United Methodist Women to Participate in Global Media Monitoring Project

January 20, 2000 - The world's media will come under scrutiny for one day in February when groups in about 80 countries will monitor the portrayal and representation of women in the news on television, radio and in newspapers.

At the October board meeting, The Women’s Division of the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church agreed be one of the monitoring organizations and urge members of the 1-million member United Methodist Women to participate in the upcoming monitoring project. The results will be presented at the review of the 4^th United Nations World Conference on Women in June and will be published later in the year in both print and on the Internet.

The Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) 2000 is the second of its kind. United Methodist Women members participated in the first, held in January 1995, and organized by MediaWatch Canada. It involved hundreds of volunteers in 71 countries contributing 49,000 data records. The project resulted in the groundbreaking reportThe Global Media Monitoring Project: Women's Participation in the News.

This second GMMP, organised by the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) in collaboration with Erin Research, MediaWatch Canada and media specialist, Margaret Gallagher, aims to assess changes that have occurred in half a decade. It will provide a valuable insight into the situation of women in the media in the 21^st century and in the context of the advancements made in media technology.

This collective study is particularly timely in that preliminary results will be available at Beijing +5 in June, when the Platform for Action of the Fourth UN World Conference on Women will be reviewed. WACC hopes that the GMMP will be an invaluable means of informing the review of progress regarding women and media, which was included for the first time ever in the Platform for Action in 1995.

Five years ago, the GMMP revealed that while women comprised 43% of journalists they accounted for only 17% of interviewees and 29% of female interviewees were victims of accidents, crime and other events. In stories about politics and government, only 7% of interviewees were female. Margaret Gallagher, who has acted as a consultant to WACC throughout the process of organising the GMMP 2000, says of the project: "With this second global initiative, women will reveal how far the world's media have moved since 1995 towards reflecting diversity."

WACC is an international, ecumenical organization with some 800 corporate and personal members in 115 countries whose main focus is to promote democratic structures of communication. The GMMP 2000 is one of the projects of WACC's Women and Media program, which is committed to communication that is enriched by women's perspectives and whose structures are challenged by women's participation.