KARACHI: Uks Research Centre organised the online launch of the country report for the sixth Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) on Saturday.

Beginning in 1995 with 71 countries, the GMMP is the world’s longest-running and most extensive research on gender in the news media. The research was designed to capture a snapshot of gender, basically women’s presence, on one ordinary news day in the world news media.

Speaking at the ceremony, the Uks Research Centre director said that although she was impressed by the work put into the first report, she was not pleased to find that a report from Pakistan was not there.

The GMMP comes out every five years and this is the third time that Pakistan has been a part of the report in coordination with Uks, she noted.

Shaista Yasmeen, the manager projects at Uks, said this country snapshot was based on the monitoring of nine newspapers, 11 news channels, the state-owned Radio Pakistan, four news-based websites and four Twitter handles.

“The GMMP methodology provides tools and guidelines on which media to monitor and how; and the Uks team is familiar with the methodology, which we also taught to university students through a mock session prior to the actual monitoring activity. The tools remained almost the same as of the GMMP 2015, despite a few changes e.g. a separate question on Covid-19 in the coding sheets,” she explained.

Shujaat Ali, the program officer at Uks, said the GMMP monitoring day for the sixth report happened to be Sept 29, 2020. That day the chief of one of the two main opposition parties Shahbaz Sharif was arrested by the National Accountability Bureau in a money laundering case. So the news topic that gained the most coverage across the media on the monitoring day was politics and the government.

“More than 47 per cent of the total stories were related to politics that day. Fifty-one per cent of television stories were related to this topic, and on radio it was 58 per cent. Print, in comparison, provided 40 per cent coverage to this topic. Internet and Twitter also had high margins of coverage of this topic i.e 38 and 47 per cent, respectively. That day only 14 news stories out of a total of 382 were related to women politicians, which makes hardly 3.66 per cent of the total,” he said.

“The second highest coverage was on crime and violence with more than 14 per cent of monitored news items. Television provided 40 per cent coverage on this topic. Science and law got the third highest coverage, with almost 13 per cent, followed by the economy with media coverage of more than 11 per cent of the entire monitored content,” he said.

Sharing further findings he said that the overall presence of women as news subjects was 18.3 per cent. The figure decreased by half in comparison to GMMP 2015, which stood at 36 per cent. But then things could have been very different had this been a different day like March 8.

This year, the ratio was 17.5 per cent in print, radio and television, while on the Internet and Twitter, this proportion was slightly higher at 21.7 per cent. Radio remained the lowest in terms of women news subjects’ presence with seven per cent, which was portrayed in only a single news item. Twitter, on the other hand, represented women as news subjects with maximum coverage of 68 per cent. Print remained second at 22 per cent, followed by television, at 21 per cent.

A breakdown of women news subjects by function showed 89 per cent women in news stories were spokespersons for the government, any politician, minister etc., while men were 63 per cent. In contrast, 64 per cent of men were monitored as experts or commentators on news regarding the government and politics with women at only 33 per cent. No women subjects were monitored as eyewitnesses or provided any personal experience.

The overall presence of women news subjects identified by their family status was 40 per cent as compared to only eight per cent men in stories monitored across all the media.

Ali Nisar Awan, Dr Salman Asif, senior journalist Afia Salam, the report’s co-author Ahmed Yusuf and rights activist Khawar Mumtaz also shared their views and recommended coverage of more subjects and areas in the monitoring report.

Published in Dawn, August 2nd , 2021