Real Majority, Media Minority

Real Majority, Media Minority: The Cost of Sidelining Women in Reporting, Laura Flanders, Common Courage Press, 1997

Laura Flanders is an associate of the media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting); she writes for their magazine Extra! and hosts their nationally syndicated radio show, Counterspin. This first-rate book collects ten years of articles and interviews on the treatment of women by the mainstream media. While, numerically, there may be more women reporters, and while some women have risen to the top of the media world, like Diane Sawyer and Cokie Roberts, her assertion is that there has been little or no improvement in the treatment of average women by the mainstream media.

Flanders gives plenty of examples. A pundit spectrum that ranges from far right to almost center; the corporate PR campaign against women suffering from breast implant side effects; a welfare debate that shows great concern for children about to be thrown into poverty, but says nothing about women about to be forced into poverty; the Cairo conference on population, which turned into a battle between the Vatican and the Clinton Administration, with women excluded; the almost total lack of coverage of anti-gay and anti-abortion violence.

Flanders does an excellent job at documenting the shoddy treatment women have received by the national media. The writing is clear and eloquent, and leaves no room for misinterpretation. Highly recommended.