Special NCMR report-back section

Women rocked the NCMR!

Now, why aren’t I asleep yet?
Jennifer L. Pozner, Jan. 14
http://www.wimnonline.org/WIMNsVoicesBlog/?p=389
Excerpt: Women’s voices were present, powerful and prolific during panel sessions, workshops and intensive discussions about media content and policy at the National Media Reform conference – though women were still marginalized within the plenary discussions that addressed the entire 3,000+ audience. However, women’s perspectives were heard loudly in ways that hadn’t happened at prior NCMRs, in part due to WIMN’s organizing efforts, which included a bustling Women’s Media Networking Breakfast, moderating and presenting an every-seat-taken-and-people-standing-in-the-back panel titled, “There Is No Media Justice Without Women: Models for Feminist Media Action,” and distributing 1,500 copies of our Women’s Guide to the NCMR…

Gender as a media reform issue
Lucinda Marshall, Jan. 17
http://www.wimnonline.org/WIMNsVoicesBlog/?p=392
Excerpt: Due to a lot of hard work on the part of many women, gender is now an official part of the media reform agenda and while there is still room for improvement, women made substantial inroads to microphone equity…Some women who spoke specifically to gender issues included NOW President Kim Gandy, Katherine Spillar of Ms., and WIMN bloggers Sonali Kolhatkar, Carolyn Byerly and Jennifer L. Pozner. A panel on children and media that addressed gender was moderated by former FCC commissioner Gloria Tristani and included Crystal Cook from See Jane, an organization that advocates change in gender representation in children’s media… The most telling moment in Jane Fonda’s speech was when she asked who in the audience knew who Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi was. Very few people did…

Video, and some audio, from the media reform conference
Jennifer L. Pozner, Jan. 18
http://www.wimnonline.org/WIMNsVoicesBlog/?p=394
Excerpt: Women had a significantly better and deeper experience at the 2007NCMR than at the 2005 NCMR, and what that is undeniably positive, any increase in attention to women’s perspectives at all would have been better than the embarrassing invisibility of women’s voices and concerns at both previous conferences. And so, inequities did remain: of three days of multi-speaker plenary sessions and keynote talks, only four women delivered speeches from the mainstage, and of those, two were famous actresses, and only one was a woman of color. In a particularly telling visual illustration of the persistence in gender imbalance even in a good year, note that all the women who spoke during plenaries got far less time to do so than their male counterparts… During her plenary session talk, Deepa Fernandes said that “Media justice is about changing who is at the table at every single level.” So true. I’d propose that it’s also about making sure that each person seated at the table - and each constituency they represent - has an equal seat…

WIMN on the radio: round-up of radio interviews about women, media and feminist media justice advocacy
Jennifer L. Pozner, Jan. 20
http://www.wimnonline.org/WIMNsVoicesBlog/?p=398
Excerpt: Progressive radio hosts have been running segments on media issues during and after the National Conference on Media Reform, several of which have involved interviews with members of Women In Media & News, along with our media justice allies from Third World Majority and Texas Media Empowerment Project. These include: Radio Nation with Laura Flanders, KPFA’s Sunday Salon, KPFK’s Uprising Radio and KFPK’s Women’s Magazine. Democracy Now! and Uprising have also run additional noteworthy radio reports about the NCMR. Audio for all of these is available here…