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Women activists have shown that obstacles to progress take many forms.
What is the point of drawing up policies to make women's riahts central to national development when, at the same time, negative stereotyping of women goes on daily in the national press and on television?
Women's rights campaigners in several Arab countries are organizing today to end this anomaly. They are exposing the negative aspects of media messages and working to overcome the hurdles facing women journalists and to empower them to counter the negativity. A multiplicity of deterrents means the campaign has to take place on several fronts.
Paradoxically, as I realized while researching a report on women in the Arab media for a media freedom center in London, the challenge facing women has become more daunting as the number of Arabic-language media outlets has increased. A popular perception has arisen in recent years that women are everywhere in the Arabic-language media, above all as glamorous news presenters on satellite television channels. The proliferation of Arab-owned satellite channels has also generated an increase in airtime for advertising, with commercials featuring women in large numbers mainly as impressionable consumers, decorative objects or cleaners and cooks. Indeed, in terms of both numbers and images, it seems that women's growing presence on Arab television, far from ending their subordination in the media, might be reinforcing it.
Evidence collected by Lebanese reporter May Elian and others supports this concern. It suggests that women are used by the appearance-conscious visual media to attract viewers. Worse still, they are used in a way that associates women with a superficial role, in the sense of reading from other people's scripts or delivering "just one question" reports.
Print journalism, in contrast, is still seen as a male domain because it involves "hard work" and needs to be "taken seriously." Elian presented comparative data to a seminar on Gender and Communication Policy held in Beirut in the run-up to the U.N. Assembly's Special Session on Women in 2000. She found that, whereas the dominant Lebanese television stations have many more women than men on their news desks, the gender ratio on newspapers is quite the reverse. Women media professionals surveyed by the Beirut-based Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab...