Video, and some audio, from the media reform conference
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Posted by Jennifer L Pozner January 18th, 2007 |
As I noted when I returned from the National Conference on Media Reform, women had a better experience at the 2007NCMR than at the 2005 NCMR, with a particularly passionate panel discussion titled, “There Is No Media Justice Without Women: Models For Feminist Media Action” (listen to the audio of the session here, moderated by myself, with co-panelists from Reclaim the Media, Texas Media Empowerment Project, Third World Majority and In These Times magazine) , an extremely vibrant Women’s Media Networking Breakfast (PDF) organized by Women In Media & News and the Women’s Media Fund at the Global Fund for Women, with more than twenty co-sponsors, and the Women’s Guide to the NCMR that WIMN distributed to make sense of it all.
While all that is undeniably positive, any increase in attention to women’s perspectives at all would frankly have been better than the embarrassing invisibility of women’s voices and concerns at both previous conferences.
To wit: of three days of multi-speaker plenary sessions and keynote talks, only four women delivered speeches from the mainstage, and of those, two were famous actresses, and only one was a woman of color. In a particularly telling visual illustration of the persistence in gender imbalance even in a good year, note that all the women who spoke during plenaries got less time to do so than their male counterparts:
Jane Fonda: 25:10
Geena Davis: 22:15
Amy Goodman: 13:58
Deepa Fernandes: 11:42 (Read a transcript)
Now, while some of the NCMR’s many male speakers came in under 20 minutes, compare the time given to the women above to that of the NCMR’s more heavily-prioritized male speakers:
Bill Moyers: 63:17
Reverend Jesse Jackson: 42:08
Senator Bernie Sanders: 29:21
Van Jones: 27:48
Congressman Ed Markey: 24:58
… not to mention the many men who spoke in addition to these, for equivalent or shorter periods of time.
During her plenary session talk, Deepa Fernandes said that “Media justice is about changing who is at the table at every single level.” So true. I’d propose that it’s also about making sure that each person seated at the table - and each constituency they represent - has an equal seat… and that they’re not at the kiddie table near the kitchen, with the wobbly legs and the leftover pie…
I’ll post a deeper analysis of the content of the conference at some point soon. Stay tuned.
January 21st, 2007 05:31
This is quite possibly the most ridiculous blog post ever. Are you really serious? You come away from a conference of that size and scope and all you can do is complain? Did you listen to Van Jones’ speech or is he insignificant because he’s male? Does it occur to you that keynote speakers generally go over time limits - if Free Press set limits for anyone, how do you know they didn’t run over their allotted time. Or maybe they didn’t set limits and that’s how long each chose to speak. I really can’t believe you’re even wasting time blogging about this. Are you funded to do that? And I didn’t see Geena Davis there as just a “famous actress” but as a feminist leader in media issues and, if I remember correctly, she had the most prominent spot of the night. And can you really say that Jane Fonda is more of an actor than an activist? I don’t know why you need to insult them for being actors anyway. I was lucky enough to attend this conference and am pretty disgusted that after this group spent the time, money and energy to bring people together across a movement, you’re wasting and knocking the effort by worthless conjecture. I hope your work takes greater meaning in the future.
January 21st, 2007 07:09
Noting the realities of inclusion verses marginalization, diversity verses tokenism, is not “complaining,” it’s honest reflection about the positives and the negatives of working together in coalition, of sizing up a young media reform movement to see how much it has learned, how much it has grown, over the past five years and three conferences, and seeing where there is still room for growth.
As I have said in numerous radio interviews and in other posts to this blog, Free Press did a much better job this year than in the past about incorporating spaces for women and people of color to be a part of the NCMR this year, in the panel sessions. However, there can be no argument the main plenary sessions are what set the tone for the entire event, they are what all the 3000+ attendees are able to attend, what get broadcast (with video) throughout the globe, etc. And in those sessions, men who had important things to say were asked to say them — women who had important things to say had to be famous in order to say them. I have *nothing* - not one thing - bad to say about Jane Fonda, or about Geenda Davis. They both founded and co-founded, respectively, two new groups on women and media issues, the first being the Women’s Media Center, the second being See Jane. Both the WMC and See Jane have important missions, and their founders are not vapid Hollywood celebrities but intelligent, insightful women with strong messages. And, Jane Fonda’s speech, in particular, was stellar - extremely powerful and useful.
However, there were hundreds of intelligent, insightful women with strong, important messages, women from the actual media movements who are going groundbreaking, landscape-shifting work at the grassroots level all over the country, women who addressed small panel sessions, and the content of discussions by those media activist women would arguably have been just as or possibly significantly more relevant to the 3000+ plenary sessions (as the plenaries are supposed to be growing a movement). But they didn’t get that chance, since they are not famous… and not for lack of suggestions from women’s groups to the conference organizers beforehand. If you notice, the famous celebrity women - who, yes, had important things to say - did not stay at the conference and talk with women. They went on stage, said their piece and left. There’s another model, a movement model, that could have been more useful. Geena Davis was not brought in, as you guess, because she is “a feminist leader” in media issues. She’s an intelligent, powerful actress who has recently become involved in media issues. There are, however, hundreds of active feminist leaders in media issues who have been doing the work for years - some for decades - who have a greater grasp of what the entire media landscape looks like and what has to happen to chance it… but the actual leaders of the feminist media movement were not there. (Jane Fonda, though a late arrival to feminist media leadership, gave a speech that did speak to the landscape, which I very much appreciated.) But there is no question that these actresses - while they have used their positions of celebrity positively - were brought in for their celebrity, not for the body of their work. If it were the body of their work that appealed, there were actual grassroots leaders who would have been invited to speak from the main stage.
A persistent problem within left movements is that we often replicate the problems that we say we’re critiquing. Whether it’s the underrepresentation of women writers and wwriters of color in progressive magazines, or the fact that we critique corporate America for keeping women and people of color out of higher level power positions and authority slots via discriminatory/biased hiring and promotion practicies, these problems are too often replicated within our own movements, which, sadly, hold a different standard for the success and competance of women and people of color: we have to be better, smarter, work harder, accomplish more and, in this case, be more famous, in order to get not even an equal share but a smaller share of the attention/power.
I will say this: the perceptions I’ve shared publicly are informed by my attempts and others’ attempts to address these concerns privately before the conference, so that actual and perceived inequities did not have to occur. Those efforts brough some success in the panel sessions, but not as much with the plenaries.
P.S., Carrie: No, we’re not funded to blog. (As for our work taking on more meaning, we created a Women’s Guide to the NCMR and distributed 1,500 copies to help women at the conference? We also organized a networking space for women media activists, women journalists and allied men, so that they could gather together, begin to meet one another and strategize with one another, and build connections that would last post-NCMR. We also organized and moderated a women and media justice panel that was the first of its kind at any of the three NCMRs. You can listen online if you wish, the link is in a previous post. There were many positive aspects of this conference, but the fact that there needs to be more — we’re not creating the problem, we’re voicing the concerns of women, in particular women of color, who told us throughout the NCMR that they felt marginalized.)
January 21st, 2007 09:23
jpozner said:
“Jane Fonda’s speech, in particular, was stellar - extremely powerful and useful.”
You must have gone back to listen to the speech, because as Kim Gandy was introducing Jane, and through part of Fonda’s speech, weren’t you on the radio, sitting next to the stage, harping on how uninclusive the conference was?
I hope you appreciate the irony of you highlighting the lack of women at NCMR07 while Kim Gandy of NOW was introducing Jane Fonda.
Yes, everyone who speaks to a room of 3000 is usually a celebrity, regardless of the conference. So what? That’s how you draw a crowd.
“I have a complaint”…
January 21st, 2007 09:59
Tidbit: I had only agreed to do that Pacific show if they agreed to let me get off the air before Fonda’s speech - and when it dragged on into Kim’s intro, I kept the radio headphones on to be able to participate in the end of the conversation, but turned around to read the closed-captioning of her speech on the big screen behind the radio area. I was able to get off air about two or three minutes into her speech, so I did actually catch the whole thing - the first two or three minutes via reading the captions, the rest as all the rest of you did. I also relistened to the whole thing in its entirety afterward, via the MP3.
And no, not everyone who speaks to a room of 3,000 is a celebrity. There were a good number of men there who were not celebrities at all. (Of course, some - like Bill Moyers and Jesse Jackson - were, and there’s nothing wrong with that.) My critique rests in the fact that the women had to be superstars of Hollywood or of the Left, with only one exception (”Wake Up Call” host Deepa Fernandes), while the men had much more leeway to come from a variety of backgrounds: politicians, broadcasters, community activists, indy media producers, preachers, etc. The women didn’t have that leeway; that’s just a fact.
Another thing that is just a fact is that women were only four plenary speakers over three days: far, far from equity. Sad that you have a problem with me talking about that on-air, as the solution to underrepresentation of women’s voices is more airing of women’s voices. Also, if you listened to that radio clip, you’d also have heard me talk about the good work that was done at the conference, the steps forward women were making, and the reasons why gender and racial inclusion are not just equity issues but are content-wise crucial to the success of the media reform movement - which is supposed to be what we’re all working for, yes?
Love the irony of you calling *me* a “hater” for highlighting these issues. Amusing.
Oh, and love the word “harping.” People use that word about men all the time, don’t they? Not so much…