THE VOLUNTARY Media Council of Zimbabwe (VMCZ) has negatively portrayed the country’s mainstream media and also pointed out that women were still highly marginalised.
Presenting its findings on a research it conducted in collaboration with the Danish, Norwegian and Dutch embassies about media diversity in the country at the National University of Science and Technology yesterday, the VMCZ said women were victims of the media as they were negatively portrayed and excluded in developmental issues.
After conducting a qualitative research through contextual analysis, literature review, desk research and media
monitoring, the VMCZ researchers concluded that the mainstream media coverage of gender-related issues and women in general left a lot to be desired.
VMCZ Media Committee ethics chairperson Tapfuma Machakaire said negative portrayal of women in the mainstream media was a cancerous abnormality that affected ethics in many media houses.
“It came to our attention as we were conducting researches on media diversity that women are negatively portrayed in the media.
“From these findings we came to a conclusion that the way gender and women’s issues are portrayed in the media affects ethics in the day-to-day coverage of news reports,” Machakaire said.
He also said the public is concerned about how the media fails to prioritise issues affecting women in their coverage. There are some issues involving women that the media should look at.
“Take, for instance, issues of maternal deaths — they are issues worthy telling the public so that something can be done to prevent such misfortunes, but you rarely find such issues in the media,” he said.
The media is accused of turning a blind eye on issues that affect women, but is quick in publishing bad things women do in society.
The Netherlands embassy senior policy officer Joylyn Ndoro said they chose media diversity in this year’s theme because of the power the media has to empower people.
“We chose media diversity as this year’s theme because people can be empowered through the media,” Ndoro said.
“After realising how women were being negatively portrayed, we then decided to take this campaign to challenge the media to empower women through positive publicity and including them in developmental issues,” she said.
Negative portrayal and exclusion of women from the national discourse has for long remained a tapeworm that needs to be eliminated in modern day society as it still resembles patriarchy.
After a successful campaign, Ndoro said they hoped the media would become a platform of empowerment for marginalised women in the national discourse-The Southern Eye
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