“Instead of the media merely concentrating on so-called ‘women's issues' and only on the celebrations that are set to take place on 9 August 2007, we challenge the media to fill their papers, radio broadcasts, television schedules and news programmes with women making contributions to their communities and driving social change,” MMP executive director William Bird said.
In SA, women's positive contribution towards community development more often goes unnoticed, ignored by the media and swept under the carpet.
And a few good deeds that get press coverage are mostly those that are done by high-profile female personalities.
But this year, the MMP is calling upon the media to focus not only on so-called celebrities, women in business and government, but rather on ‘ordinary' women and the role they are playing in effecting social change.
The following are some of the MMP's suggestions that can help the media to rise to these challenges:
Furthermore, Bird said that an annual monitoring exercise on media coverage conducted by the MMP over the past eight years during the period in and around the National Women's Day shows that there has been a consistent increase on ‘women's issues' for the period preceding the commemoration of the day.
“While such coverage tends to give women some of the credit they deserve, much of it still fails to celebrate and represent the diversity of women in SA,” he concluded.