Gender Biased Media

A few years ago, I got too infuriated with the Times of India (TOI), due to the way it handled a news report. Some policemen had misbehaved with some women-protesters in Punjab, and the newspaper chose to show the face of the woman being harassed, her horrified friend’s face, but the camera angle made sure that policeman’s face would remain unclear and unidentified. It happened in both the two pictures it printed while reporting the news. That was a wretched show of journalism and my dislike of TOI reached a pinnacle with that incident (but many more cases had to follow).

Now a day, especially when I am in office, I browse through news.google.com to keep track of the latest happenings around the world. With time I started getting surprised as to why even Google News props up images of women in unrelated news, at the slightest opportunity. One day I just scrolled down the page and found that pictures of women were dominating the news page unnecessarily and almost unjustifiably. Since news hosted on google news is coming from various sources, and each source has multiple images on it, google news should have some logic to select which image to prop up on its main page. Was there a gender bias even in this expectedly gender-neutral programming?

I look at this page which is from any normal day.

With the news item titled “OBC admission: Supreme Court upholds HC order”, there are lady students featured alongside. So if the media has to post a picture of some students, it will be girl-students in most cases.

Second item is on rains and calamities. News titled “Heavy rains in UP, Bengal, Meghalaya; 12 dead” Here too, we can see a group of five women joining their umbrellas and captured in the camera. So if some people die out of heavy rains, our newspapers will show the pictures of some women commuters walking or suffering in the rains. 

This kind of gender bias in the media is disappointing, and even offensive in a way. Such a practice keeps positioning women as an object and material, whose bodies would be for “display” to generate more eyeballs and raise some TRPs when it comes for the media. Advisers have historically used women (women’s beauty) to create a buzz around their products and services to an extent that we have stopped seeing any wrong in it. But it is surprising to me that even online portals running by unbiased search logic are selecting images of women only, for display.

- Rahul