By IPS Correspondents
SANTIAGO, Feb 23 2001 (IPS)

Women are only marginally present in the news coverage of Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, according to a study that monitored the leading print and broadcasting media in those four Southern Cone countries.

The study was carried out by the ‘Grupo de Comunicadoras del Sur’, a network created in 1997 by women journalists and editors concerned about gender issues in the four member countries of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) trade bloc – Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay – as well as associate members Bolivia and Chile.

The results of the study gave rise to the book “Gender and Communication: the Dark Side of the Media”, published last year in Santiago by Isis Internacional.

The book follows the lines laid out by the Action Platform adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women held in 1995 in Beijing, regarding the space occupied by women in the media, considered a sphere that is key to the construction of a society free of gender discrimination.

With respect to the methodology used by the study, Uca Silva, in charge of the Chilean portion of the project, said that “one of the contributions of the press monitoring project was to stimulate the ability to read critically, and to leave behind the crude protests (by the women’s movement) that generated resistance in the media.

“While it is true that the media permits access to new cultural discourses and symbolic meanings, it is also true that in the case of content, major changes have not been seen with respect to the presence of women,” she added.

The study monitored the cover pages of the leading daily newspapers of Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in the month of June 1999, as well as the Tuesday broadcasts of the most popular TV and radio newscasts from that month.

In each category – i.e., sports, international politics, etc. – the study counted how often women appeared in the news, whether they were named or interviewed as sources.

In TV newscasts in Argentina and Uruguay, women received the greatest coverage in the categories of “civil society” and “international”, respectively. But in neither case did women figure in more than five percent of the news stories.

Overall, in the four countries monitored, women appeared in no more than seven percent of the TV news. The only exception was ’24 Horas’ – the leading news programme of the Chilean state channel ‘TVN’ – where the proportion was 21.3 percent, although fully half of the news stories involving women fell into the category “police coverage.”

But while Chilean state TV was in the lead, radio coverage of women in that country was similar to the other three countries – 5.8 percent in Chile, just below Argentina’s 7.8 percent.

The imbalance was even greater when it came to women being consulted as sources. In Chile, for example, where half of the ‘El Diario de Cooperativa’ morning radio programme is based on consultations with experts, women’s voices were heard for only 13 seconds, or 0.1 percent of the total discussions on legislative issues.

In Paraguay, no woman was consulted in the days that the second edition of the ‘Radio Cardinal’ news programme ‘Reporte de Noticias’ was monitored.

Susana Aldana, who headed the study in Paraguay, said that “it stood out that none of the women in the news – a deputy minister, a prosecutor, a lawyer – had been interviewed, but were only cited as spokespersons or sources.”

‘Hoy por Hoy’, the news programme of ‘Radio Mitre de Argentina’, dedicated the most space to women’s views: 29 percent.

In general, the women interviewed on the programme discussed issues that fell into the category “civil society”. The exceptions were the president of the human rights group Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Hebe de Bonafini, and politicians Hilda Dualde and Graciela Fernández Meijide, who were consulted on electoral issues.

With respect to the print media, the study specifically focused on title pages. But so few headlines had anything to do with women that percentages could not even be established. In the newspapers studied in Argentina and Uruguay, each had just one headline referring to women or gender-related issues, while in Chile and Paraguay women simply did not appear.

The Grupo de Comunicadoras del Sur criticises the tendency of the women’s movement to marginalise itself and clash with the media. “Such a focus has failed to awaken an echo among women, because it has conflicted with the positive relationship women have with many media products.”

The aim of the book is to encourage diversity in the media, and to put an end to “polarised ideological postures,” where some maintain that gender discrimination in the media is a thing of the past, while others argue that the media have made no progress at all.

María Pia Matta, the director of ‘Radio Tierra’, an independent station linked to a local women’s group, La Morada, that has been on the air for 10 years, said there were many issues regarding which the communicators of the women’s movement had been successful in winning space in the media, but which were not recognised as specific accomplishments of the movement.

To illustrate that, she cited the issues of domestic violence and sexual harassment, both of which are now covered on a daily basis by the media in Chile.

She agreed, however, with the book’s authors that it was not enough for women to merely be present in the news, but that it was necessary to analyse just how women and gender-related issues were covered. “The problem is not one of quantity or of whether or not the issues are present, but the editorial focus.

“The issues are in the media, and that is good. Anything that implies a diversification of the discourse in the rigid mainstream media is a step forward,” said Matta.

But just as it is important to diversify the issues covered by the mainstream media, “the independent media are also important,” she stressed.

“Chile’s problem is that civil society has no means of expressing itself,” and alternative voices – not only of women’s groups – that are not part of the “dominant discourse” must be encouraged, said Matta.

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