Conference blasts mainstream media, looks at options for reform
By Emily Mullin
Athens NEWS Campus Reporter
May 12, 2008
The failures of mainstream news media coverage were addressed at a conference held at Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism over the weekend.
Students, faculty and community members attended workshops and panel discussions Saturday that were aimed at reforming mainstream and corporate news outlets at the local, national and international levels.
The second annual Media Reform Conference was hosted by the Athens Free Press, a group working to improve the quality of news and information in the Athens area, and Campus Progress, a national organization based in Washington, D.C. that promotes progressive ideas and activism on college campuses.
Events focused on a number of media-reform issues such as political reporting, war coverage, the portrayal of women in media, corporate and mainstream media, and the depiction of certain parts of the country and world by the media.
Chelsea Toy, a sophomore journalism major specializing in international studies, helped coordinate the event along with professor Bob Stewart, associate director of the School of Journalism. Toy is a Campus Progress advisory board member and interned earlier this year in Cape Town, South Africa at a community newspaper.
Toy became interested in media reform when she attended last year’s conference and said it motivated her to help plan the conference this spring. As a member of the Campus Progress advisory board, Toy pitched the idea of a media-reform conference. Campus Progress helped bring some of the speakers to campus, such as representatives of the D.C.-based organization, Toy explained.
“Democracy is in jeopardy when it comes to the public being informed,” she said.
Aspiring journalists are the future of the news industry, Toy said, noting, “As journalism students, we can do better than the media that we have right now.”
Toy said that during her internship, one of the things she most enjoyed was the international coverage of news. She said she agrees that most people don’t pay attention to international news, and many mainstream media outlets don’t give international issues enough coverage. But Toy also said she sees a potential for change if young journalists are serious about media reform.
Toy’s hope for the students that attended the conference is that they’ll take what they learned and “put it to work in the system” working for local media or at their internships at bigger news outlets.
The “We STILL Want a Better Media” conference kicked off Friday night with a film screening of “A Soldier’s Peace,” a documentary about an Iraq War veteran and former Army journalist who walked the length and breadth of his home state of Utah to protest the Iraq War.
Marshall Thompson, director and producer of the film, spoke to an audience at Scripps Hall after the movie screening. Thompson, a graduate student of mass communications at OU, was deployed to Iraq while pursuing his master’s degree.
Thompson said he realized the need for media reform upon retuning from Iraq, saying the media portrayed protesters of the war in an “unsavory light,” categorizing them all as “hippies and pot-smokers.”
But Thompson said that generalization is not true. “They [mainstream media outlets] don’t want to actually listen to soldiers who are against the war,” he said.
Thompson’s documentary not only calls for an end to the Iraq War but for reform in the way the war is covered by the mainstream media.
In Thompson’s experience, he said, when a story about the Iraq War appears on a major news station, a military spokesperson or politician is used as the only source for a story. These are not “reliable sources,” he said, because they almost always portray the war in a favorable way.
Rather, Thompson said if a news station interviews a military spokesperson about the Iraq War, they should also interview a soldier, veteran or peace activist to balance the story.
Statistics can also be easily manipulated by military personnel or politicians, and Thompson said that most major news networks are probably drastically underestimating the number of U.S. and Iraqi causalities attributed to the war.
OTHER PANELISTS DURING the conference called for media reform in a variety of different areas.
Susanne Dietzel, director of the OU Women’s Center, said that despite the changing times, women are still underrepresented in the media. And the ones who are shown in the broadcast media are usually young, white, thin and attractive.
“Women in the mainstreams media are treated as commodities,” she charged.
Dietzel pointed out that many types of women such as those who are overweight, of color, old, LGBT and/or disabled are rarely, if ever depicted in the news media. Women on television shows and news programs also tend to be much younger than their male counterparts, she said.
Ruhi Khan, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in telecommunications, called for reform in Indian media. Khan grew up in Kuwait, received her undergraduate degree in India, and is completing her dissertation research on how the media impact the collective identities of Muslim youth in India.
Her research of Indian mainstream media outlets came up with disappointing findings. Khan said that The Times of India, one of the major newspapers in India that cater to the English-speaking elite, does not accurately portray the country of India.
“The entire newspaper is made up of feel-good stories,” she said.
The Hindustan Times, another main Indian newspaper, caters to celebrity coverage and entertainment news, she added.
Khan said reform in Indian media is needed because the real problems of the country, such as humanitarian issues and natural disasters, are not being properly addressed in the mainstream media.
Geoff Buckley, an associate professor of geography at OU, while not a journalist, said he often sees the Appalachia region negatively depicted in the media. The region is almost always linked to the coal-mining industry.
“Media coverage continues to promote the idea that it’s OK to not know where your energy comes from,” he said.
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