FSD Newsletter Spring 2002 - Facing Goliath: Feminism and communication policy

Women and Media Policy

In late March, more than 60 feminists demonstrated outside the offices of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington DC to protest the agency's February ruling that further dismantles regulations against media mergers and acquisitions in the cable and television industries.

The demonstration was the latest move by a growing US feminist lobby to oppose US government communications policy, which for 15 years has promoted media concentration of unimaginable proportions, both in the US and across the globe.

Heading the lobby is Jennifer Pozner, a longtime media activist, who sought feminist endorsements for the March 22 citizen protest through e-mail petitions.

Women's opposition to events like these has never been very vocal or well organized. Therefore, Pozner's newly founded feminist media watchdog group, Women in Media and News (WIMN), assumes much needed grassroots leadership to raise a feminist analysis of the situation and to call for women to join a growing movement for media policy reform.

In the US, that movement has coalesced under a number of groups, including Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), Institute for Public Accuracy, Media Access Group and Media Education Foundation, among others. Most of the leaders in these groups are progressive men who recognize the threat to democratic freedoms associated with fewer and fewer corporate media conglomerates.

At present, there are six giants - AOL Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, Bertelsmann, Vivendi, and News Corporation - that own the majority of telecommunications (i.e., cable, telephone, broadcast, Internet sites, etc.), book publishing, newspapers, magazines, and other media industries in the world. Half of these are US-based, which makes any activist movement for policy reform of relevance to people everywhere. These developments also expand opportunities for US-based feminists to develop strategies and working relationships with their counterparts around the world.

Providing an Historical Context

While women's interests have always been imbedded in the issues surrounding the concentration-of-ownership problem, these interests have been slow to emerge with any specificity in leftist critiques or calls for political change. Identifying "women's interests" requires us to consider both macro- and micro-level domains of media concentration.

The macro-level domain is defined by gender relations in ownership and control. By the mid 1990s, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) had identified telecommunications industries as providing the structural backbone to the global economy. These industries serve as the conduits for both financial information and transfer of capital; in addition, they provide the technical delivery system for entertainment, news and intellectual content throughout the world.

In 1996, the US Congress passed, and then-President Bill Clinton signed into law, the Telecommunications Act after little floor debate and only minimal organized citizen opposition. The law took away most limits of who could own how much and what kind in both print and telecommunication media companies, thereby inspiring what has accurately been called an era of mergermania that continues even now.

Media Concentration and Women at the Macro Level

Communication industries are the most lucrative of all, generating profits of more than $2 trillion by the mid 1990s, a figure double their profits a decade earlier. But where are women in the world of high rollers?

To be sure, women have never been big financial players in the media world, but their presence and involvement today is noticeably miniscule. Though there is the occasional (now late) Katharine Graham, who inherited the Washington Post upon the death of her husband Phil, women's names are seldom found among the largest stock holders or corporate executives in major media companies today. Few rise to the status of Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Officer Carly Fiorina. Indeed, a count of women at the board and executive levels in five of the big six found a total of 13. The sixth, the German-based Bertelsmann A.G., had none.

Feminist activists and scholars have been largely silent about the impact of concentrated ownership, even though it clearly affects the bigger economic picture for women throughout the world. Consolidated wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer rich white men has an impact on women's ability to gain resources or status necessary to full participation and decision making in both private and public sectors everywhere. That media concentration has both a gender and a race suggests a complex feminist political-economic analysis of these industries, in particular, and a broad activist agenda aimed at national and international policies to give women greater power and voice.

Sociologist Saskia Sassen (1998) opens up analytical terrain to feminist scholars in this regard. In Globalization and Its Discontents, she suggests we consider not just women's roles at the top but also at the bottom of the global economy, with a special focus on communication industries, which she recognizes as central to global processes. Factories located in developing nations around the world, employ mostly women in low-paid positions to assemble electronics gear and other telecommunications equipment. Their labor, Sassen indicates, forms the base of the global economy, though it remains unorganized, relatively invisible and silent.

Between those at the top and those at the bottom, exists a layer of better paid women in the service occupations of telecommunication industries. Female employees, who make up the majority of the rank-and-file workers in U.S.-based companies like Verizon, AT&T and other telephone, broadcasting, cable TV, publishing, electronics, and related fields today. Here women have made higher wages and benefits than women in other service sectors since the mid 1990s. A 1995 study by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, Washington D.C., reported that women in non-supervisory telecommunications employment earned about $27,040 annually -- twice the $13,000 median for other women in the service sector. Similarly, minorities in these fields earned nearly twice as much as minorities in other service jobs. A causal factor, the mid-'90s study said, was union representation.

Telecommunications is the only female-dominated private-sector service industry in which about half the work force belongs to a union. In a phone interview in late summer 2001, Debbie Goldman, research economist for the Washington D.C.-based Communications Workers of America, emphasized that her union does not oppose mergers in the industry per se. In fact, she said, it encourages mergers between companies that are pro-union.

In this view, the benefits to women (and men) in a larger, stronger unionized workforce suggest that communication mergers, in some instances, may have merit. The size of a paycheck, job security, adequate benefits, and power to negotiate with one's employer are all hugely important, to be sure. The role of organized labor regarding women's well-being in media concentration, therefore, is one worth investigating further.

Media Concentration and Women at the Micro Level

In the micro-level domain of media concentration, the harms to women are perhaps easier to spot, problematize, theorize and study. Media representation - in news and television entertainment programming mostly - is visible and able to be monitored routinely. We are more aware of what we see and hear where the larger political and economic structures are elusive, overarching, overwhelming.

Not surprisingly, feminist activism and scholarship have focused primarily on women's representation since the 1970s, with special concern for women's invisibility, silence and misrepresentation in mainstream media. Less attention has been given to the macro-level structural relations forming the context for these messages and images. Feminist protests and intervention strategies alike have most often been concerned with increasing the amount and quality of news and programming about women than addressing the policies or other underpinnings that shaped the nature of message and image in the first place.

This is not to dismiss the seriousness of the representational issues. We can consider, for instance, the near-disappearance of women in print and broadcast news about present-day wars and conflicts, for instance. War, itself a powerful institution manifesting men's violence, as well as economic and political alliances, shapes both local and world events at a rapid rate and affects the lives of millions of women. There was never a historical moment more in need of women's analyses. Similarly, the increased amount of nudity and graphic sexuality in television, and the proliferation of sexual and other violence in film and television, affirm the relevance of feminist activism and research that examines, questions and reveals new understanding of men's and women's relations through media content.

Feminist Interventions

Also to be remembered are women's gains in strategic interventions into communication industries, as well as the successful establishment of their own alternative media. In the latter category are the thousands of personal and organizational websites constructed for the purpose of circulating women's own news and analyses. Though users must seek out most of these intentionally, others provide free or subscription-based information through periodic listservs. The Internet is arguably feminists' best organizing tool today, a communicative site whose true utility is only beginning to be realized or studied. From the standpoint of political activism, feminists will need to remain vigilant and involved in seeing that the Internet remains affordable and available for our needs.

Also frequently overlooked is the possibility of older technologies like community radio. Paula Chakravartty, a communications professor at University of California - San Diego, said that in India, like many developing nations, radio and the Internet still offer the greatest hope to women. A strong feminist movement in India has moved on both fronts, she said, with women securing local community radio licenses to reach rural and preliterate women, and setting up websites to reach those who are educated. Seeing itself as a high-tech center, and with a national literacy rate over 60%, the Indian government has set up computer kiosks on the streets of major cities, Chakravartty said, to increase citizen access to the Internet.

Feminist media democracy is something that calls feminist activists and scholars throughout the world, if we are to arrive at a deeper understanding of the issues of media concentration, as well as an analysis and strategy for action. Tying these elements together, Jennifer Pozner said:

" . . the implications for diverse representation, local coverage, equal access to media and independent perspectives are dire when media consolidation continues at a break-neck pace. Parodying and speaking out against the FCCj's lack of concern for public-interest matters, the protest aims to force the FCC to re-examine what the public wants and needs and how to create a truly democratic media system." (Pozner, e-mail correspondence, 3/5/02)

This article has tried to sketch out some of the central issues and parameters for creating a tighter working relationship between feminist communication activists and scholars. Undoubtedly much has been omitted, glossed over or misrepresented. Your critiques and additions are invited.