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Males Manipulate the Mass Media
If Women Had More Media Would the
Press Be More Free?
Women Strike for Peace MEMO
Spring, 1973
Vol. 3, No. 2
New York, NY
Editor: Amy Swerdlow
By Donna Allen
From the start, Women Strike for Peace was dealing with a communications problem. First we tried to communicate our plea for peaceful policies directly to our government both the President and Congress; then, when there was insufficient response, we realized we had to direct our message to the public in order to win wider support.
Because the mass media did not agree with our views, we thought up clever gimmicks and dramatic marches to catch the TV camera's eye and trick it into conveying our message to the public.
It worked at first, because we were a novelty.
But soon the media had us programmed into their own view. As they then reported us, we became unpatriotic extremists and kooks, bent on destroying the very fabric of society. The more outrageous our gimmicks, the more outrageously we were portrayed to the public.
I went home from demonstrations feeling humiliated. It seemed inherently undignified, as a citizen in a democracy, to have to beg to be allowed to communicate with my fellow citizens. Why in a country with the world's most sophisticated communications technology did I have to reduce my message to five words on a picket sign and march in the public streets? I imagine this is how John William Ward, president of Amherst, felt when he engaged in civil disobedience, saying, "What I protest is there is no way to protest."
Our harassment value was considerable, but the message was not coming across. News accounts reported how many people attended the demonstrations, how many police were on hand, how many arrests were made, where the speakers' table was located and the busses parked, how people were dressed, even their average age, and what the counterpickets had to say. But our message was little more than an occasional sentence, scarcely enough to convert anyone. For example, it might say only, "The women were protesting the bombing of North Vietnam as 'brutal' and 'genocidal.'
In reality, this was mass censorship news while believing they were receiving all available data.
Several years before they "discovered" the information in the Pentagon Papers, the media had heard us speaking and discussing that same information at our rallies and in our teach-ins, in our publications and leaflets, and even in our press conferences scheduled to try to get them to report it directly.
Today they acknowledge this fact, but over the years, the media also blacked out the first-hand reports our women brought back from Hanoi that morale there was strong. Instead, they reported the Pentagon view that North Vietnam was exhibiting "a sense of weakness and failure."
Almost 90 per cent of the press editorially favored the Vietnam war; they simply did not want our information. The public's highly-touted "right to know" was a "right" to know only what the media wanted to tell it.
Why did the media like the war so much? The answer is not hard to find, in my view. I see war as a male phenomenon, reflecting what Simone de Beauvoir calls men's "compulsion to dominate."
The House Armed Services Committee that authorized the war-making machinery consisted of 41 men. Fifty-four men and one woman on the House Appropriations Committee recommended the appropriations for it. In the Senate these two committees were made up, respectively, of one woman and 15 men and 23 men and the same one woman. Their recommendation were passed by a 97 percent male House of Representatives and a 99 per cent male Senate.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff are all men. The decision-makers in the White House and Cabinet on defense and foreign policy are males. Men decided to drop napalm. Men chose to devastate the forests rather than see another country succeed as communist. Men chose to protect investments at the cost of thousands of lives. War is a man's game.
We know all this, but how was the ugly war conveyed to the people as a palatable, reasonable, necessary, even a good thing? What isn't known so well is that the mass media, source of almost all of the public's information, is also a male Establishment.
The top job category, the officials and managers who determine what the public will see on 609 commercial television stations, consists of 4,985 men but only 530 women. The networks themselves have boards of directors and officers consisting of 2 women out of 39 at CBS, 3 out of 62 at NBC, and 1 out of 26 at ABC. Of the up to 50 stockholders in each network who hold 1 per cent or more of the stock, none of the three has more than four women, except where their investments are managed by banks or trust companies.
The Associated Press and United Press International, which provide almost all of the country's national and international news for both print and broadcast media, are exclusively male in the topmost posts. Of the 36 Associated Press bureau chiefs and 37 chiefs of communications, for example, not one is a woman. In the 28 AP foreign service bureaus, all of the bureau heads and chief correspondents are men. UPI also employs no women in these jobs in its foreign service bureaus.
This men's news which then comes to the 7,500 broadcast stations and 1,750 daily newspapers is selectived again by men. For example, although the owner of the Washington Post is a woman, the 10 managing editors are all men. The 9 news desk editors in finance and other special sections of the paper are men. Of the metropolitan, national and foreign desk editors, there are 3 women and 50 men. Of critics in the Style section, 7 are men and 1 person employed part-time is a woman. One does not have to turn the pages very far back to find the Post editorials supporting the war in Vietnam, the bombing of the North, the view that the war is a struggle between communism and the free world, the belief that Hanoi could not hold out too much longer, and that the Southeast Asia area was vital to American interests. Conflicting information was effectively censored out.
The networks and local broadcasting stations refused to put peace programs on the air even when they were paid for as ads, although they did not call this censorship.
Would women have done differently? If you can imagine all the Pentagon decision-makers being women instead of men, would those women have ordered the napalming in Vietnam? If the House of Representatives consisted of 218 women and 217 men, or suppose there were 99 women Senators and one man Senator, instead of the reverse, do you think that Congress would have voted the money to bomb North Vietnam? I do not believe they would.
If women were in the jobs of men in the media, or even in half of them, would they define news as conflict, attack, and violence? Would they give automatic headlines to name-calling? Would women exclude views other than their own? I do not believe we would.
If we are to prevent the recurrence of war and if we are to live in peace with our neighbors at home and abroad, we must keep the channels of communication open. We should constitute ourselves a continuing review board against private censorship of the public's information. Women in some cities are already monitoring their broadcast stations to take action necessary to see that they operate in the public interest: all information is in the public interest. Since monopoly conditions prevail in the mass communication industry, the threat of private censorship is always present.
The Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press intends to explore these questions and to ask what the role of women might be in facilitating the free flow of everyone's information. We believe that the First amendment intended that all Americans have freedom of the press, not just those who own the media.
Donna Allen was a founder and leading activist in Washington WSP for many years. She has an MA in Economics, which she taught at Cornell University in the 1950s, and a doctorate in United States Economic History. Her book, Fringe Benefits: Wages or Social Obligation? was published by Cornell University Press. She has two other books in the works, one on the mass media and national health insurance, and the other on women and the mass media. Donna Allen is presently the director of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press, an organization doing historical and economic research on the structure of the mass communications industry in the U.S.
Spring, 1973
Vol. 3, No. 2
1940 Calvert Street, NW
Washington, DC 20009-1502
email: allen [at] wifp.org
phone: 202-265-6707
www.wifp.org