WOMEN UNCOVERED
Real Majority, Media Minority: The Cost of Sidelining Women In Reporting. By Laura Flanders.
Common Courage Press, 1997, 294 pages, $16.95.

Reviewed by Phyllis Eckhaus

FEMINIST MEDIA criticism often seems to tilt at mirrors, targeting the media’s distorted reflection of reality instead of the real-life inequities that make for women’s subjugation. Would more female talking heads on "Nightline" actually redress women’s lack of political and economic power?

Probably not. Laura Flanders, director of the Women’s Desk at the media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, observes that "how a story is told is more important than who is doing the telling. The biggest problem isn’t numbers, but an industry-created numbness to a whole range of ideas."

Flanders’ provocative and passionate new book, Real Majority, Media Minority, is feminist media criticism at its best. This collection of articles and interviews— taken mostly from Flanders’ columns in Extra! and from her radio program, CounterSpin—never succumbs to mere bean counting. Instead, her focus on women becomes a means to track the stealthy seduction of the media by corporate and right-wing forces. Flanders’ true subject is power; and because she keeps her eye trained on that prize, the portrait she paints of women’s neglect by the media is profound.

When reporters leave women out of the story, it’s like "covering the Super Bowl without mentioning the players," Flanders asserts. "It’s not just sexist, it’s getting the story wrong." Media neglect of women means the public continues to be deluded—for example, about the actual proportion of women in the world. Although women continue to be a majority in the United States, globally, men outnumber women. How can this be, given that women naturally outlive men? It turns out, Flanders reports, that the worldwide denial of food and healthcare to women has created a demographic shift.

Flanders recounts the covert campaigns by corporations and conservative think-tanks to insert their biases into media coverage—and the media’s almost zombie-like capitulation to those efforts. When Dow Corning funded skewed studies to defend the safety of silicone breast implants, the media swallowed the studies whole, reporting them as news and using them as the basis for editorial crusades to protect business from product liability claims. The conservative National Journalism Center provides free journalism training to students and then rushes them into the media marketplace—which hires them without questioning the ideological basis of their training; other entities, such as the Heritage Foundation, churn out a flood of biased press releases, which the media pick up equally uncritically.

White men in general also get a free media ride, especially if they can be squeezed into popular stereotypes like the rugged individualist or the manly patriarch. Thus, journalists dignified Paul Hill, who openly advocated the murder of abortion clinic doctors, as a man with a cause—at least until he gunned down two staff members of a Pensacola clinic. And the media laud the Promise Keepers—who fill football stadiums with men who seek to turn their families into patriarchal fiefdoms—for their eagerness to accept responsibility.

Yet the same journalists automatically suspect feminists and other advocates of progressive social change. Flanders recounts how PBS refused to air an Academy Award-winning documentary on battered women because one of the unpaid producers had "direct self-interest" in the subject matter—she had helped to found a group for battered women. Barbara Seaman, the journalist who first exposed the birth control pill’s side effects, tells Flanders in an interview how drug companies once got her fired from her job writing a women’s health column for McCall’s Magazine. Today, Seaman says, she is frequently approached by the media to talk about myriad subjects—except women’s health, the area where she has expertise.

It’s scarcely surprising when the media support the status quo; what’s disturbing is their increased use by the right as an instrument of change. More and more, the media seem to promote the further consolidation of power and profit. Of course, as Flanders points out, the media constitute a prime example of such consolidation. Citing the recent mega-mergers of communications companies (made possible by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which was supposed to promote competition), Flanders offers an extremely funny critique of these unnatural and unholy corporate marriages.

Real Majority, Media Minority is a triumph of style and substance, a breezy read that transcends soundbite superficiality. If you’re interested in the media—or in the prospects for progressive social change—pack this book with your swimsuit and take it to the beach this summer.

[War Resisters League Website] [Nonviolent Activist Index]
May-June 1997: [Editorials: Disarm Police] [Turmoil in Tabasco: Maya vs. Big Oil] [A Day without the Pentagon] [Youthpeace Meets Toymakers] [Activist News] [Activist Reviews: Women in Media]

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