The trick for feminists has long been to keep one eye keenly fixed to the deeper problems afflicting us while letting the other eye see signs of progress. The prickly but familiar dialectical relationship of progress and recalcitrance have left many of us cross-eyed through the years.

So it is again with the findings in the Global Report on the Status of Women in News Media that was published earlier this spring by the project’s sponsor International Women’s Media Foundation.

As a result of a court decision last week, women and people of color have an open door to advocate for media policy that will serve to expand their media ownership.

Finding women and people of color in the long-awaited Federal Communications Commission report The Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age is an exercise in near futility. The 478-page report integrates details on the status of various media platforms and assesses mediated informational needs by communities within the United States in the years to come, ending with a short chapter on recommendations.

Yet those of us know through experience that when women and people of color are omitted or barely mentioned in such a comprehensive undertaking, their interests are most certainly not going to be part of any structural changes. If Congress and the FCC follow this report, the future of media promises to be as white and male as the present.

I was among more than 20 individuals and 25 organizations to petition the FCC’s Media Bureau on February 2nd to make public the current ownership data, with respect to women and minorities, for broadcast stations in the US.

The letter bearing our signatures asked FCC Chairman Julius Genakowski and Commissioners Michael J. Copps, Robert M. McDowell, Mignon Clyburn, and Meredith Attwell Baker to release ownership data, which contains gender and race information. The FCC has not made such data available since 2006.

Timing is everything.

When I heard that Hazel Trice Edney was leaving the National Newspaper Association (NNPA) (www.nnpa.org) as editor in chief a few weeks ago to start her own electronic news service, I thought, “Why now?” But in my heart, I knew why. Her talent and vision for Black journalism had already moved into the future, and she needed the freedom to lead it to a new conclusion.

I found my first job in 1963 by looking through the “jobs for women” section of the classified ads in the local Colorado Springs newspapers. It would take another decade for those gender-segregated ads to disappear, and then only because National Organization for Women had filed its landmark complaint against the now defunct Pittsburgh Press . That case went would go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and result in the 1973 ruling saying the practice was illegal.

Malibongwe – a word in the Zulu and !Xhosa languages meaning “let the women be praised,” roused the 180 delegates attending the third Gender and Media (GEM) Summit (http://www.genderlinks.org.za/page.php?p_id=400) to action, in Johannesburg, August 10-12.

Among the issues on the table at that meeting was a draft policy on gender equity in the media.

I’m reflecting on Lynn Ziegler’s story in Women’s eNews of 4/2/08 about women’s low representation in television. She was reporting on the event sponsored by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, held at University of Southern California a few weeks ago at which numerous presenters recounted what is by now a familiar tale of how few women there really are on screen to symbolize what amounts to half the human population.

Why do the news media ignore our annual March 8 commemoration of women, International Women’s Day?

Our nation has before it both a civil rights and women’s rights crisis in media ownership. Our failed federal communications policy has enabled those with great wealth and power to buy and control more than 90% of our public airwaves. These powerful owners have a narrow demographic: They are nearly all male and all white. This predicament of gender and racial inequality in ownership is discriminatory on its face.