Media has a great influence in any society’s opinion, realising the power the media holds, the right thing for them to do would be being honest and unbiased news providers. However, sadly we still live in a patriarchal and misogynist world. And our news providers do not understand why the line “with great power, comes great responsibility” was so iconic.
It’s 2019, one would think that after the disappointing election result of 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost against Donald Trump, the society would be more encouraging and supportive of female presidential candidates but it seems that’s not entirely true. It is no secret that media used to harshly criticised Hillary Clinton more than they criticised Trump, which was like ignoring all of his pile of mistakes, which are also in actuality very severe in nature. Looks like the media is back at its bias again with the 2020 women candidates running for the presidency.
Alex Frandsen, a senior journalism student in Northeastern University and his editor journalism professor Aleszu Bajak, discovered in February that the women who had entered the 2020 presidential race were being described in the media more negatively than the men. They conducted a research and found out about the bias in the media’s representation of female candidates which was prominent. Frandsen’s work has got a lot of attention, they received many comments on Twitter and Facebook about how the appearance of bias isn’t surprising at all.
The research is still in its initial stages and we can only hope that it concludes better than we assume, because if people are not going to change their attitude towards women we may never overcome patriarchy thanks to the misogyny that is deeply rooted in people’s mind as a product of patriarchy.
Mayuri Talgaonkar