“One of the central accomplishments of the women’s movement over the last two decades has been to draw media attention to the physical suffering and institutional victimization of women in North American society,” writes gender bias researcher Adam Jones. But does this imply that men’s suffering and victimization have been given their share of concern and coverage by the media? “Absolutely not,” say Jones and a large number of others who have chronicled what they claim is a pervasive strain of anti-male bias in the media.
Not surprisingly, many women’s advocates take strong exception to this claim, asserting instead that the true gender bias in the media is an overwhelmingly anti-female one. And as proof, they offer stroke tallies of the gender of people pictured and quoted in the media, and of the by-lines of journalists. For example, the 1994 survey conducted by Columbia University’s Women, Men, and Media (WMM), found that women wrote only 33% of the front-page newspaper stories and appeared in the same percentage of front page pictures (53% in the New York Times, though). Just 21% of network news was reported by women, and only 24% of those interviewed for nightly news shows were female.
But does this prove that there is anti-female bias in the media? That depends on your definition. While it might be proof of anti-female bias in hiring by the media, and it may chronicle the continuing effects of discrimination in various other fields (politics, for example), it may say nothing about whether there is a fair mix of coverage of women’s and men’s suffering in the news.
And for Adam Jones, coverage is the real issue. “The other side of human suffering and victimization… has, unfortunately, passed almost unnoticed by mainstream media,” he writes in his extensive analysis of gender bias in Canada’s “National Newspaper,” the Toronto Globe and Mail. “Aspects of suffering which could be considered largely or specifically ’male’ have tended to be ignored, dismissed, or distorted.”
Because Jones’ conclusions fly so completely in the face of conventional wisdom, one might be tempted to dismiss them. But that would be premature. First, his is essentially the only scientific research to do an in-depth analysis of each and every article concerning violence over a certain time period, and to evaluate whether it contained bias against either portraying the man as a victim, or the woman as the victimizer. Other research on media gender bias has consisted simply of the type of number counts described above. Second, his findings are confirmed by anecdotal accounts by dozens of men and women who work in the media.
So does the media have a tendency to give more coverage to, and be more critical of, men who are guilty of wrongdoing than women who are guilty of the same wrongdoing? And does the media have a tendency to give a story more play when the woman is the “victim” than when the male is? Clearly, there’s a lot of disagreement on this issue. After all, deciding whether coverage is negative or positive can be a rather subjective task. Nevertheless, further exploration of the widespread claims of anti-male/pro-female bias (which, for the rest of this article I’ll refer to as the “Lace Curtain”), seems warranted—if for no other reason than out of a commitment to intellectual curiosity and journalistic integrity.
But before going any further, let’s get one piece of business out of the way. Nothing in this article is meant to suggest that women have not suffered or to deny that, in many areas, they have been discriminated against as a class. What is being discussed is how issues that affect men and women are covered by the media—not past (or even present) discrimination.
Nevertheless, the question of past discrimination often makes it hard to recognize the effects of the Lace Curtain. Until quite recently, women were generally excluded from testing and research in non-gender specific health areas. But now there’s an Office of Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health which deals exclusively with women’s health concerns. And each of the various national health plans includes special provisions for women’s health—regular mammograms, Pap smears, etc. According to Laura Flanders, Coordinator of the Women’s Desk as F.A.I.R. (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), the very use of the term “women’s health” indicates “that the default has always been men’s health.” While it’s hard to argue with that point, it’s also important to note that such critical men’s health issues as regular prostate exams, or screenings for testicular cancer, are not even mentioned in any of the proposed national plans. Nor are they highlighted in coverage of the health-care debate.
In a recent phone interview, I asked Flanders whether she thought women’s gender-specific health concerns get more media attention than men’s gender specific concerns—especially given that prostate cancer kills almost as many men as breast cancer does women. While denying absolutely that there is any anti-male bias in the media (“to talk about sexism against men is ridiculous”), Flanders said that any disparity in coverage is a result of what she called “surplus visibility.” “When people who have been silenced speak out, the sound of their voices is shattering.”
There’s a good case to be made for giving a bit more than their proportionate share of media coverage to women who are emerging in areas that once excluded them. In some ways, this may be the media equivalent of affirmative action. But if this approach is justified when it comes to remedying past discrimination against women, why not apply that rule to areas in which men have been excluded? Female soldiers who participated in Desert Storm (who were only about 10% of all the soldiers who fought) received a lot of coverage. But where is the male perspective on such important social issues as family leave and abortion, or on fathers’ efforts to juggle their desire to be with their families with the demands of their jobs? Flanders feels that it’s sexist and demeaning for the media to focus exclusively on women when it comes to parenting issues. But it doesn’t occur to her that men might find it sexist and demeaning to be excluded from these discussions.
According to Richard (not his real name), a journalist with a major news organization, the Lace Curtain manages to exclude the male perspective on other “gender issues” as well (things like sex, relationships, and children). For example, one of this country’s largest news-gathering agencies distributes to its reporters a valuable guide containing over 6,000 names, phone numbers, and addresses for sources on a variety of subjects. Under Women’s Groups, the guide lists 18 separate topic headings, including battered women, magazines, and political organizations (which itself contains 23 sources.) But the reporter looking for a quote from a man on a “men’s issue” (divorce and custody, for example) is out of luck. No fathers’ rights organizations, male health advocates, or men’s groups are listed. In fact, the alphabetical index of categories skips directly from Mellon Bank to Mental Health without so much as a single entry for Men. (This is not because men’s groups don’t exist: Rod Van Mechelen, publisher of The Egalitarian, has complied a directory listing over 100.)
As evidenced by the WMM surveys, women have been—and, unfortunately, continue to be—underrepresented as interview sources. This has to change. But on issues that affect men in ways that tend to have been neglected in the past (male victims of domestic violence, men’s health, and, again, divorce and custody, etc.), including the man’s perspective is necessary to ensure balanced and thorough coverage.
Even if we assume that leaving sources on men’s issues out of the book was simply an oversight, people listed in the source book will be the first ones called. Reporters who might otherwise be interested in including a male perspective will have to spend a lot of time and effort tracking one down—something they often won’t be able to do on a tight deadline. The result? The male perspective gets left out. Perhaps not deliberately, but left out nonetheless.
Among those who argue that the Lace Curtain exists, no issue is cited more frequently than the media’s coverage of domestic violence. While this is not the appropriate forum in which to debate the true extent of the problem of battered men, suffice it to say that even advocates for battered women admit that some men are beaten by their female partners, and that not all female-on-male assaults are in self-defense. It is, of course, impossible to agree on the exact percentage of victims of unprovoked domestic assaults who are men, but for the sake of discussion, let’s use 10%—a number admitted to by even the most skeptical women’s advocacy groups. The question, then, is whether battered men and violent women are getting their “fair share” of media coverage.
According to Laura Flanders, “they’re getting too much. There have been op-ed articles on the subject in the Los Angeles Times and USA Today.” Besides op-ed articles, however, there has been virtually no coverage of male victims of domestic violence. A computer search of over two million articles appearing in the nation’s largest newspapers revealed 112 that focused on battered women. Only one focused on battered men. A similar search of over 1,500,000 magazine and journal articles located 203 on battered women and, again, only one on battered men.
When Kim Gandy, executive vice-president of NOW, was asked to comment on this seeming disparity in coverage, she replied that perhaps “there should be proportional coverage of domestic violence issues.” (She wasn’t, however, able to say who would establish the correct proportions.) But Gandy’s views are hardly universally shared. “Talking about battered men simply detracts from the real problem,” says Laura Flanders. She and other women’s advocates fear that giving battered men even proportional coverage would jeopardize the already pathetic amount of money available for women’s shelters.
In some ways, it’s almost possible to justify the media’s reluctance to adequately cover violent women. After all, it’s only relatively recently that the women’s movement succeeded in getting the issue of domestic violence against women out of the closet. (Advocates for battered men, however, maintain that the issue of violence against men is still in the closet.) The media, then, may be ignoring or minimizing men’s victimization in order to protect feminism’s hard-fought gains.
This raises an interesting contradiction. On one hand, the media is quick to condemn paternalism when it seeks to “protect” women from the pressures of work outside the home, the public life of politics, or the dangers of combat.. But when paternalism operates to judge women less harshly (or to absolve them of responsibility for their behavior) in the name of “protecting” past gains, the media sometimes seems to be far slower out of the box. “If a politician made an outrageous statement, or if the concrete lobby or the tobacco lobby said something that common sense told you was crazy, we’d be all over them,” says Bernard Goldberg, a correspondent with CBS News. “But when it comes to people in groups that have an agenda to “do good,” it’s considered bad form to challenge them.”
An article on domestic violence in a recent issue of a national parenting magazine illustrates this point perfectly. The author of the article made reference to a 1992 letter by Surgeon General Antonia Novello, and quoted her as having said that “one study found that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury of women 15-44.” In an attempt to maintain the highest factual standards, most national magazines require writers to submit backup for every statistic or quote used in an article—especially one on a controversial topic. In this case, the magazine’s fact-checkers routinely should have asked to see Novello’s letter. Had they done so, they would have found that what Novello actually said was that “One study found violence to be… the leading cause of injury to women ages 15 through 44 years.” Nowhere did she say “domestic violence,” just violence. The study Novello referred to was a study of extremely poor, crime-ridden, inner-city African-American women in Philadelphia—a population not even vaguely representative of the rest of the country. In a recent phone interview, Dr. Jeane Ann Grisso, the study’s lead researcher, cautioned that even if her study had concluded that domestic violence was the leading cause of injury, she would “never apply that conclusion to the total population of American women.”
Unfortunately, when inaccurate statements—such as those mentioned above—are left unchallenged, they soon take on the status of “fact.” In one part of a recent “Eye-to-Eye With Connie Chung” segment, Bernard Goldberg wanted to debunk an assertion by NOW president Patricia Ireland that domestic violence was the number one cause of birth defects. (If you think about it, does it really make sense that domestic violence could cause more birth defects than crack? than alcohol abuse?, than car accidents?) But rather that raise their eyebrows and check out Ireland’s (non-existent) sources, CBS’s army of attorneys made Goldberg prove that Ireland was wrong.
This brings up the dueling paternalism contradiction raised above, but with a dangerous twist. By allowing what are perceived to be “pro-women” stories to use lower standards for truth and accuracy, the stage is set for a backlash against all “pro-women” data, which may be treated as suspect out of fear that the research methods that produced it were motivated more by politics than by science.
But paternalism is not the only explanation for why coverage of female violence and male victims of that violence is suppressed. Some writers who might otherwise be interested in seriously investigating the issue are simply afraid to do so.
Take, for example, the experiences of Erin Pizzey, a lifelong advocate for battered women who opened England’s first shelter over twenty years ago. Pizzey’s involvement with battered women apparently gave her a rare insight into women’s capacity for violence, a topic she discussed in her book, Prone to Violence. In an interview with British journalist David Thomas, Pizzey describes the threats on her life and bomb scares at her house that began to happen after the book was published. “I finally decided that I couldn’t take any more of that intimidation, not for my sake, because I’m used to it, but for my children’s sake,” she said. “So we went abroad.”
Suzanne Steinmetz, one of the first American researchers to document female-on-male domestic violence, had similar experiences. Dr. Steinmetz told me that after she published an article called “The Battered Husband Syndrome,” she received verbal threats and anonymous phone calls from radical women’s groups threatening to harm her children. In addition, all of her female colleagues were contacted and told to “do everything possible to deny” Steinmetz tenure. And when the ACLU invited her to speak on domestic violence, it received a bomb threat. Both Steinmetz and Pizzey found it ironic that the same people who claim that women-initiated violence is purely self-defense are so quick to threaten violence against people who disagree.
Fortunately, as David Thomas notes, few researchers have “stirred up the kind of hostility” that Pizzey and Steinmetz have provoked. Nevertheless, he writes, “anyone arguing against the view that women can only be seen as innocent victims can expect, at the very least, trenchant criticism.”
Some argue that, besides protecting women by punishing their critics, the Lace Curtain attempts to protect women by silencing their critics before they even have a chance to criticize. In an extensive analysis of bias at the New York Times Book Review, John Ellis, literary editor of Heterodoxy, claims that pro-feminist books are “protected by assigning them to ideological clones of their author,” thus protecting them from negative attack. “How do you ensure a respectful review of feminist eminence Gloria Steinem’s Revolution From Within? Since Steinem is the former editor of Ms., the book goes to Dierdre English, former editor of Mother Jones: a close match. Susan Faludi’s Backlash is the work of a journalist with a sour view of any criticism of feminism, so let’s find another like her: the equally sour Ellen Goodman.” Others within the media have also noted a corollary trend: books by those who criticize feminism or who write favorably about men seem to be given either highly negative reviews (Christina Hoff Sommers’ Who Stole Feminism) or not reviewed at all (Jack Kammer’s Good Will Toward Men, and Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power, for example.)
“It is not always wrong for a review editor to be guided by a viewpoint,” writes Ellis. “But the New York Times is, or should be a very different case—its readership has no ideological restriction. It is a national, not a sectarian resource, and it ought not to behave like The Nation.”
Again, one could use Flanders’ “surplus visibility” argument—that because of past discrimination, the paternalism inherent in giving women’s views prominence may be necessary. However, the big question is whether this kind of paternalism helps or hurts women. “Because of Faludi’s book and the climate of antagonism against men, anything critical of women—legitimate or otherwise—is called backlash and therefore dismissed,” says Christina Hoff Sommers. Criticism is good thing; it acts as a kind of quality control for the media and for academics; it leads to a healthy debate and to sharing of information. But shielding a particular point of view from scrutiny, criticism, or debate (or threatening to kill those who question it) ultimately results in shoddy, unreliable scholarship.
As discussed above, reasonable minds will probably always differ as to the percentage breakdown of the victims of domestic violence. However, there are other areas where it’s impossible to deny that the men are the majority of victims. “In cases where the victims of violence cited in statistical data are overwhelmingly male—where, therefore, a gender component is both obvious and relevant—the victims are likely to be categorized not by gender, but by some other gender-neutral classification variable (e.g., age, occupation),” writes Adam Jones.
A variety of recent articles have, for example, noted that convenience store workers and taxi drivers die on the job at nearly the same rate as police officers. And the current reexamination of the military’s early atomic weapons testing has highlighted the powerlessness, suffering, and death of those soldiers who—frequently without their consent—became human guinea pigs. The fact that nearly all these deaths are male is rarely, if ever, mentioned.
Using the standard that it’s OK to ignore battered men because there are fewer of them than battered women, it might seem reasonable to ignore the even smaller number of female workplace deaths. But instead, women’s suffering is given top billing over men’s.
Take, for example, an October, 1993 New York Times headline declaring “High Murder Rate for Women on Job—40% of Women Killed at Work are Murdered, but Figure for Men is Only 15%.” At first glance, this sounds like women are being butchered in the workplace. But a careful reading of the article reveals that “women account for only 7 percent of on-the-job deaths” and that “although men are 55% of the work force, they comprise 93% of all job-related deaths.”
Television and films are two other areas in which media coverage of women’s minimal victimization far overshadows that of men’s. According to Warren Farrell, the average American child will watch more than 40,000 people get killed on TV—97% of whom will be men.
Critics (and women’s activists) regularly—and rightfully—complain about the sexist and demeaning nature of the “woman-in-jeopardy” theme so popular in Hollywood. But as Farrell points out, “In woman-in-jeopardy films, the woman is typically saved while many men die saving her.” In fact, contrary to the assertions that violence against women is rampant in films, over 90% of those killed in movies are male.
According to Frederic Hayward, the director of Men’s Rights Inc., in Sacramento, California, men also get a pretty raw deal when it comes to the way they’re portrayed on television. Hayward, who conducted a survey of 1,000 random advertisements, wryly summarized his findings by commenting: “100 percent of the jerks singled out in male-female relationships were male. There were no exceptions… 100 percent of the ignorant ones were male. 100 percent of the incompetent ones were male.”
When Marlene Sanders, director of WMM, was asked to comment on this rather startling example of anti-male bias, she was dismissive. “Sit-coms are ridiculous. I don’t watch them and we don’t keep track of them,” she said. “And anyway, they’re all written by men.” Sanders may not watch sit-coms, but millions of other Americans do—many times more than the number who watch the nightly news or read the newspaper. For that reason, television’s portrayals of men and women are particularly powerful. And given the results of Hayward’s study, the gender of the writer obviously has nothing to do with his or her bias.
Although legitimate examples of the way the Lace Curtain seems to operate are plentiful, some media critics feel compelled to overreach. In The Myth of Male Power, for example, Warren Farrell compares the media coverage of Joseph Hazelwood, who caused one of the world’s costliest natural disasters, and Robin Lee Wascher, a female air traffic controller, whose negligence resulted in a plane collision in which over 30 people were killed.
Farrell correctly notes that after the Valdez incident, Hazelwood received massive amounts of well-deserved, negative attacks in every media outlet, while coverage of Wascher was minimal and focused not on the reasons for her negligent performance, but on the grief she felt after the incident. Farrell writes that the difference in coverage is an example of how women who fail at their jobs are treated more gently than men who do. In reality, however, this difference in coverage is probably unrelated to the gender of the negligent person, but directly related to the difference in the nature of the wrongdoing. People—women or men—whose negligence leads to accidental deaths are almost always treated gently by the media. (Coverage of a male police officer who shot an undercover detective on the New York subway focused extensively on the shooting officer’s emotional devastation.) But when the negligence is aggravated (or caused) by alcohol or drug impairment, all bets are off—the media has no sympathy.
Despite Farrell’s overzealousness on this point, others, such as syndicated humor columnist D.L. Stewart, have made the charge that women are generally shielded from criticism—even the most mundane kind. By his own description, Stewart’s column is “the flip side of Erma Bombeck’s.” But while Bombeck can joke that her husband goes into a coma during football season, Stewart has to “bend over backwards” to make sure he’s the butt of every joke and that his wife gets the last word in any argument. “If I joke that my wife doesn’t know the difference between baseball and football, I’ll be bombarded with negative mail.” Stewart, who is clearly not a misogynist, feels that “there’s a double standard and it’s not getting any better.”
“The results of this double standard—whether it shields women from criticism, overplays women’s suffering, or underplays men’s—are bad for women and men alike,” says Cathy Young, vice president of the Women’s Freedom Network. “For men, because their suffering is not taken as seriously as it needs to be; for women, because they are getting an exaggerated picture of the dangers they face—something that can have a very restrictive effect on their lives.” Young feels that media coverage must reflect the fact that just there are some problems that are more specifically female, there are others that are more specifically male.
So what can we do to eliminate double standards in reporting and insure more balanced coverage on gender-specific social issues? According to Jack Kammer, “journalism’s professional conventions should include workshops and presentations that recognize gender bias against men. Journalism schools and associations should educate their students and members to be as aware of anti-male bias as they are of any other kind.”
What this means is that all of us in the media need to recognize the inconsistency and bias inherent in giving women “surplus visibility” in areas where they have been victims or historically silenced, but limiting men to “proportional coverage” in areas when they are victims or where they have historically been silenced.
Finally—and most important—writers and their editors need to remember the incredible power of their pens. “Every society, I now realise, has its taboos—even those that seem as permissive as America’s,” writes The New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan. “Journalists are actually the guardians of many taboos. They determine what is said and how; they frame the parameters of public debate. They help sustain the fact that debate in a democracy tends to be less about truth than about the appearance of truth; not about arguing, but about posturing.”
© 1994 Armin A. Brott