The Female Face of Poverty: Media and the Gender Divide in the Millennium Development Goals

2005 is a banner year for global partnerships and transnational feminist dialogues. It is the ten-year anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and also the fifth anniversary of the United Nations’ ongoing Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), regarded by international leaders as a unifying framework which sustains the Beijing and other social agendas. The MDGs, what the UN calls a “measure of political will,À may be perceived as a switch from traditionally patriarchal or Orientalist approaches which construct culturally victimized “otherÀ women requiring “helpÀ as opposed to people being actively engaged in decision-making. Instead, MDG principles require participatory dialogue among countries so that results address needs. Using feminist framings, this study examines news agency reporting of more than 2,000 reports that specifically mention “Millennium Development Goals” from five international news agencies. Two are western agencies – the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. Two are based in developing regions – the PanAfrican News Agency and China’s Xinhua agency. The fifth is Inter Press Service, an independent NGO that specializes in news relevant to developing regions. The reports cover a 19-month period from the World Social Forum in January, 2004, to the end of the UN Summit in September, 2005. The analysis includes news geography, topics, and actors; for instance, we determined the amount of attention to feminist issues accorded by each agency. While this study explores links between women, social issues, and the media, it also directs attention to new identities and agendas emerging from MDG coverage.

Publisher: Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Dresden International Congress Centre, Dresden, Germany, Online
Year of Publication: 2008