Who makes the news? Mirror on the Southern African findings of the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP)

Southern Africa has made significant progress towards achieving greater gender balance in the news and in newsrooms, but it still far achieving equality by any one of the measures used in the third Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP). While women sources have increased from 17% in the regional Gender and Media Baseline Study (GMBS) conducted by Gender Links (GL) and the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) in 2002 to 19% in the GMMP conducted across 76 countries in 2005, this is below the global average of 21%. The study, released in London on 16 February 2006, is a snapshot of the representation and portrayal of women and men in the news on one day of the year that has been conducted every five years since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. It covered 13,000 news items. The GMBS is a far more in-depth regional study that covered a month of monitoring and 25,000 news items and will be repeated again in 2007. While the GMMP is less accurate than the GMBS because it is based on monitoring for just one day, the fact that all 13 Southern African countries participated in the global study and provided 8% of the news items monitored makes the regional findings of the GMMP a useful benchmark for the region.

ISBN: 0-620-36015-1
Publisher: Gender Links
Year of Publication: 2006