- Global Media Monitoring Project
Uks is Pakistan’s representative for the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP). The GMMP is the world’s largest and longest longitudinal study on gender in world’s media and is coordinated by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC)
Every five years since 1995, GMMP conducts a one-day study of the representation and portrayal of women and men in the news media across the globe to analyze women’s presence in relation to men, gender bias and stereotyping in the news media content. The global, regional and national reports can be found online at www.whomakesthenews.org
PREFACE
After the last WACC Global Gender in the Media snapshot exercise in 2015, our colleagues had described the media in Pakistan as “vibrant and largely free.” Just five years later, amidst a pandemic that is still wreaking havoc in the country and around the world, independent journalism finds itself with a lot at stake today as the incumbent government reveals its intent to enact laws to silence criticism from the media. Indeed, these are challenging times, when those whose jobs are to tell others stories become the story themselves.
But, ultimately, questions of gender and cultural imagination are at the heart of our endeavor.
Uks Research Centre has long been part of the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), the world’s longest-running and most extensive research on gender in the news media coordinated by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC). Together we began measuring gender in the mainstream media in Pakistan more than two decades ago. In the midst of the pandemic, Team Uks gathered in its Islamabad office on September 29, 2020, along with a group of young researchers and monitors, to link up with hundreds of others engaged in GMMP monitoring worldwide.
What we can safely say is that even today, after more than two decades, changes to how women are reporting and being reported remain marginal. Successes for those working to push gender-aware content in the media exists; there are increasing instances of women’s pictures being carried in affirmative ways in the print media. But the situation hasn’t improved enough to truthfully report the cost of the pandemic on women and the extra burdens they’ve had to bear – both in terms of lack of reportage on reported crime and in the stories left untold.
National Context
On the day that we are writing this report, June 3, 2021, almost all Pakistani newspapers printed an advertisement that stated “NO to the Pakistan Media Development Authority” – a government body being proposed by the Ministry of Information in an attempt to “regularize” the media sector in Pakistan. It is a poignant place to begin – because the day we were to monitor the media for the GMMP global snapshot was dominated by headlines of the main opposition leader being arrested on charges of corruption.
Absolute control of the media is perhaps among the last-remaining frontiers for a regime described as
“hybrid” – a shared control of governance handed by the military to a leader of their choice who is usually a man. Until now, much of that overarching state control over the media takes place through either willing and/or pliant media, or as coercive control of journalists. The proposed Media Development Authority is a step beyond that – the focus of coercion seems to be moving away from individuals and towards media organization themselves.
This reining in of media organizations, particularly those that house critical voices, comes at a time when the media industry is suffering through a crisis of financial investment and outdated business models. But to do this in the midst of a pandemic, when public messaging is key to containing the virus and news organizations have already slashed jobs to accommodate for lost funds, is a huge blow to the media industry in Pakistan.
The timing of this attack is also suspect for another reason: foreign policy. In fact, the mediascape that we witness today is the outcome of the Pakistani establishment after the war of Kargil arriving at the conclusion that its position could not be questioned internationally because a Pakistani electronic media sphere that can challenge the Indian media sphere simply did not exist. The fact that today most Pakistani channels have been running news from Israel and Palestine with a pro-Palestine angle and without worry or fear of repercussion seems to underline this foreign policy argument. Ditto for media coverage of Kashmir or the larger silence around Uyghur Muslims in China.
While foreign policy is being sorted, whatever singular truth that the state is trying to tell its domestic audience has not reached its intended target.
The ad today – cosigned by the All-Pakistan Newspapers Society, Pakistan Broadcasters Association, Council of Pakistan Newspaper Editors, Association of Electronic Media Editors and News Directors, and the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists – describes how this ordinance enacted by the President of Pakistan will allow law enforcement to “invade” media premises on arbitrary pretexts. In other words, the regime has bypassed the Parliament to enforce new bounds for media operations. The tone of the advertisement suggests that media head honchos are foreseeing the same kind of coercive control of media organizations that exists across the border in India.Given this context and the experience of the opposition leader’s arrest, it would be no surprise for the next month of the Pakistani news cycle to be dominated by this news as media organizations gather their best resources for a counter-narrative onslaught. Almost all newspapers have written strong editorials today while the airwaves are slowly filling up with more and more analyses of the story.
Between the day of GMMP monitoring and today, as we write these words, we notice recurring trends: hyper-politicization in the media and where those hyper about politics are almost always men; airtime being hogged by politics (petty or significant); and since politics is still a man’s preoccupation in Pakistan, the disappearing voices of women in newsprint and in studio.
It compels us to ask: is there a link between hyper-politicization and gender-aware media content?
Our data suggests so – hyper-politicization of the political and media spheres is lapped up both by media organizations and corporate sponsors in Pakistan and it usually comes at the cost of gender aware content appearing in the news media. There is a significant drop in women contributing stories this year as compared to five years ago: what started off as an industry crisis before the pandemic morphed into women losing jobs on the pretext of cuts due to pandemic economy. Without any women in the newsroom, reporting on gender-aware reportage has suffered.
News media is a fair reflection of where a country stands in gender terms because it captures how a country imagines its women to be. Where gender-aware content is low, women’s status as agents of change or as equals in the economy and household is also fairly low. Pakistan scored 12 per cent in gender-aware news and eight per cent in Covid-related news – both markers of fairly low gender equality in Pakistani culture and society.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
- This is the third time Pakistan has been a part of the GMMP and coordinated by Uks Research Centre.
- This country snapshot is based on the monitoring of nine newspapers (print media), 11 news channels (television news media), the state-owned radio channel (PBC), four news-based websites and four Twitter handles.
- Monitoring was conducted by 17 volunteers which included Uks’ own staff, journalists and students from various universities.
- The activity was supervised by Uks’ team who have been monitoring media in Pakistan through the gender lens for more than two decades.
- GMMP Methodology provides tools and guidelines on which media to monitor and how. Uks team was familiar with the methodology, which they taught to university students through a mock session prior to the actual monitoring activity.
- The tools remained almost the same as of the GMMP 2015, despite a few changes e.g., a separate question on Covid-19 in the coding sheets.
News Content
- The main theme that received maximum coverage on monitoring day across the news media was “Politics and Government” followed by “Crime and Violence” and “Science and Legal.” respectively.
- Women contributed 18 per cent of all news stories as compared to 36 per cent in GMMP 2015 findings.
- Men dominated the news stories on all the major topics except “Gender and related” where women news subjects contributed 68 per cent.
- Women news subjects’ presence in “Economy” related topics scored the lowest and remained at only 7 per cent.
- 89 per cent of the women news subjects were covered as “spokespersons” while men were 63 per cent.
- 64 per cent men were monitored as expert or commentators on news regarding “Government and Politics” whereas women only constituted 33 per cent.
- 40 per cent of women news subjects were identified by their family role/status as compared to only 8 per cent of men.
- News that portrayed women news subjects as “victims” were 48 per cent whereas 52 per cent were men.
- 52 per cent of news subjects that were photographed were women, compared to 48 per cent of men news subjects.
- 43 per cent of women and 57 per cent of men news subjects were directly quoted in the news.
- The overall presence of women reporters across the media added up to 18 per cent of all the reporters (whose by-lines were mentioned).
- More than 42 per cent of the news was presented, announced or reported by women journalists. Of these, only 18 per cent of women journalists were monitored as reporters,” whereas rest of 82 per cent were recorded in the role of news presenters/announcers.
- Men reporters covered 72 per cent of the stories with women as news subjects, while just 28 per cent of these were reported by women reporters.
- 33 per cent of stories in which issues of gender equality/inequality were raised were reported by women reporters.
- About 12 per cent of the total news items had women subjects as central focus.
- Only 4 per cent of the monitored news content challenged stereotypes.
- Covid-19 related news stories made almost 8 per cent of the entire monitored content
RECOMMENDATIONS AND ACTION PLAN 2021-2025
- Encourage developing subject-specialists
- Encourage women to develop more than one specialisation
- Encourage intersectionality
- Society and culture after the pandemic, particularly its collapse, is a gendered crisis, but very few journalists are able to study it. Encourage and create master classes that help them gain sociological and anthropological understanding of the issue.
- Develop and place gender-aware and consumable content in news organizations
CLICK HERE TO READ FULL NATIONAL REPORT – 2020
Preface
Wednesday, March 25, 2015 was an ordinary day for newsrooms across Pakistan. On this ordinary day the office of Uks Research Centre in Islamabad, was bustling with activity with university students volunteering to monitor media for the fifth GMMP.
The GMMP network’s membership spans over 100 countries in every continent across the world. The network includes gender and communication groups, women’s media associations, women’s grassroots groups and researchers in academia who participated in the previous GMMPs of 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010.
The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) is the world’s longest-running and most extensive research on gender in the news media coordinated by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC). It gives a detailed picture of the numbers of women and men in the world’s news on a particular day, the different ways in which they make the news and the roles they play.
National Context
From a single, state-owned television and radio monopoly, Pakistan today boasts a vibrant and largely free media. After a long struggle against periodically oppressive press policies and censorship under successive military regimes, the print media became freer in the 1990s and today enjoys more freedom than ever before.
The 2002 policy of liberalization led to the rapid growth of private electronic media, both TV and FM radio. Another expansion came about through cross-media ownership: almost all media houses with print media as their main business have established or are planning to launch their own TV channels. As a result Pakistan today has over 90 TV channels (news and entertainment), currently 170 radio stations broadcasted in Pakistan, and over 400 print publications (dailies, monthly and weekly) in various languages (English, Urdu and regional languages).
Recent figures place the number of internet users as close to 25m (2014) (almost 16% of the population), 15m of which access it through their cellular phones. The use of broadband services is also showing growth, with about 1.7m current users (2014). News websites of some of the Pakistani media houses rank among the highest in searches from Pakistan. Most have a robust online presence.
It is also true that this large, vibrant, ever-expanding and relatively free Pakistani media has yet to be used as an effective and credible tool to advance messages relating to human and women’s rights and gender equality. The main reason for the enduring gender-insensitive nature of much of the content churned out using a male, most often patriarchal, lens, could be that it tends to look at issues in the light of circulation figures, ratings, commercials and one-upmanship.
At the global level, changes in the status and role of women in the media and the portrayal of women in the media have been slow but visible. Pakistan is no exception, as revealed by the Pakistan Country Report of the Global Media Monitoring Project Report (2010) put together by Uks Research Centre. Media content, including the portrayal of girls and women in the media, remains largely patriarchal, gender-insensitive and sometimes violates consumer rights, as well as media responsibility and accountability. There is inescapable and widespread evidence of media reasserting and perpetuating negative stereotypes of girls and women alongside other empowered and empowering content.
The state and civil society have been attempting to bridge the gap. The Uks Research Centre (Uks) brought together media professionals, policy planners, civil society organizations (CSOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and women activists to begin a process of debate and dialogue on issues concerning women and the media. Media portrayal of women, strategies for women’s empowerment through the media and the formulation and implementation of a national code of conduct for the media, are a few of the milestones achieved by Uks in the last two decades, since its inception. Uks has been the national coordinator for GMMP in 2010 and this time (2015) as well for Pakistan.
Executive Summary
- This is the second time Pakistan has been involved in GMMP, both times coordinated by Uks.
- This Pakistan report is based on the monitoring of 6 newspapers (Print), 4 news channels (Television), 2 radio frequencies and five news websites and tweets were monitored.
- The monitoring was conducted by 17 volunteers mostly university students supervised by the Uks Research Team who have been monitoring media in Pakistan through the gender lens for almost two decades now.
- GMMP Methodology provides tools and guidelines on which media to monitor and how. Uks team was familiar with the methodology and oriented the university students on this methodology through a mock session prior to the actual monitoring activity.
- Main theme that dominated the news was Social and Legal issues followed by Crime and Violence and Politics and Government respectively.
News Content
- Women constituted 36 per cent of all news stories as compared to 27 per cent in GMMP 2010 findings.
- As far as function of news subjects are concerned, female news subjects were not registered as spokespersons, experts, commentators or quoting personal experiences in any of the news stories on the monitoring day.
- The news stories that portrayed news subjects as ‘victims’ had 61 per cent female subjects and 38 per cent male subjects.
- 19 per cent of the news subjects that were photographed were female as compared to 9 per cent male news subjects
Gender in Newsrooms
- Overall, the presence of female reporters in newsrooms stand at 16 per cent across media
- 25 per cent of the news stories with female subjects were covered by female reporters as compared 75 per cent of the news stories covered by male reporters.
- 33 per cent of all female reporters reported news stories with women as central focus as compared to 19 per cent of male reporters
- None of the stories in which issues of gender equality/inequality were raised were reported by female reporters as the monitoring findings indicate
Gender in the News
- All news stories with women as central focus stood at 32 per cent in print, TV and radio
- The news stories highlighting gender inequalities (4 per cent), and challenging stereotypes remained in negligibly low proportions
- 31 per cent of women news subjects were identified by their family status as compared to only 5 per cent men in news stories
The Next Five Years
A lot of organisations have been advocating and working for a gender-just media in Pakistan. Despite their efforts, the change has been very slow. For a fair and balanced representation of men and women in the media, sustained efforts have to be made including:
- Regular media monitoring
- Enhanced awareness and Advocacy to voluntarily adopt Gender Sensitive Code of Ethics for the Media in Pakistan
- Audience to be made aware of their rights as consumers and not ‘to be fed’ content they do not approve of.
- The training and sensitization of journalists is imperative. Although a lot of sensationalism, sexual objectification exists for increased circulation/ratings but many media practitioners follow such practices unintentionally.
- Media toolkits on gender-just practices and terminology to be widely circulated in media houses.