Cavemen Clearly Control the Mainstream Media: Just Look at How Women Were Treated During the Election

By Sheila Gibbons, Women's eNews. Posted November 25, 2008.

As long as these loudmouths have an audience, executives at radio stations and broadcast groups that syndicate these shows won't rein in repulsive rhetoric, and the sewage will keep spilling over into other media. Case in point: MSNBC's David Shuster's comment about the Clinton campaign: "Doesn't it seem like Chelsea's sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?"

CNN led the election coverage pack in terms of the diversity of its news team and analysts. Campbell Brown ably steered discussion during prime-time and wound up with her own show. She came down on the McCain campaign for limiting Palin's interaction with the press, calling it a sexist decision.

Along with Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer, Brown led lively discussions with reporters Gloria Borger and Soledad O'Brien and a team of analysts that included Donna Brazile, Hilary Rosen, Amy Holmes and Leslie Sanchez. Reporting from the campaigns and the field were Dana Bash, Candy Crowley and Suzanne Malveaux. If this wasn't exactly "girls' rule," it was still a much stronger representation of female expertise than any other news network has yet produced.

TV Toggling Finds Few Women

But CNN was pretty much alone in that. On Election Night, toggling among TV channels, I noticed it was nearly all guys on MSNBC, with only superb newcomer Rachel Maddow at the analysis table. Over on PBS, although Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff conducted interviews with insiders and observers, the main political analysis was provided, as it usually is, by David Brooks and Mark Shields, anchored by Jim Lehrer. This is a trio I respect but which should have been enlarged with women and minorities for that night especially, and at other points throughout the campaign.

Disheartening is a new analysis from FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) showing that the influential Huffington Post blog, considered friendly to female contributors, advances less than a quarter of them to its prominent main page.

Authored by Jessica Wakeman, a former associate blog editor at the Huffington Post, the report says that during the study period (July 7-Sept. 5, 2008), only 23 percent of the main page bylines belonged to women.

"The Post does seem to be making a conscious effort to include women's voices; despite the low percentages, the study found at least one female byline on the home page at all times," Wakeman says. "But if there is indeed such an effort, it stops far short of parity ... Arianna Huffington, appearing 57 times, accounted for more than a fifth of all women's bylines; 45 of those occupied the most visible top post. Only once, in fact, did a woman other than Arianna Huffington get her byline in the most visible top slot -- Post editor-at-large Nora Ephron."

The gender imbalance in top bylines is significant because, according to the blog-tracking Web site Technorati, Huffington Post is the single most-linked-to blog as of September 2008; Nielsen Online ranks it the 28th most popular news site in the United States.

Wakeman correctly notes that Huffington Post's count of female main-page opinion bylines is no improvement over that of mainstream newspapers, weekly newsmagazines and syndicates. This is a disappointment for those of us looking for high-profile Internet news venues to provide prominent exposure to female contributors that daily newspapers and news magazines -- and most cable and broadcast networks and talk-radio operations -- haven't.

Copyright 2008 Women's eNews. All Rights Reserved.

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Sheila Gibbons is editor of Media Report to Women, a quarterly journal of news, research and commentary about women and media.

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