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As in other countries,the concept of media accountability in the United States arose from the special communication requirements of the 1960s. Much information the public needed was not being reported -- for example,the dangers of nuclear war or the deaths being caused by working with asbestos. From our own perspectives many of us had information we were unable to share with the public for lack of media to reach them, such as the extent of harm we saw and felt from discrimination and our deep concerns about U.S. policies in Vietnam. In addition to seeing that mass media were not representing the public as they claimed and not proving information the public "needed to know," as they said were their functions in democracy, we also found that the mass media were often spreading untruths about countries and about our own people.
We first began to use organized pressure in the 1960s to persuade our privately owned media to be the public service they claimed to be rather than just a dollars and cents business concentrating on the "bottom line." A major tool of that pressure was media criticism, but we also sought an expansion of media outlets, principally through the use of cable television channel access to the public. But we did more, especially the women. We challenged broadcast license renewals, sued newspapers and magazines, picketed, and sat in media offices until agreements were reached for more accurate representation.
In the United States women have been active in all of the media accountability systems(M*A*S): the Media Project, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, War and Peace and the Media, the investigative Research Center, Center for Media and Values, the Association for Media Literacy, the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force, and many others. Women have been part of the selection process, the judging, and the content of Project Censored which annually selects the ten most under-reported news stories during the previous year. Project Censored, (started in 1976) is registering an expanded impact on the media's coverage of news. Women have also participated in the studies and publications of all the media criticism groups, from Lies of Our Times and Extra to Accuracy in Media.
But in the United States women's undertaking to make the media more accountable are very different from these other media accountability systems. We have had to have other ways of obtaining a press that would be publicly accountable to us, and as a result, we developed a unique M*A*S. We began to construct it in the 1960s, and it has grown alongside the other efforts to make media more representive of the public's diverse interests.
Of course, while developing our own approach, women cheered the broader efforts. Even a single gram more of public service in the U.S. media would be welcome. As long as media were inadequate, so was human society, especially because that society called itself a democracy. Women knew all that very well. Although they represented 51% or a majority, of U.S. population, the privately owned media had never treated them adequately. Why? Because It is not possible for men to speak for women, and the mass media were very clearly a male monopoly. Even when it, or parts of it, tried to picture women more frequently and fairly, the attempt would usually fail. Take a look at the media situation we faced - decades ago: in 1972, 100% of the top editors at the Washington Post were men -- its 10 managing editors, 9 news desk editors, and 9 editors of special sections. In that same year, 96% of news directors in commercial radio were men. Even in public television, 98% of the situation managers were men in 1974. The situation has changed very little: today [1990], for example, 9 out of 10 TV news directors are men, and the figure is the same for daily newspapers' directing editors.
Women experienced three evils flowing from this lopsided male decision-making in news selection:
1. Because the news information of the female majority of the population was not being reported, there was not enough information for public to take into account to arrive at viable decisions. Decisions made on the basis of only men's information cannot be viable in a society that is 50% women. Women's needs are not dealt with.
2. The male dominance in news selection, with its emphasis on conflict and violence (often a definition of "news"), teaches that violence is natural and acceptable. Society is irreparably hurt when young boys and girls learn that using violence is an acceptable response to situations that do not go their way.
3. Male domination inhibits freedom of expression by its practice of disseminating name-calling -- sometimes even in headlines: "Senator calls protesters 'communicators." We saw most directly that name-calling discouraged and reduced communication when news stories popularized "bra burner" and "man-hater." Even the term "feminist" used a derogatory way has inhabited people from speaking out against sex discrimination.
It is this male-female imbalance that forced women's media projects into a distinctly different course from other media accountability systems. But the difference at the same time creates the two contributions women offer to the broader M*A*S movement. Before describing the two contributor we offer, however let us stop a moment first to look at the special origin of women's media accountability ventures in the United States and to see how they developed.
Development of Media Accountability
Undertaking by U.S. Women
The 1950s were a kind of Ice Age for women in America -- after relatively full societal participation in World War II , we were figuratively "put on ice" in the post-war period. We were unable to communicate our concerns even to each other, there were almost no independent women's newspaper, journals, or magazines, Nearly all of our information came from male-owned media, which dealt with us in stereotypes intended to keep women "in their place" to serve men and their family needs. Naturally, discrimination against women in education and the work world flourished .
But just as other groups in the 1960s were finding and creating new communication voices and channels, women were also doing so -- in fact, to an even greater extent. We shared in the general impact on mass media: television now began to bring live into America homes, for example, the civil rights revolution, the Vietnam war opponents, and the protest of poor welfare mothers.
Women already had discovered that when we made our voices heard, things began to happen. In response to our complaints about discrimination, President Kennedy in 1961 appointed a Commission on the Status of Women; in its report released in 1963, was a section pinpointing media responsibility for much of the discrimination against women. In 1966, the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) included as one of its principal concerns a more accurate and responsive media. Women went to the 1968 Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City to demonstrate their objection to sex discrimination (and particularly to media stereotypes of "beauty over brains"), because it was there that their message could reach the mass public. They knew their actions would be seen nationwide on live TV, as indeed they were.
Women in steadily increasing numbers were establishing independent media: newspapers, journals, and magazines, radio programs, video, cable, film, theater, art, record albums, and festival in all media-forms. Through their own media channels women were calling mass media to accountability for the years of stereotyping and discrimination they had experienced from the male mass media. One could say that the American women's movement itself arose as a media accountability system --ranging from Betty Friend's magazines, to today's Journalism and Women Symposium (JAWS), which meets annually to discuss media accountability. So widespread and varied have our media accountability activities been that many Americans, and some women themselves, still do not realize its extent and nature.
Few are aware that the women's media accountability movement in the United States includes the action by the Media Women's organization in New York City that made headlines as early as 1970 when about 100 feminists carried out a sit-in at one of America's oldest and most traditional women's magazine. The Ladies Home Journal. or that radio stations' practices, too, were taken on by women impatient for accountability; CBS, for instance, was targeted through its annual stockholders' meeting, also in 1970, with the general message that "The airwaves belong to the people" and half the American people are women. In 1972 the woman's Institute for Freedom of the Press was founded to explore ways to shape a communication system that would serve all people. Those media accountability actions by women occurred two decades and more ago.
The early 1970s also saw women challenge the broadcast licenses of U.S. radio and television stations. The Los Angeles Women's Coalition for Better Broadcasting, for instance, which consisted of eight women's organizations, challenged the Federal Communications Commission's renewal of a broadcast license for one of the three major U.S. television network stations in 1974.
The formation of this coalition was simply reflecting the now rapidly growing interest in media accountability; it followed the lead of several organizations of women who in 1972 had already challenged the other two major networks' licenses, charging that the content of their broadcasts did not represent women accurately. Although these cases were lost in the Court of Appeals, the action served notice that women were demanding "accountability" for how they, the majority of the population, were presented in the media; and some changes did begin to come about in both employment at all levels and in news and programming.
Newspapers and magazines -- among them, the New York Times, Reader's Digest, and Newsweek -- were sued in the 1970s for discriminating against women in terms of employment. This was a crucial aspect of accountability, for if women were not hired as reporters and so forth, male editors would not know what so-called "women's news" was.
In addition to taking on the male-dominated media directly, women worked for media accountability through newly founded groups that not only facilitated communication among women on media issues of special concern, but also worked energetically to get messages to the public and to policy makers. An example is the media accountability organizations Women Against Violence in Pornography & Media. These women protested that the mass media were encouraging men(and women) to see violence in male-female relationships as natural and were even promoting the idea that women enjoyed being raped or beaten.
Other organization of women sought to encourage an increase in the reporting of general news about women that was being ignored by the male -dominated press. Media Report to Women, published by the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press in Washington, for example, encouraged publication of documentary texts, such as the suits and judgments in women's discrimination lawsuits against media. Such information was of crucial importance to other women seeking to initiate similar suits of their own. Improvements in media news coverage, as well as in employment, are also sought by many other women's media accountability undertakings, such as New Directions in News; Women, Men and Media; the international News Gathering Service.
In addition, long-established media organizations, such as the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), formed sub groups especially concerned with the problem of accountability toward women. They sought both to see that they themselves equally represented women within their organizations and also to hold mass media accountable for assuring progress for women in employment and a more accurate portrayal in media content. On the other side of the coin, many women's organizations, such as the National Organization for Women, established special media sub groups, committees, or task forces to monitor the media and to report and recommend action.
Still other groups have been organized specifically to address women's concerns about greater media accountability: the Council of Communication Organizations (COCO), a women's network made up of representations from a dozen organizations of communicators, is an example. And yet others, such as the National Commission on Working Women, make annual based on year-round monitoring to broadcasting entities that have provided distinguished programming, in this case, for fair portrayals of working women.
Women's media (that is, media that are owned and run by, for, and about women) now number in the United States, alone more than 500 periodicals, publishers, news services, and a dozen other media forms (music, are, theater, film, radio, TV, etc.), established to disseminate women's information that has been neglected or ignored by mass media.
These woman's media have certain characteristics that distinguish them from male-owned media, according to Dr.Martha Leslie Allen's study, The Development of Communication Network Among Women, 1963-1983. Women hoped to remedy the mass media's lack of accountability to society. Thus, in addition to disseminating the women's news that mass media ignores, a feature we have discussed above, women's media also characteristically offer ( as stated editorial policy) an open forum for all women -- without discrimination. Similarly they commonly follow a stated policy of letting women speak for themselves instead of reporting their news in the third person. Women's media more typically operate collectively rather than hierarchically. They emphasize co-operation and sharing over competition, and peace over conflict and violence. They purposely avoid name-calling or labeling, again as an editorially stated policy. And women's media are activist in their orientation to the news -- supporting specific feminist causes instead of attempting to be objective or neutral.
But perhaps the most common characteristic of all women's media from the beginning has been their distrust of mass media, based on perceptions of discrimination and hostility toward women. Their frequent analyses of mass media coverage and monitoring studies over the years have documented the sex stereotyping of women's and girls' portrayals in school books, film, art, music, and other media forms, as well as discrimination in media employment, history, ownership, and management.
This characteristic of women's media -- this consistent analysis of mass media as hostile to women, which nearly all women's media hold in common -- is a principal quality distinguishing women's form of media accountability systems. Yet this hostility is more often felt than documented or even expressed, although it has also frequently been documented, as indicated above, The hostility is felt when, unlike men, women news makers are described by their dress or family status, or called by their first names, in a score of other ways, too, women's ideas and news are belittled or ignored, especially their political news.
Women feel the hostility even today it is perhaps less over than back in 1971 when Harry Reasoner, a major television commentator, said of the first issue of Ms Magazine, "I give Ms magazine five months. They said it all in this first issue." Others were quoted as saying, " There can't be more than ten to twenty thousand women in the country interested in changing the status of women. And what will they say after they write about their identity crisis?" Male newsstand dealers refused to display the Preview issue and mailmen ripped it up. Although the 650.000 circulation that Ms Magazine reached and its many years of consecutive publishing made the male media hostility less overt, women continued to feel its presence -- for example, even now mass media disseminate stories about "post-feminism" (and similar obituaries) while they still ignore or trivialize women's news. Women's response has been to expect nothing from mass media that they cannot themselves control for accuracy. Of necessity, our primary media accountability approach became the development of media of our own, however small compared to mass media or compared to our need to communicate our information to the public and to each other and, of course, compared to our percentage of the population.
Contributions of Women's Media Accountability Systems
Yet out of this unique women's experience with mass media have come two contributions we are consequently able to offer the M*A*S movement, consisting of two new approaches to the measurement and enforcement of media accountability.
Accepting the M*A*S movements working definition of accountability as "social responsibility," women offer a new definition and meaning for each of these two words.
First, "social," being another word for society, clearly must mean 100% of the people, and that obviously must include the 51% who are women. There just is no way that one can talk about "social" responsibility without meaning that at least half of the attention should be given to the female part. Yet this matter of 100% constituting "social" is rarely mentioned by most media accountability systems. We regret that very few M*A*S look for or even seem to be aware of any different impact on or distinction between the male/female parts of the accountability problems or have thought to examine by American women's media accountability undertakings is quite simple -- "social means 100%"
The practical value of the concept is significant: if a society does not have information of all its parts, including the 51% women, its decisions will not be viable; rather its decisional base is fragmentary and shaky and implementation problematic. That, of course, is not real democracy, that is, "of the people." A rather dramatic way of perhaps putting the thought is: "No women, that is, minus 51% , no democracy."
Second, women's M*A*S offer a different definition for the word "responsibility." We do not believe that the mass media have a "responsibility" to represent, minor, or reflect us, or to speak for us, however often they claim it is their task to represent the whole of society. We do not choose to surrender to anyone else the responsibility for deciding what information the public "needs to know" about us -- and certainly not to mass media's wealthy, white, male, often hostile owners. From our experience we have come to realize that men, no matter how well-intended, cannot speak for women, most simply because they do not have our information, which is innate to us and based in women's culture. Our different information arises from our very different life experience gained from a different socialization and different hormones. Despite what has long been said about "objectivity," there is no such thing in humans; no one can objectively, or accurately, articulate another's interests.
Moreover, media owners also should not try to speak for us, because democracy each individual has the responsibility to represent himself or herself. Women cannot hold the mass media responsible for failing to represent them when that is not their but ours.
If, however, the mass media continue their claim to represent us, we hope they would make room for our voices to be heard in our own way. Or let them put women in content-determining positions, as our media experience has shown that women more characteristically let people speak for themselves.
For mass media to make their channels available to people whose information has not been heard by the public would more truly constitute media responsibility to society. Even to have mass media cease their attacks on women-owned media, or begin to let the public know we exist, would be closer to our definition of responsible media than telling the public they are speaking for us or that they represent us.
How We Approach the Goal
However idea this view of social responsibility may be, it still at the present time only a goal to work toward. Nevertheless, the women in the United States have made significant progress toward its realization by working at two closely interrelated levels.
The first we call the Democracy Level. At this initial level, in their own media, women raise their issues for discussion first among themselves. They formulate and reformulate such issues as incest, battered women, employment or credit discrimination, abortion, child care, equality under the law, and sexual harassment to bring out the diversity of perspectives and to exchange new information from their many cultures and the full range of their economic and social lives. By this process, women are able to develop and articulate the various position they hold on their issues.
Several examples will illustrate this first level of American women's approach to media accountability. Women began to raise the issue of battered women in their own media about a decade ago and have finally now begun to receive sufficient public attention to obtain remedial legislation. Similarly, women are now discussing pornography and are working toward some useful definitions, such as "portrayal of sexual violence," that can avoid the problem of "obscenity" censorship.
In another area of concern neglected by mass media, women's health periodicals have been an especially important source of information, partly because they are open to all women to voice their own concerns and exchange their health experiences. As this information is published and disseminated, it improves the total health and welfare of women and achieves more enlightened health legislation through exposition of women's experience and their recommendations.
Women's political action media, too, are a quick and comprehensive way to let women know, in the absence of mass media coverage, about legislation that has been introduced to benefit women so they can support it or purpose useful changes. These media also convey news about the women who are running for public office and what their platforms are; those candidates, in turn, can then receive feedback in women's needs and suggestions.
The second level of women's media accountability strategy, which we can call the Public Education Level, seeks dissemination of women's own information to the general public assisted by women employed in mass media, who then pick up the issues for wider public discussion, debate, and decision-making. They press their editors, news directors, and managements for better coverage, urging the fullest possible reflection of women's diversity on each issue and reporting as directly as possible from the women themselves.
For example, when Sylvia Chase was made moderator of ABC Weekend News, her first story was about battered women and sexual abuse, the Francine Hughes case. Although a topic previously ignored by the male-dominated media, Chase learned about it from NOW and other women's organizations; they had begun to communicate their experiences an the subject among themselves and in their own media were writing extensively about battered women and sexual abuse. "The women's movement had geared up and raised money for Francine Hughes for her defense," Chase said, "and somehow there was an intuitive reason to do the story. Had it not been that I was a woman and had been wanting to do a story on wife-beating for many years, would it have happened?"
Other individual women journalists have also made important contribution at this second level of public education. Eileen Shanahan, for example, first persuaded the New York Times to begin covering Congressional hearings on women's issues and other government actions affecting women; White House correspondent Sarah McClendon at Presidential press conferences asked buried reports on sex bias in government and discrimination against women in the military, which then were given media coverage.
Although operating quite independently, the two levels are interdependent: the women at the second level of public education need the women at the first, the democracy level, to raise the issues loud and clear so that male editors and news directors see that it is "an issue" and assign coverage. And the women an the first level, with their outreach that can yield only limited progress, need help from women in mass media who have the mass audience necessary to do the public education job.
Women at both levels share a common goal: to increase the power to bring change and progress -- to offer new options to women and girls -- by reaching an ever larger number of people with new information. This is women's concept of social responsibility, women's news benefiting society as a whole, the female half and the male half.
Unfortunately much more information now stuck at the first level is needed by the general public so that viable political solutions can be found. For instance, the public does not know about and therefore cannot consider proposals that women have been offering for peace in the Middle East and in Ireland. The public is still ignorant of the extent of sexual slavery in the world and thus cannot take remedial action. Few yet know about the harm being done to women in foreign countries where drugs that have been banned in the United States are now being sold. The high social costs of discrimination, both to individual families and to society, are being ignored by mass media, as is also the disastrously inadequate funding for social programs.
The lack of media accountability to the majority has left many individual women unable to obtain information that exists but simply cannot reach them. For example, some years ago when women were injured, and many were dying, from use of the Dalkan Shield contraceptive device, the mass media reported the information only on their financial pages where the many lawsuits were shown to affect profits. Meanwhile hundreds of women continued for many more years to use the device, and be injured and die, because they lacked information about the harm and deaths it already had caused. Women did not have an adequate means of communication to disseminate their experience, to warn other women and the public of the danger. Yet this catastrophe could have been easily stopped years earlier if the male media owners had so wished. Only recently when a flawed batch of pain-killer drug Tylenol was discovered, within hours the findings were reported on national television, and the drug was recalled, preventing further injury and loss of life.
The lack of a means of communication to the public for women's information has had immeasurable other individual ill-effects on society. Employed mothers who do know where child care can be found (or about legislation proposed to provide it), suffer inadequate care, income loss, needless anxiety, and personal and family disruption. Those who do not know that a fair credit bill was passed, still assume they cannot get a loan and do not try.
Women who must support children or a disabled husband or a parent and do not know where to get help may not be able to take advantage of better-paid employment opportunities more suitable to their abilities. Society suffers, as well as women and their families, because there is no way to get to the general public this information it needs and, indeed, is looking for.
Conclusion
It is not necessary to deny any mass media owner his right to communicate whatever he wishes. But just because owners are wealthy enough to own the dissemination machinery should not entitle them to a say out of proportion to the rest of the population. In a democracy, communication -- because it is the way we participate in political decision-making --should be a citizen right, not a property right. We know well that the greater one's outreach to the public, the more influence he or she has on the final decisions. Thus in a democracy where all citizens have to be entitled to an equal opportunity to be heard, our major task becomes finding ways to equalize citizen outreach to the public. Reaching one's fellow citizens is a basic condition of democracy.
It is not only women who see the fallacy of the wealthy white male media owners presuming they can mirror society or speak for us. We all this fallacy or we would not be meeting here.
But we also see the raw political power of their exclusive access to the majority of the population and feel the need to bargain for at least some greater social responsibility. However, it is our task to make clear at the same time that we the public are not surrendering to them our right and our need to speak for ourselves.
For greater social responsibility in democracy, mass media should be moving, or be moved, toward a common carrier concept that provides politically equally citizens with equal opportunity for access to the public. That is, we expect mass media to be "responsible" not for telling others' information for them, but only for helping others reach the public to tell their own information.
Nevertheless, before such a day dawns, we in the meantime certainly can hold mass media owners accountable for the claims they specifically make when they assign themselves a democratic role in society. We can monitor and document the discrepancies between their claims of representing all of society and the reality -- that, of course, is just what the media accountability systems are doing. We, however, should also make clear to them that we do not expect the mass media to(in fact, that we do not believe they can) represent others in society, except by helping that 100% of the public to have an opportunity equal to that of the present owners to make their own case.
There are lessons here for ourselves as media accountability systems, too. We all should make a more conscious effort to help those parts of society be heard that we are still neglecting or ignoring. The M*A*S movement, for example, needs to become more aware of the investigative stories not yet being reported on the issues of the 51%, or the majority, of the population. One of the biggest "Lies of our Times" is the lie that there are no very serious women's issue problems. Even many of us in the media accountability movement have come to believe this lie. But failure to report them has not made the problems go away; it only makes them invisible. We do not see them, or we don't recognize them as investigative stories. In reality, making them invisible makes them worse. When the problems cannot get attention, they multiply and fester. For example, ignoring the extent of rape and violence against women, condones and encourages its further increase.
But hidden also, with perhaps worse consequences to society, are the remedies women are offering for a wide variety of society's problems. Looking at the sad status of much of the world's affairs, it seems clear that the insights and information of that ignored 51% of our populations surely would be useful.
Let us begin with our media accountability systems. Women offer the M*A*S movement from our experience a definition (1) of "social" to include all of society, not just those whom the mass media may have chosen to make visible, and (2) of" responsibility" as being mass media's greater obligation to democracy to see that all people can speak for themselves, to as many of their fellow citizens as do those who have enough money to buy access to the majority of the public.
To make it possible -- or work toward making it possible -- for each citizen to become responsible to ourselves for what we tell the public (or don't tell) is the only sense of "social responsibility" that works for a democracy. But that will require a new communication structure that makes access to the public -- an equal opportunity. It also provides a new kind of media accountability system.
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