Global Media Monitoring Project 2010 - National Report for Canada

Official Description:

The 2010 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), is the fourth in a series of reports that have monitored the news media’s treatment of women since 1995. The GMMP is the largest longitudinal study on the news in the world. The statistics collected since the first report demonstrate alarming trends of gender disparity in Canadian news, both in who is reporting stories, and whose stories are reported.

This year’s report found that women remain significantly underrepresented and misrepresented in news media coverage worldwide. In Canada, some of the most alarming findings include:

• Men were 2.5 times more likely to be news subjects, and three times more likely to be found in stories about ‘politics and government’ and ‘celebrity, arts and sports’.
• Women in the news mostly function as providers of personal accounts, and rarely as knowledgeable experts - expert opinion was overwhelmingly male.
• Less than 9% of all news stories (8.8%) have women as a central focus.
• Women reporters were least likely to be found reporting on the topics that dominated the news agenda (‘crime and violence’ or ‘politics and government’) - male journalists were twice as likely to report on these stories.
• Only 5% of the news stories challenged gender stereotypes. News stories on gender (in)equality were almost non-existent.
• Further, while the overall representation of women in the news has increased globally from 17% in 1995 to 24% in 2010, the North American statistics show almost no improvement over the 15 years - from 27% in 1995 to 28% in 2010 (see the North American report).

The researchers responsible for the GMMP hope that their work will help foster increased gender equality in the media landscape. The next step to achieving this goal requires increasing the number of news stories that challenge gender inequality. We hope you will support this process by sharing this year’s GMMP findings with your readers.

The full report, Who Makes the News? The Global Media Monitoring Project 2010, along with the Canadian National Report can be found on the GMMP website. GMMP research in Canada was coordinated by Dr. Kathleen Cross of Simon Fraser University.

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