If you’ve flipped on Netflix between those midterms, you might have seen the stereotype: female journalists are overly sexual. These tropes are inherently harmful and degrading to women and demean the valuable work that female journalists do.
During Wildcat Welcome my freshman year, we were told at Medill orientation that there are more women in the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications than men. So why are female journalists portrayed so poorly in media when they make up the bulk of the profession? In House of Cards, one female reporter brags about how she’ll “suck, screw and jerk anything that moves just to get a story.”
Clearly not ethical journalism right there. In the third episode of the first season of Parks and Recreation, reporter Shauna Malwae-Tweep sleeps with parks employee Mark Brendanawicz. Shauna acquires multiple quotes from Mark, which he assumed was off the record since they were in bed together. The question we have to ask here is whether Parks and Rec is twisting the trope or just adding on to it. Is Shauna taking advantage of a dumb government official, or did the writers have her use her sexuality to get what she wants instead of doing her job?
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, a shameless chick-flick yet a classic, is built entirely off the premise of a female journalist attempting to seduce a man to write a story for her magazine. It ended happily, but at what cost? In 2005’s Thank You for Smoking, a young journalist named Heather seduces the vice president of a major tobacco lobby who claims there is no link between lung cancer and tobacco usage. Heather writes a furious exposé blowing up the lobbyist’s lies, but then Heather’s unethical tactics are exposed, and she is punished by having to become the local weather girl.
It’s easy to see in journalism classes at Northwestern that there are usually at least twice as many women as men. In my Journalism 301 class right now, a required class for Medill undergraduates, we have 13 women and three men. While more women than men enroll in Medill, in the professional world women are incredibly underrepresented in journalism. According to a University of Nevada at Las Vegas study, sources from TheNew York Times front page stories are 65 percent men, 19 percent women and 17 percent unknown. NBC’s news showMeet the Press is 62 percent white men and 28 percent everyone else. Fox News Sunday is even worse at 67 percent white men and 33 percent everyone else.
People might say that I’m overreacting, that I’m reading into things, that I’m creating a problem where there isn’t one. Sometimes a movie is just a movie, sometimes a character is just a character, but I don’t think that’s the case. The problems arise when we don’t even realize that what we see in the media influences our thoughts, perceptions and attitudes. How many girls are growing up now thinking that in order to be a journalist, screwing their sources is common practice? How many boys are growing up thinking that all they have to do to have sex with a girl is give her information for a story? How many perceptions have been warped in the last 20 years by the changing portrayal of female journalists?
There is nothing wrong with a woman choosing to exercise her sexual freedom. If any woman wants to have sex, without a doubt she should be able to and she should own it. The problem is the way media portrays female journalists as needing to use their sexuality in order to do their job, something that is clearly not true in real life. So how can Medill students, and any other aspiring journalist, break this stereotype? We are an incredibly respected journalism school: Medill graduates go on to win Pulitzer Prizes, work for publications in every corner of the country, travel overseas and cover violent warfare.
How can we reconcile these amazing people who do incredible things and the way that the media portrays us? We can’t. All we can do is live and work in a way that defies these stereotypes and create real-life examples of kick-ass, powerful women. We can attack the problem at its source. Aim to write for these shows and movies, changing the way women are portrayed. I grew up watching Gilmore Girls, where young Rory Gilmore is head editor of her high school paper and then the Yale Daily News.
The series ends with Rory pursuing her dreams of becoming a journalist, boyfriend be dammed. Rory never so much as even winked at a source, and she was still able to be a successful reporter and a great role model. I wanted to be a journalist because of Rory Gilmore. Gilmore Girls ended in 2007 though, so it’s unlikely that aspiring middle school and high school journalists are still watching it. Hollywood, give us accurate, empowering portrayals of female journalists. Give us more Rory Gilmores.
Originally published: http://www.northbynorthwestern.com/story/the-real-female-journalists-getting-sources-withou/