Censored 2012 (19 page)

Source:

Student Researcher:
Allison Holt (San Francisco State University)

Faculty Evaluator:
Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University)

Sources:

Student Researcher:
Nzinga Dotson-Newman (Sonoma State University); Amanda Avery (State University of New York, Potsdam)

Faculty Evaluator:
Matthew Paolucci (Sonoma State University); Dr. Christina Knopf (State University of New York, Potsdam)

Source:

Student Researcher:
Taylor Wright (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator:
Don Romesburg (Sonoma State University)

Student Researchers:
Jordan Hall, Cynthia Solano, Taylor Wright, Amy Ortiz, Cameron Cleveland, and Yuliana Zamudio (Sonoma State University); Cara Peracchi Douglas, Sarah Schmidt, and Katie Whitney (Fresno State University); Ashley Noble and Jessica Capers (Indian River State College)

Faculty Evaluators:
Sheila Katz, Andrew Deseran, Don Romesburg, Lena McQuade, James Dean, and Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University); Steven D. Walker (Fresno State University); Elliot D. Cohen (Indian River State College)

T
he corporate-owned media system has largely failed at the task of providing information about stories that do not reinforce hetero-normativity and female submission. The lack of adequate coverage stems from how the media is organized and how news is created, but it is also a reflection of our culture’s deeply entrenched problems of sexism, racism, and classism, as well as our inability to critique the realities of capitalism. The corporate media often trivializes news stories about women and marginalizes them within the media structure through their framing and omission of issues of concern to women. This lackadaisical attitude toward gender inequity and sexual violence has historically allowed many of the worst atrocities against human life and society to go unanalyzed and underreported.

The lack of a critical mass of women participating equally on all levels of news creation furthers a cultural missive in which no institutionalized understanding or inclusion of women’s issues in the mainstream media’s news agenda is necessary. The distorted portrayal of women and gender issues in the corporate press is not accidental;
it is the product of how journalism is practiced, how newsrooms are run and by whom the stories are chosen and edited, as well as who owns the company. “Women have been successful in gaining access to US news companies in numbers approaching those of men overall, but they are not yet at parity with men in their status across occupational levels. Most vividly, women encounter a glass ceiling in senior management that prevents their upward mobility into top decision-making posts. Women are fewer than a fourth of those in top management, and only about a third of those in governance.”
¹

The United States is ranked thirty-sixth out of 175 in freedom of the press, seventieth among nations in women holding national office, and sixty-fourth in wage equality.
²
The corporate media are preoccupied with the appearance of women within the male gaze and trivializing women in power positions by focusing on their perceived attitudes, appearance, or questioning their mothering capabilities, and this allowable sexism prevents real women’s issues from being discussed in substantive terms. Only by comparing corporate media coverage of issues relating to women or gender to the coverage we found from independent sources, can we begin to see how issues such as rape, sexual violence, reproductive rights, and gender inequity are framed in the mainstream media.

Since the midterm elections in November 2010, a broad rash of legislative actions aimed at restricting the reproductive rights of women has been introduced and signed into law in governments all across the United States by Republican-controlled legislative houses and governors. While it has been impossible for corporate media to ignore these developments as factual news, these outlets have published little analysis of the rhetoric used to impose these laws or of the concrete impacts they are likely to have.

For instance, one quote from an anti-abortion activist published by a corporate news outlet in a story on their website directly says, “Americans [want to] make sure our legal system protects the weakest members of our society, which is the unborn child.”
³
On its face, this assertion appears to be simply the opinion of a prominent activist. However, left unquestioned by critical analysis, this statement makes multiple contentions with regard to national citizenship and the protections guaranteed to such members of our society. Fetuses cannot justly be given protections through our legal system on the basis of
their class as members of our society since they can have no citizenship and, at the very least, no consciousness of their status in a hierarchical world. Women, themselves, only recently came under the protections of the Constitution as citizens of this country. Publishing statements like the example noted above, without a critical framework in which to place them, promotes a view of these new laws, which restricts the reproductive rights of women in America, as just another debate over morality between different factions.

Reporting within this framework undermines the concept that protections and rights are granted to peoples in the US and cannot be abridged or restricted based on prejudicial religious beliefs. While reproductive rights are surely not the only protections abridged in this way, these attacks affect a salient majority of persons in this country whose rights to bodily integrity and full personhood are relatively recent developments in our history; namely, women.

Another way that major corporate outlets frame the issue of the abridgement of constitutional rights and protections is through the lens of controversy.
The New York Times
, in a story on state bills restricting abortion on the basis of pain felt by the fetus, has said, “The question of fetal pain … is one of intense, unresolved debate among researchers and among advocates on both sides of the abortion question.”
⁴
This obscures the issue behind a cloud of “scientific controversy.”

Medical scientists have actually stated, however, that “pain perception requires conscious recognition or awareness of a noxious stimulus [and] fetal awareness of noxious stimuli requires functional thalamocortical connections. Thalamocortical fibers begin appearing between 23 to 30 weeks’ gestational age.”
⁵
There appears to be no scientific controversy surrounding the issue of fetal pain, but anti-abortion activists who also happen to hold medical degrees may very well be claiming otherwise. That does not mean that there is evidence such pain exists. Even if it did, the fundamental constitutional rights of a woman should take precedence over that of a preconscious fetus.

The notable exception to the mass of reporting, which places this issue within the framework of competing conceptual discourses, is that of Rachel Maddow on her corporate-owned television program,
The Rachel Maddow Show
. Her constant reporting on these laws as they develop shies away from placing them in an abstract, conceptual,
moral frame, and reports on the harsh actualities that women seeking to utilize their rights will face.

In some cases, such as those in South Dakota, which does not have even one full-time abortion provider in the entire state, women are subjected to waiting periods of multiple days, legislature-scripted lectures by their doctors, forced ultrasounds, and mandated visits to unregulated pregnancy crisis centers run by anti-abortion activists who provide dubious and unscientific information, and do not provide an assurance of privacy or confidentiality. These new policies have already been signed into law and are to take effect July 1, 2011, unless a court injunction is imposed. Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union have said that they will file a lawsuit.
⁶

While this law appears to be one of the most radical and potentially unconstitutional attacks on women’s reproductive rights that this country has seen in years, South Dakota proposed a bill earlier in the legislative session that would have allowed a relative or spouse of a pregnant woman, even against the woman’s will, to defend the life of the fetus. Called, “justifiable homicide,” the bill was intended to intimidate doctors who perform abortions in the state, and may have been proposed in the expectation of an eventual decision overturning
Roe v. Wade
by the Supreme Court. After public backlash, South Dakota shelved this bill and passed the restrictions noted above.

This type of legislation did not end with South Dakota; both Nebraska and Iowa have taken up similar bills. Nebraska Senator Mark Christensen introduced a bill that would allow any third party to use deadly force to stop harm or death from being inflicted on a fetus. Nebraska has already passed a bill (LB 1103) banning the termination of a pregnancy after twenty weeks, regardless of the viability of the fetus outside the womb.