Women in Mexican Media
It is all too easy to dismiss the importance of the press because so much of it is unimportant. There are endless videos of car chases on local news programs. Skinheads throwing chairs at the hosts of what are putatively news programs. Endless stories of alien kidnapping in the tabloids. And all-too-frequent blurrings between advertising policy and editorial content.
But the news is, of course, more than this. Or at least it can be. No democratic nation can be run without a free press because no society can be run without giving more power to some people than to others. Without a free press to ensure that those with substantial amounts of power are not being corrupted by it is to have watchdogs alert to what they are doing. This is the role that the press serves, as a proxy for the people.
Most citizens have probably never been to a city council meeting or a water district board meeting or a county board of supervisors meeting - or to a Senate hearing. And yet what is decided at every level of governmental meeting has real and lasting affects upon each citizen or resident. Without responsible mass media the citizens of a society cannot do their work as citizens.
Mexican television news fails its viewers dramatically in this regard in no small part because of the ways in which larger cultural attitudes about women's role in society are reflected in and reinforced by the on-air personalities. Especially in border towns like Mexicali, the worst gender stereotypes of both nations are often acted out on the air. One of the results of this is that what serious journalism is done within the realm of broadcast journalism is done by men. This relegation of women to reporting about scandals and gossip and other forms of "yellow journalism" not only degrades the quality of the news in terms of informing citizens about the important issues of the moment but it also lowers the status of women in Mexican society. This engendering of news is certainly not new or unique to Mexican television (as Gans 1979 notes) but it remains fundamentally harmful both to the body politic and to women - both those on the air and those in the audience.
There are feminist protests against the ways in which Mexican women are depicted...
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