Changing images: a long road

Bernadette van Dijck

‘We are journalists. We tell it how it is. You cannot expect us to make the world prettier than it is.’ Discussions with programme teams about gender portrayal often become heated affairs. Both male and female programme-makers have difficulty acknowledging that the way men and women are portrayed on television is still fairly stereotypical. Women appear on screen less often than men and they hold the floor for less time. ‘If this picture really is accurate, the fault lies with reality, not with the journalist.’ And that is precisely the conclusion that the Gender Portrayal Department of the Netherlands Broadcasting Corporation (NOS) rejects. The fact is that reality is far more varied than the image we see on television. Change in the way we see men and women must come first and foremost from journalists.

Ever since 1991 the NOS Gender Portrayal Department has been concerned with the image of men and women projected in programmes on Dutch radio and television. After an initial phase largely taken up with research, the Department has more recently concentrated on the journalistic process by which images are formed and the influence that particular pragmatic decisions can and do have on gender portrayal. At the heart of the Department’s approach are awareness and change, and a key concept is ‘quality’: by focusing attention on gender portrayal you switch off the automatic pilot and an item becomes better journalism. But paying attention to gender portrayal is also important for managers and policymakers. Public service broadcasting in the Netherlands is obliged by law to broadcast programmes that reflect society, and varied gender portrayal is an essential part of this. However, it is still the viewers who have the last word: they expect public service broadcasting to offer programmes in which we can all recognize ourselves, man and woman, black and white, old and young.

Actively stimulating more varied gender portrayal in programmes is a necessary element of public service broadcasting, the NOS Management Board recently concluded. For this reason, it has been decided that the Gender Portrayal Department should be given a permanent place within the structure of the organization. This is a brave decision, given that it means taking a critical watchdog on board. But it is also a unique decision, because it means that public service broadcasting is now taking the initiative to build bridges between programme-makers, audiences and media critics.

Time

For years research into gender portrayal has consistently revealed the same patterns. For every woman on screen we see two men. At the same time, men appear in roles with a higher status, e.g. as experts and authorities, while women appear principally in lower-status roles as e.g. victims and passers-by. Reporting on the changing roles of men and women in society often implicitly assumes that women are principally responsible for child-rearing and home-making while men are responsible for income and management. (Eie, 1998)

At first sight, changing this picture would seem to be mainly a matter of time: as women become more and more emancipated and take an increasing share of paid employment, gender portrayal will change of its own accord. We have now reached the stage at which almost half of all journalists in the Netherlands are women, yet there is nothing to indicate that this has done anything to change the content of programmes or the image they project. Stereotyping is not so much a function of the sex of the programme-maker, it is deeply rooted in the routine of journalism. Any attempts to bring about change will have to concentrate mainly on changing that routine. The motives and arguments for change must be found in journalistic considerations.

Journalistic choices

Changing journalistic routines begins with charting the journalistic production process. Programme-makers are constantly taking decisions, and they do so under great pressure of time. What subject is about to become news? What angle should we approach when we report on a particular subject? Who do I choose as the spokesperson? Where shall I put the camera? What questions shall I ask? What background pictures do I show? These decisions are often rational and individual, and in the perception of many journalists their view of the position of men and women in society plays no part in them whatever. Yet the sum of all these individual choices continues to show the stereotypical pattern that I described earlier.

Let us look at an example. In the Dutch parliament a debate is in progress on a new bill designed to regulate the admission of refugees. The government proposes various measures, the opposition has alternative plans. This is all properly reflected in the report in the news. A politician from one of the progressive parties of government explains the basis of the bill. A politician from the conservative opposition party puts forward another proposal. The progressive party responds. The view of the refugee interest group is put in the voiceover. The statements made by the various parties are interspersed with archive footage of refugees at an asylum seekers’ reception centre.

The spokespeople are all white middle-aged men. ‘That’s coincidence’, is the journalists’ initial response. ‘And anyway it doesn’t matter because the subject has nothing to do with men or women, it’s about the new legislation.’ From the point of view of gender portrayal, however, it is not a coincidence and it does make a difference who acts as spokesperson and who one is talking about. The choices made in the making of the programme serve to reaffirm and reassert an existing power structure.

Screening gender

When you confront programme-makers with this pattern, most of them are horrified and come up with all sorts of plausible explanations. ‘There was no female spokesperson, we only had a couple of hours to put the item together, we had no money for an interpreter. And besides: surely it’s all about the story, the subject, and not about who tells it?’ All these remarks are true and legitimate. And yet it is still important to ask whether things could have been done differently. What angle would you have had to choose in this case to let women or ethnic minorities express their views? How much time would you really have needed to make a better item? What would you have asked if you had had an interpreter? What kind of story would someone other than the politician have had to tell? And is that story important to the viewer, the citizen trying to form an opinion about the parliamentary debate?

By asking these questions we appeal to the reporter’s journalistic responsibility and curiosity. The automatic pilot is switched off for a moment, the choice of a particular approach has to be rationalized. This makes it clear what consequences pragmatic decisions have for the meaning of the images you ultimately broadcast, and hence for the story you are telling. It is precisely in these observations that the germ of change lies.

The audiovisual training toolkit Screening Gender collects together pieces of video footage that ask these questions. It was developed by five northern European public service broadcasting organizations, of which the NOS was one. (Screening Gender 2000) The patterns of gender portrayal identified by academic research are illustrated visually with the aid of recent television footage. Alternative examples, some of them news items produced specially for the toolkit, demonstrate what kind of gain in quality can be achieved by paying attention to gender portrayal. Programme-makers explain how they achieve more varied gender portrayal and what benefit they derive from it. In June 2000 the toolkit was distributed to training institutions affiliated to the European Broadcasting Union.

Global Monitoring Media Project

One of the constant challenges facing the NOS Gender Portrayal Department is how to find fresh angles when entering into the dialogue with programme-makers. The Global Monitoring Media Project organised by the WACC on Tuesday 1 February 2000 gave us a good opportunity to bring the various target groups for whom we work into contact with each other. We invited women’s organizations, ethnic minority organizations, researchers, programme-makers, managers and young journalists to come and have a collective look at what part women and men play in the news of the day. We promised them a fun day during which we would not only work but also, together, visit the seat of government in The Hague. There we would be joined by politicians for the last part of the programme, analysing the news as presented on television.

Over eighty people accepted our invitation and worked in groups filling in the code lists. Monitoring is clearly important: statistics have the power to reveal the true balance. Or, as one of the young journalists put it, ‘It’s as if the news suddenly tipped on one side, as if you were reading the newspaper through 3-D spectacles’. Next day, the results of our monitoring were in almost every Dutch newspaper. More important than the figures, however, were the day’s conversations. As the day progressed, it became increasingly clear to both programme-makers and journalists that the world inhabited by those with whom they were now engaging in dialogue was being largely overlooked by ‘the news’. Where were all the young people, the women, the ethnic minorities?

On 1 February they were mainly victims - literally: in the UK, where medical doctor Harold Shipman had been found guilty of murdering at least fifteen of his elderly women patients and the news was on almost every front page, even in the Netherlands - or problem cases: the papers were full of a study of school children from ethnic minority backgrounds, who were performing poorly in the education system. Is it any wonder that people no longer follow the news, if there’s so little in it that they can recognize as relevant to their own lives?
But there was more insight in the other direction, too. Those who represented women’s organizations and ethnic minorities came to realize that the journalistic process is governed by rules that determine what is news and how it has to be presented. If you want to influence the news as an interest group, the first thing you have to do is stick to these rules. For example, you will have to train some energetic spokespersons who can put your point of view concisely and lucidly so that journalists will be prepared to listen to it.

Changing images

Deliberately setting out to initiate a process of change so as to produce greater diversity in the media image not only of men and women but also of ethnic minorities: that is the complex task facing the NOS Gender Portrayal Department for the coming years. But while it may be a complex task, it is one that is not only supported by those at the top of public service broadcasting in the Netherlands but also empowered by a statutory framework. By concentrating on the journalistic debate we hope to be able to advance the right arguments to bring about change. But it is through the meeting of minds that the importance of that change will become a live issue. And in that process, programme-makers, critics and viewers all share part of the responsibility.

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Notes

Eie, Birgit, 1998. Who Speaks in Television? A comparative study of female participation in television programmes. Oslo: NRK

Screening Gender (June 2000); a training toolkit for innovation in programme production. Produced by: NOS (Netherlands); NRK (Norway); SVT (Sweden); YLE (Finland); ZDF (Germany).

Bernadette van Dijck studied linguistics and film at the University of Utrecht. She has worked as a programme-maker and journalist since 1983. She was appointed Head of the Gender Portrayal Department at NOS in 1998.