Pro-Feminist Media Bias?

A new book about the news media's allegedly liberal bias suggests that journalism is too "pro-feminist." A review of recent reports on women proves quite the opposite.

That's the charge made by former CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg in his new book, "BIAS: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News." He says the big newspapers and the networks are full of lefties, and they have a decidedly pro-feminist bias.

If the elite media had a pro-feminist bias, women and their issues should be everywhere on the news. Are they? Decidedly not.

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz notes. "Most of the officials, lawmakers, experts and political figures who parade their opinions on Sunday morning television have something in common. They don't wear pantyhose."

Women represent barely 11 percent of guests on the five major network shows, reports The White House Project, a group dedicated to getting more women in politics. Since Sept. 11, pictures of Afghan women in burkas have been seen more often on American television than female talking heads.

And when women do appear on network "ideas" programs, on op-ed pages and on cable shows, ultra-conservative women are more likely than feminists to give the female perspective. The Washington-based conservative Independent Women's Forum opposes Title IX, affirmative action, the Violence against Women Act, and funding for day care--positions few American women support. But the Post notes that the group's members get quoted and invited on talk shows with "astonishing regularity" despite the fact that the group has only some 600 members.

In 1995, The New York Times published six opinion pieces by forum leaders, the Wall Street Journal published five, and the Washington Post three, reports Fairness and Accuracy in Media. During that period, those same papers chose to publish no commentary on any subject by anyone from National Organization for Women (275,000 members) or the Feminist Majority Foundation (more than 60,000).

Overall, when the media covers feminism, it focuses on how dead the women's movement is, when it died, and how it will never rise again. One Time magazine cover showed the demise of feminism as running in a straight line from Gloria Steinem to Ally McBeal.

The truth is that the major tenets of mainstream feminism have been largely absorbed by young women, who now fill more college seats than men, run marathons, join the Army, play contact sports and seek out good jobs. But most of the media ink is devoted to how "post-feminist" women have rejected the movement.

Good News Ignored, Bad News Exaggerated

And bad news about women gets consistently overplayed. Women are endlessly shown as facing grave risks if they are too "ambitious." Such articles are often based on bad science, but they get huge play and as a result, flawed data becomes immortal. It gets repeated over and over again for years, often migrating from the leads of news stories to the "background" paragraphs, where it is presented as undisputed fact.

For example, an obscure study of the marriage habits of baby-boom women in 1986 led to screaming headlines--and covers on People and Newsweek. The stories claimed that women who weren't married by 35 had as much chance of being wed as they did of getting killed by a terrorist. (That idea even ended up as a line of dialogue in the film "Sleepless in Seattle.") The underlying message, of course, was that if women put off grabbing a guy to get more education or advance in their careers, they risked becoming "old maids."

This "factoid" just won't die. It still gets cited today. What were the true facts? A baby-boom woman who would only marry a man two or three years her senior would have a small pool of males as prospective mates. But if she would marry someone her own age, or younger, there was no man shortage at all. The story was completely bogus, but the careful refutations got no headlines or cover stories. In fact, new research shows that the more education a woman has, the more marriageable she is. You almost never see that reported.