both within the U.S. and globally, points to several structural explanations for white male dominance in the business. First and most important is that media companies have had an increasingly white elite male ownership since passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 — a piece of legislation that deregulated the industry, allowing those with more resources to buy out the smaller players (who were disproportionately women and people of color, mostly Black). The telecom industry is the second highest grossing industry in the world (second only to pharmaceuticals), and those who own the largest conglomerates in the telecom (“big tech”) sector long ago have consolidated their economic hold on national and global affairs. They infuse huge sums into candidate campaigns and typically win, therefore exerting undue influence in Congress and the presidency. Indeed, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was written by telecom industry lawyers, passed through Congress, and signed by neoliberal, pro-corporate President Bill Clinton without as much as a public hearing, according to media scholar Pat Aufderheide. With both executive and legislative branches of the federal government in the pocket of the white male elite, no administration has had the chutzpah to address the problem through policy, and neither the Federal Communications Commission nor the Federal Trade Commission has seen fit to invoke antitrust legislation to block these moves in telecom or other industries until recently (the good news is noted later).

As a result, since 1996, women and people of color have seen a shrinking share of media ownership and executive-level control. In U.S. broadcast, female and nonwhite ownership is in the low single digits for full-powered radio and television stations. Thus, our media remain dominated by white extremely wealthy men who are getting richer by the hour and who safeguard whom and what they represent. And, in a stunning development in April, a Supreme Court ruling (Federal Communications Commission et al. v. Prometheus Radio Project et al.) overturned three lower court decisions by agreeing that the FCC did not have to address gender and racial balance in media ownership.

Second, it would be a mistake to think that those who host news programs necessarily have authority to determine who populates the guest spots. They are certainly involved, but producers and directors are the gatekeepers on final decisions, and those gatekeepers are still predominantly white men.

Third, as ample evidence shows, the news is fundamentally male in its formatting, orientation, and gathering. Gaye Tuchman’s study Making News, released four decades ago and still relevant today, found that news is focused on the important events and people within the “news net” — that realm of “legitimate” institutions. Reporters still occupy beats that cover these — education, government, finance, police, courts, etc. — and their executives (still mostly male, often white) are typically the spokespersons sought as news sources. News is about events more than issues, and white men — CEOs, barons in finance, athletes — are seen as more important newsmakers than women. Missed in this enduring news tradition are the people, events, and issues on the margins of society, as well as social movements and their leaders who tend to be — you guessed it — women and people of color.

Fortunately, there is some action addressing at least one of these problems — media conglomeration. The Washington Post reported in late September that the FTC and the Justice Department are examining recent acquisitions by Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other emerging media giants (who are increasingly the owners and content producers for mainstream news) about the need for greater transparency in reporting their business dealings. These moves, inspired by “progressives on Capitol Hill,” follow those already taken by the European Union and some Asian nations against some of these telecoms.

WMC’s yearlong study of U.S. news programs urges calls for alarm and mobilization. Feminists and other activists should reframe media policies as women’s rights, civil rights, and human rights concerns and mobilize around them in broad coalitions to develop short- and long-term strategies for accountability to the diverse publics the news media serve. There has been substantial action on the part of a number of civil rights groups — Media Action Program, UCC Office of Communications, Civil Rights Leadership Council, Multicultural Media and Telecommunications Council, Urban League, NAACP, and others — but almost no efforts at all within women’s organizations in the U.S. The time for such action is now.



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