Media and Elections/Governance

This section of the fourth edition of the Gender and Media Diversity Journal, published by the Gender and Media Diversity Centre, explores elections and governance including: paradoxical images of women in the post-election media coverage in Kenya; the relationship of women, politics, and the media; and gender balance in the Russian media during election campaigns.


It contains the following articles:

Wailing Women, Marching Men: The Paradox of Women in the Post-Election Kenyan Press by Simiyu Barasa

This article addresses the image of women in the media, particularly in the press coverage of the December 2007 Kenyan post-election violence. The author states that women are generally represented as powerless victims of violence perpetrated by men. From the abstract: "During times of conflict, the media shows women as subordinated persons. In the case of the reportage of the Kenyan violence, one can go further to see how such imaging of women is manipulated to push certain agendas and the various contradictions when the media presents women as victims, yet makes them invisible in the attempts to seek peace and solve the conflict. While women are victims of the violence in the pages of the print media, voices in the radio and footage in TV News, men have more prominence in the articulation of violence."

The Role of Activism in Shaping Public Policy: The Case of the Women in Politics Support Unit by Sibongile Mpofu

According to the abstract of this article: "This paper seeks to analyse the role of women’s activism in Zimbabwe, with special focus on Women in Politics Support Unit (WIPSU), in advocating for social change and whether the media has been a willing partner in this cause." The author uses statistics from the WIPSU for the period July-September 2007 to show that women in politics and decision-making positions are still not given enough coverage by the media, despite a rise in the number of women seeking seats in local council elections in Zimbabwe, among other indicators of an increased gender balance in politics. The author concludes that: "Media is one of the pillars of society, expected to play its democratic role rather than categorising. It is expected to change negative mindsets in society. With the rise of civil society and the consciousness on the rights of individuals or groups, the media’s role is expected to even go further by assisting these civil organisations and acting as a platform for their protests."

Gender in Russian Media during Election Campaigns by Tatiana Frolova, Olga Smirnova, Elena Vartanova

In this article, the authors address the position and image of Russian women in the Russian mass media. They claim that the low presence of women in the media reflects a low degree of women's participation in public policy, including "one of the most urgent problems of gender policy – the formation of gender tolerance in modern Russian journalism." The article describes the authors' gender-related content analysis of media texts during an election period. They conclude: "...the ...study reflects the controversy of gender consciousness: society feels and sees these problems, the mass media show that it is high time they became an important point on the political agenda. However, both the politicians’ and experts’ community do not pay enough attention to them. They still view social problems overall and gender problems in particular as something not important enough to be used in politics fully. Only an insignificant part of the texts covering the election campaign was devoted to the subject of gender, and the political platform did not reflect the topic adequately."