M. Appeal (Mass Appeal)

I’ve been reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s eat, pray, love and it’s driving me insane. A colleague recently pointed out Gilbert’s TED lecture and I got interested. Somehow I had missed the phenomenon of Gilbert’s book, which she is quick to point out in her talk.

A simplistic description of her book is that it is a memoir of her spiritual journey after a divorce. It’s more than that, but sometimes less. So much of her lament, to my mind, is simply about being young, too smart for her own good and nubile. She tries to be self-effacing but one gets the impression that it is false modesty, and she falls into — and I know she would want to slap me silly for this one — traditionally sexist depictions of herself. Aren’t I cute that I just eat all the time and don’t mind a whit that I’ve gained a few pounds? I was so skeletal and wan before — the divorce, you know. Isn’t everything I experience in my spiritual journey just the most, the best, the biggest, the most god awful, and don’t forget soul-crushing event you can imagine? Don’t my bathroom-floor crying jags and ragged public blubbering make me an amazingly emotional intellectual free spirit?

Of course, I feel guilty for that last one since Gilbert suffers from depression and has alcoholism in her family, but, uh, doesn’t everyone – have both of those, I mean.

But now I’m actually hooked on the book because the good part of her writing is really good. She’s out there on so many human issues and dilemmas that normal people just don’t talk about. A lot of it is about god and spirituality, and even if you’re turned off by stuff like that, she’s at heart an intellectual (despite her protestations), so her take on all of it is quite palatable, especially if you’ve ever at least been intrigued by questions of religion, meditation, and/or other existential quests.

Her book is on my mind, and I have to admit, she has me thinking about things a bit differently. She has a writer’s ability to put in plain English some ideas I’ve been thinking about for awhile — simple stuff like living in the moment more, being more generally grateful and less self-pitying, listening more, not being so self-absorbed (even though, she herself, totally is).

Anyway, it’s worth reading — or listening to (which I’m doing, and she reads it aloud, herself — I could have guessed that one!) — if for nothing else than to re-live some of the things you thought were important in your 30s! Ha! People in their 30s do think they rule the world – I used to think so, too. I have this strange desire to write a satire of her book based on the perspective from the 50s — overeat, go gray, goodbye love — it might be called.

I’m about to be deep in the throes of the college hunt with my daughter. It’s a process that I’ve been dreading because everyone talks about how complicated it is, but like everything, once you figure it out, it’s not so difficult.
We went on a group tour during a college visit recently and one thing I noticed is that the parents who are about to shell out a fortune in tuition were passive. Perhaps it was that they understood the student guide wouldn’t have a lot of information beyond what he’d been trained to say, but I think it’s also that parents don’t know what to ask in a lot of cases.
There are two questions I think that parents don’t have a clue about, but they are things that I’m very concerned about as an academic myself.
The first question is: Is this institution endowed or is it tuition-driven?
“Tuition-driven” is a term that universities without huge endowments use to mean that their day-to-day operating budget depends heavily on student tuition. This may seem like a no-brainer. Of course, universities depend on tuition. But universities that depend more on tuition than, say, state budget allocations (in the case of state universities) and/or private endowments, could have a different culture than other universities. Think about it. If administration officials, professors, and staff know that their facilities and salaries depend directly on students, students become “customers” and the customer is always right. For parents and students, this may be what they’re looking for — a university that treats its students like, well, well-paying customers. That could include special treatment — in food service, luxury facilities and services, and, one other thing — grades.
The second question that parents may not have a clue about: What is the school’s ratio of full-time faculty to adjunct faculty?
With budgets squeezed, the trend toward hiring cheap labor in the form of adjunct faculty has become epidemic in higher education. Tenure-track and tenured professors are expensive because they have decent wages, good benefits, and they are paid for something that is difficult to measure in terms of a cost benefit — research, innovative teaching, and creating new knowledge. They’re also on campus (theoretically) and available to students.
Adjuncts on the other hand, usually don’t have a real office on campus, have other jobs to supplement their low pay, and are often not in the loop on cutting edge research and new approaches (not always, by any means).
So, will your child have access to a knowledge creator who is bringing that knowledge and passion to the classroom in an environment fully supported by the wealth of resources at the university? Or, will your child be taught by a potentially overburdened adjunct professor who is poorly paid and considered a hired gun by the university?
Try asking these questions during your next college visit. Your student guide won’t know what you’re talking about, but try to find someone who will. Such inquiries are surely as important as knowing what the cafeteria serves for lunch and whether the dorm laundry service will send an e-mail when the dryer is available.

San Jose State student Suzanna Yada makes demands of J faculty at http://www.collegejourn.com/.

It seems that Congress has come to Twitter. See Dana Milbank today. Look for Twitter’s obituary soon!

Read here for Twitter’s role in reporting on the Turkish plane disaster.

Listen to the Washington Watchdogs American forum I produced: WAMU or you can watch it on C-SPAN.

first published April 2008

Thanks, We’ll Make Our Own Media by Adele M. Stan

April 4, 2008

http://www.womensmediacenter.com/ex/040408.html

Summary: At a time when women of substance can seem barely present in mainstream media, there’s a movement of women who have defined this as the feminist media opportunity: the moment when women can change the shape of public discourse by making their own media. As Adele Stan reports in today’s WMC exclusive, the creative urge was spread with evangelistic fervor at last weekend’s Women, Action & Media conference (WAM!) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Thanks, We’ll Make Our Own Media by Adele M. Stan

April 4, 2008

At a time when women of substance can seem barely present in mainstream media, there’s a movement of women who have defined this as the feminist media opportunity: the moment when women can change the shape of public discourse by making their own media. At last weekend’s Women, Action & Media conference (WAM!) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the creative urge was spread with evangelistic fervor.

“I think that there is an increasing impatience with allowing the corporate media to set the agenda even on what the topics of importance are,” said conference director Jaclyn Friedman. While the WAM! agenda featured plenty of big-think, content-analysis topics, a nearly equal number of sessions featured how-to sessions for independent authors, bloggers, internet-television producers, and audio podcast-makers. Indeed, a growing number of women seem to be saying, if you can’t get the media you want, then make it yourself, dammit!

Media technologist Deanna Zandt, who provides the tech magic for such sites as Feministing, AlterNet and Hightower Lowdown, is unshakable in her conviction that a singular moment for feminist media has arrived. “I think women tend to look at things, or have looked at things in the past, like, oh, well, ‘that’s tech,’ or ‘that’s nerdy and I don’t get that.’ You know, the ‘I’m not good at math’ problem,” Zandt explained. “And that’s just not true anymore. You just can’t say that it’s too hard to do.”

Indeed, with new tools-many available for free-like YouTube for the presentation of Web-based video, and older, but equally user-friendly tools for creating blogs and Web-based audio, a whole new media world is available to anyone who has something to say.

At the WAM! conference, whatever your favored form of media, you could find a workshop to help you learn how to make it on your own. Call it DIY media. Christine Cupaiuolo, former blogger for Ms. magazine and founder of PopPolitics.com, presented a soup-to-nuts introduction to not only making your blog, but promoting it as well. Zandt gave a presentation on using the latest Web tools to enhance feminist blogs. Margaret Pickering of the Participatory Culture Foundation, together with foundation colleague Dean Jansen, conducted a hands-on workshop on how to produce and upload videos to the internet. (Sound like fun? Here’s their step-by-step guide: MakeInternetTV.org.)

Lisa Jervis, who co-founded the magazine Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture in 1996, was gratified to see at WAM! the feminist “indie” media in new iterations promulgated by a new generation. Feminist blogs, gaming and videos are being produced by women with little more than ideas and a computer. “It’s incredibly exciting and inspiring to see all the young women flooding into feminist media work in all genres,” Jervis said. Bitch began as an earlier form of DIY media: a print magazine made on a copy machine. Today, make/shiftClamor mag) as one of her all-time favorite DIY media projects, is the new kid in town. It’s totally homemade, explains Jessica Hoffman, one of the editorial forces in the collective that publishes make/shift, except for the use of an outside printer.

For her part, Hoffman names the internet video series, “FemWatch” as one of her favorite DIY media projects. Hosted by the blogger known as Sudy, FemWatch’s first episode is devoted to the topic of “Say It Ain’t So Feminism”-writings on feminist blogs where scribes have revealed unbecoming traits, like classism, racism or shallowness. Hardly without humor, Sudy acts out the words of the offending bloggers.

Homemade videos like this one, where anti-abortion protesters are asked how they would penalize a woman who had an illegal abortion, can make a point rarely addressed in mainstream media political talk shows. And as CNN’s nod to the power of YouTube showed during the heat of presidential primary season, homemade media will continue to have an impact on elections. Kay Steiger, associate editor of Campus Progress, was among the attendees at WAM!, having just launched the Web site’s election-focused “I’m Voting For,” which features homemade videos on a range of issues up for discussion in the presidential contest, including these on reproductive rights. (You’re invited to submit your own.)

Independent radio, too, has found a home on the Web, and offers great DIY possibilities in its digital form. The National Radio Project, a non-profit producer of audio content and led by WAM!-goer Lisa Rudman, recently produced this series by Tena Rubio on the neglect of the health care needs of women prisoners incarcerated in California. (The National Radio Project offers instructions on how to freelance for their site.)

Other favorite DIY media named by attendees at WAM! included La Chola, by the blogger who calls herself brownfemipower, and the Feminist Peace Network blog by Lucinda Marshall.

During her workshops, one of the things Deanna Zandt has participants do is shout out major moments or breakthroughs in communications history. People will call out everything from drumming to the invention of the printing press and television, said Zandt. “And I ask people what happened to all of those tools over time; in whose control did they end up? Whose domain did they end up in? Certainly not ours.

“[That’s why] I require women in my workshops to participate in this particular moment,” Zandt explained. We can’t have that again. We can’t lose our access to these tools. We can’t lose what we can do with these tools. I mean, it’s so democratized now.”

###

About the Author: Adele M. Stan is a columnist for The American Prospect Online and author of the weblog, AddieStan. Stan began her journalism career at Ms. magazine.

About us:
The Women’s Media Center strives to make women visible and powerful in the media. From our founding in 2004 by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem to our advocacy and media relations work today, we are part of a strong feminist tradition that seeks to hold the media accountable for presenting the world as we know it. Our mission is to assure that women and women’s experiences are reflected in the media just as women are present everywhere in the real world; that women are represented as local, national, and global sources for and subjects of the media; and that women media professionals have equal opportunities for employment and advancement. In addition to the WMC founders, current board members include Loreen Arbus, Cristina Azocar, Jodie Evans, Gloria Feldt, Carol Jenkins, Teresa McBride, Pat Mitchell, Jessica Neuwirth, Rossana Rosado, and Helen Zia. For more information, please visit www.womensmediacenter.com.

Sexism sells but we’re not buying it.

-first published Aug. 23, 2008 I was on the convention floor in 1984 in San Francisco when Geraldine Ferraro accepted the vice presidential nomination. No one wanted a woman to be at the top of the ticket in 2008 more than I. And, who better than Hillary? She is the most qualified candidate by far. But, I’m starting to look at this campaign more in meta-theoretical terms as an academic and feminist, so I am taking a stab at convincing other feminists to do the same, even though they might have to hold their noses to do it.

I can support Obama because I see him as a symbol — not of male/female or African-American or elitist vs. working class. I see him as a symbol of a social critique that began many years ago and has been led and fostered by feminists. He is not a perfect symbol but I think he works.

It is Obama’s world view and his upbringing AFTER a time of social change that works for him for feminists. Where John McCain represents the patriarchal view that power is to be wielded for control and self-interest, Obama’s approach is one of shared power and inclusiveness. While it’s understood that anyone running for president has a deep appreciation for the power that comes with being the leader of the free world, Obama at least has an understanding of a new vocabulary. He hopefully understands at a gut level that political economy is a major contributor to our place in the world, not entitlement or specialness. He might not use the term standpoint epistemology but he knows of its existence and fundamental place in the world, unlike McCain.

Obama represents at least a way of looking at the world with a better meta-narrative than we’ve had in a long time.

INTRODUCTION

Women’s fundamental connection with mass communication in the middle and late 20th century has not been fully documented.  Even women who entered the profession early on during this time have little knowledge of the extent of women’s effort in reforming media for their sake and the sake of society. It was a relentless campaign that encompassed the modern women’s movement leadership, media women, government, the law, and politics.

As this book’s title suggests, women in media can look at their connection with journalism and news in much the same way they think about a long-term partner: At first it’s exciting and new, then reality sets in, and finally both sides mature into the experience. This book is about the evolution of the long-term relationship that began in the 1970s when the women’s movement of the Second Wave and the Watergate scandal drove record numbers of women into the world of media.

Looking back at this era is part of a collective retrospective going on now by members of the generation that began examining society in the 1960s and 1970s and using civil disobedience to try to change it. It was an era different from today and so needs to be seen as it was then, which is part of the purpose of this book and part of the mission of a historian. This book seeks to tell the story of women’s connection with media and make plausible inferences about the effect of that. It relies on a historian’s interpretation but also on the actual words of women involved in the movement. It also introduces a theoretical backdrop for what in academia is called feminist media studies.

A history of women’s activism in media in the United States documents women’s presence at the center of a social movement to challenge power relations as they were expressed in the media at a particular time in history. I have named this connection between women and media mediafeminism, a term that has been met with enthusiasm from scholars who have studied women’s relationship with media from before the suffrage movement. Trained as observers, mediafeminists are like mediums in a haunted house. They are constantly aware of the presence throughout the media world of the gender and power inequities that others don’t see.

By tracing this history, I analyze what actions activists took and why, as well as the goals of feminism in activism and scholarship within mass communication in the last part of the 20th century.

My aim is to give a personal view backed up by theory and scholarship to illustrate what it’s been like for women in the world of media since the Second Wave of feminism opened wide that universe to women. I make the case that women have fundamentally changed power relations, particularly in the United States, through media. This book is about the privileges women have enjoyed in journalism, while suffering injustices at the hands of those who run the show. It fills in the gaps in the historical record about women’s efforts to reform media as the problems growing out of the corporate structure of media grew over the past 20 years.  As women have changed society, they have changed the social structure, and they have changed media as a result.

Robert McChesney, Mark Cooper, and Ben Bagdikian, among others, have made the role of media in democracy an urgent priority now that the growing concentration of media ownership and its potential negative effects to democratic discourse are no longer up for debate among communication scholars.  In bolstering their position in favor of a more diverse mass media, particularly in the United States, intellectuals use the decline in the male-headed household and the restructuring of society as part of their argument. Yet, they discuss little about the historical warnings from women’s and civil rights groups – the very groups that spurred the restructuring — on this issue. Women’s groups, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, practiced an advocacy so tied to media that it can be called mediafeminism.  These groups defined news – most often identified as the source of democratic discourse in communication — as a gendered field that represented the male-dominated societal structure.  They have worked for decades through national and international channels to voice the very warnings now being touted as dire.

Therefore, it is important to explore fully the role of mediafeminism in this debate.
This role is an area traditionally neglected in women’s media studies in favor of media-centered analyses of the ways in which media depicted or commodified women. While women were concerned about their depiction, their mediafeminist  principles dictated that a gendered discourse could do little else. A look at their larger effort to change the discourse in favor of diverse views is the point of this study.

A large part of this history can be found in the archives of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press, which served as a clearinghouse for most aspects of women’s activism in media. The institute, which is still in existence, was what one scholar called “a universe, a place, a believable space, that so many of us were hungry for” in the 1970s and 1980s.  Women’s association with the institute helped to legitimize their place in a field in which smoke-filled rooms and male-only, off-the-record meetings were commonplace. It also helped legitimize women’s role in the public sphere of politics, business, and government.

The institute, founded by Dr. Donna Allen, was an unusual women’s “think tank” on social issues of the day, and its newsletter, Media Report to Women, documented the activities of the institute and virtually all of women’s activist efforts. The newsletter is the only source for much information on class action lawsuits against media companies, nationwide challenges of broadcast licenses by women activists, and the behind-the-scenes work women did to have specific language regarding media treatment of women inserted into federal law and international agreements.

In a little-known episode, for example, the institute led women in a global effort to gain access to technology. The institute sponsored international satellite teleconferences at the U.N. World Conference of Women of the U.N. Decade for Women in Copenhagen in 1980 and in Nairobi in 1985. Long before the Internet sparked debate about the elimination of media gatekeepers, or even before broadcast satellites were in common use, these pioneers found ways for women to communicate with each other on a global scale.

The institute’s founder has been recognized for her historical contribution in using the newsletter to record the women’s movement of the 1970s in the words of those who carried it out.

Documenting the activism of women in media fills in gaps between the history of the peace movement, civil rights, and the women’s movement — all of which are related, according to recent evidence, though those relationships have not been fully explored even by women’s movement leaders. This book uses this part of history as a focal point for revealing the source and scope of a larger struggle by women to have a greater voice in society.

A history of women’s activism in media makes an important contribution to 20th century American history, particularly in relation to the women’s movement and the media’s connection to social change. A close look at the activities of women in this cause further develops our understanding of the roots of the modern activist period and the role of the media in social discourse. It also introduces the concept of mediafeminism and documents the integral role that women played in media reform efforts as debate strengthens today about a potential crisis in the part media play, or fail in playing, in 21st century America.

Just as ecofeminism makes the point of a special connection between women and the natural order, mediafeminism is based on the idea that mass communication drew women, making them prominent in numbers in U.S. journalism and mass communication schools as well as in the industry.

The first chapter, “The Women’s Movement and Media Activism: Which Came First?” introduces the potential for a revisionist history of the women’s movement and media activism.  While it is generally believed that women’s movement leaders of the second wave sought media coverage and made media a top priority, there is evidence women were already active in media reform.  When 200 women turned out for a conference panel moderated by Dr. Donna Allen in 1974 entitled “Women: In the News and the Newsroom,” the event made headlines in major newspapers and participants called the discussion “electrifying.” The next year, women’s movement leaders such as Bella Abzug made it their business to attend the same panel, indicating the women’s movement leaders knew an electrifying atmosphere when they saw one.

Chapter Two, “At the Center of It All: Donna Allen and the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press,” outlines the de facto “center” of the women’s media movement as the WIFP, located in Washington, D.C.  This chapter would detail Allen’s background as an economist, her own treatment at the hands of the media, and her motivation for starting the institute. It would also describe the institute’s unique role in fostering networks among women media activists.

Chapter Three, Media Report to Women, outlines the way the newsletter began, its philosophy, and its presence as a historical archive (see sample chapter).

“Women’s Media Activism: the 1970s – A Utopian Vision,” Chapter Four, documents the history of how women came to media activism and the vision they had of a world in which there would be equal treatment for all.  Women activists, flush with excitement over new ideas for equality, felt betrayed by what they considered to be “men’s” media.  They wondered how media, which they believed should reflect the views of all as envisioned by the founders, had become a tool of the rich and powerful or what they considered the patriarchal social order.

Chapter Five, “The 1980s and Beyond,” discusses an era that few feminist media researchers have touched upon because of the conventional wisdom that it was a time of backlash against feminism — the 1980s.  This chapter would outline the progress women made in entering the media field, in influencing media policy, in becoming pioneers of media technology, and of beginning a body of feminist media research and scholarship.

“Surviving Tokenism, Sexism, and Ageism to Change the Social Order: Women’s Stories in Their Own Words,” Chapter Six, adds a storytelling narrative into the text by relying on oral history archives of women activists in the second wave and personal interviews of women important to the story. This chapter will hopefully bring the movement alive to young people who hear about it in debates over women in politics and from their parents and grandparents who were witnesses to it.

Chapter Seven, “Women and Mass Communication Academia,” summarizes the history of women’s theory-building and scholarship in mass communication, which ran on a parallel track with activism.  This history includes academic milestones ranging from Gaye Tuchman’s warning in 1985 of women’s “symbolic annihilation” to Leslie Steeves’ call in 2004 for academics and activists to forge theory together.

“Mediafeminism: Women and the Ethics of Discourse, Chapter Eight, defines the beginnings and scattered histories of an oppositional political discourse and praxis uniquely intertwined with the dominant discourse of media.  Feminist theorist Noel Sturgeon, in her examination of ecofeminism, described it as both a feminist theory and an activist movement. Mediafeminism has a similar dual definition and is based on what women did and theorized in practice in a field to which they were drawn. This chapter also encompasses the ideas of anthropologist Helen Fisher whose research indicates that “female communication” is unique, as well as the work of Jurgen Habermas in defining ethical discourse as “a cooperative search for the truth, where nothing coerces anyone except the force of the argument.” The final chapter also assesses the state of mediafeminism today.