A Network of Women in the Media

Reprinted with permission from the Indian Express,Sunday Magazine, February 10, 2002

A Network of Women in the Media

``I wasn¿t paid for three months. When I asked my editor, he said `the municipal  elections are due, you will be getting money from the candidates anyway.¿¿

``Can we call those stringers `bichari¿ who sleep with the editor and then decide who gets hired and fired?¿¿

``Soft¿ stories are actually those which require the hardest work, whereas `hard¿ political stories require the least.¿¿

``The entire Manipuri press closed down for a week, and not a word appeared in the so-called national press.¿¿

``No rural reporting - a written directive saying this was sent to the newsroom.¿¿

``When Delhi was paralyzed with workers blocking the streets, not one paper thought fit to send a reporter to talk to the workers. They remained a faceless mass inconveniencing the lives of the middle class.¿¿

Does a forum exist for media professionals to discuss such issues? Working conditions and sexual harassment, professional ethics and current trends in the media?

Well, it just got formed. Last week, more than 100 mediawomen from 16 states got together in Delhi to launch the Network of Women in the Media (NWM), India. The three-day workshop initiated by a group of concerned women journalists, facilitated by the Bangalore-based NGO Voices and supported by UNESCO, saw women debating not just issues concerning them as female media professionals, but also issues concerning the current state of the media as a whole.

It¿s not just women journalists who don¿t get paid for months, be it in AP or Bihar, or who face the brunt of militants and the army in the North East. But there exists no forum for journalists to raise these concerns, let alone try and do something about them.

Journalists¿ unions are weak, as they are in all sectors these days, and Press Clubs are nothing more than drinking joints where occasionally a good press conference is organized. A case in point is the large turnout of both male and female journalists at the only panel discussion in Mumbai on the media¿s coverage of the Afghan War last year, which was organised by the informal women¿s journalists group there.

The coverage of Kargil and the current war hysteria in the media came up more than once in the Delhi workshop, with one participant from Bihar criticizing both as a ``celebration of war¿¿, specially on TV, with minimum coverage given to its consequences, not just in terms of casualties, but also for civilians, for example,