Democracy When on Democracy Now?
I've been doing an analysis of Democracy Now!'s inclusion of women's voices in the past year. I listen to the show nearly every day, as it is the most prominent and available source of progressive news on radio and cable TV. I am a big admirer of Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales, but around the beginning of October, I started noticing quite a few days when they interviewed only men, usually white men. So I decided to look at their archive for the whole year and see if my perception was accurate.
I am going to produce a full analysis (I did it - see http://home.mindspring.com/~katrap/LAGAI/UVApril2007.htm#demonow), looking not only at decontexualized numbers but also at things like what issues women were and were not invited to speak on, but here is some preliminary raw data (note that this analysis counts only interview guests, not Amy or Juan, nor voices heard in brief news stories, features, vox pops or recorded press conferences).
When I have done the complete analysis, I will send it to them as well as other media, though I don't know if they will respond (I did something like it in the past for queers, and they did not respond, nor did they change their practices at all - in case you were wondering, exactly 4 segments this year dealt with gay/lesbian issues and none with trans issues).
Preliminary Data on Democracy Now!'s 2006:
28% of all guests (271 of 964) were women.**
57% (553) of guests were "experts", which includes journalists, authors, professors, directors of major human rights NGOs, and of those 11% (63) were women.
37% of the time (91 days out of 244), Amy and Juan did not interview any women
5% of the time (11 days), they did not interview any men
14% of the time (33 days), there were more women than men; 9% of the time (22 days) there were an equal number of women as men, so 77% of the time there were more men than women
42% of lawyers and 20% of public officials who were interviewed were women
6 women were identified primarily or exclusively as "wife", "widow" or "girlfriend". 1 man was identified primarily as "husband".
** I generally went by name; if I couldn't tell by the name, I would look the person up on the internet and see if they were referred to by a pronoun; if I couldn't find them or still wasn't sure, I would listen to the segment. There was one person I decided to consider trans. No one identified themselves as trans, but of course, no one was asked if they were trans since trans issues were not mentioned.
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katrap40) wrote,
