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Who is MediaWatch?

For over two decades, the national women's organization MediaWatch had a significant impact on Canadian media producers, regulators and consumers in its dedication to improving the portrayal of women and girls in the media. MediaWatch was established in 1981, initially as an arm of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, and two years later became an independent entity consisting of industry professionals, academics, students and citizens looking to change the face of Canadian media.

Identifying the Problem

Women were objectified, infantilized, domesticated, and victimized. They were identified by their appearance, their sexuality, or their relationships to others. Women were rarely newsmakers, decision-makers, or risk-takers. If you believed what you saw on television, women were:

•    Young
•    Beautiful
•    Thin
•    Emotional
•    Dependent
•    Unintelligent

Stereotyping and under-representation in the media can have a negative socializing influence, particularly on children and teens, and MediaWatch set out to identify and change the portrayals of women that Canadians saw in the media surrounding them.

Changing the Media Landscape

The original goals of MediaWatch were to educate Canadians on issues of sexism in the media and to suggest ways they could communicate their concerns to the broadcasting and advertising industries. MediaWatch worked tirelessly to instigate gender role guidelines for broadcasters and advertisers, and relentlessly promoted legislative change. MediaWatch conducted research, developed educational materials for teachers and parents, provided media literacy workshops, and trained women in Canada and around the world to conduct research and lobby for improved equity in their own media industries.

Speaking Up

MediaWatch realized that consumers were often unaware of the broadcasting codes and the means to complain about offensive portrayals, so they developed a complaints process that allowed the Canadian public to have a voice and effect change. MediaWatch also addressed the larger, systemic issues by intervening in regulatory decisions within the broadcasting industry. Their impact slowly grew as they continued to vigilantly identify and eliminate stereotypical portrayals of women in the Canadian media, such as the fight to remove the Howard Stern show from the airwaves. MediaWatch continued to promote media portrayals "in which women are realistically portrayed and equitably represented in all our physical, economic, racial and cultural diversity," said MediaWatch President Suzanne Strott in 1990.
    
What Do Women Want?

Interestingly, there was almost no audience research into how female viewers themselves felt about the media landscape and its portrayals of girls and women, even though there was much evidence to show that Canadian women were either vastly unrepresented or stereotypically represented in Canadian media. MediaWatch filled this gap with a study in 1994 that explored women's attitudes about television programming, media violence and sexism. Canadian women asked to see accurate reflections of themselves with realistic portrayals of age, race, sexuality and appearance, and less violence. MediaWatch realized that Canadian women were the experts on how they felt about representations of themselves in the media, and, significantly,  MediaWatch's mandate of equality in the media was endorsed by the majority of Canadian women. The study's results persuasively argued that broadcasters and advertisers should respect their female audience -or else their bottom line could be affected.

Join the Action

MediaWatch's strategies evolved from a reliance on equity arguments and influencing the powers of the regulators, to the recognition that audience-based arguments targeting a corporation's profits were highly effective at instigating change. MediaWatch harnessed this power of audience research and consumer boycott into a persuasive argument to broadcasters and advertisers, and this gave MediaWatch a new impetus in its later years. In the Spring of 2005, MediaWatch's anticipated liaison with York University did not ultimately proceed due to personnel changes. But MediaWatch's mandate of eliminating sexist images, championing those that reflect the changing and diverse roles of Canadian women, and promoting gender equality in the media, remains strong in the newly-formed Media Action Média.

 
Selected MediaWatch Publications and Interventions

1986: MediaWatch pressured the CRTC to make compliance with the sex-role stereotyping guidelines a condition of license.

1991:  "Review of Policy on Sex-Role Stereotyping"

1992: "A Good Day to be Female? A Three Year Overview of Sexism in Canadian Newspapers"

1993: "Focus on Violence:  A Survey of Women in Canadian Newspapers"

1993: "Tracing the Roots of MediaWatch"

1993: "Submission for CTV Application for Renewal of License"

1993: "De-coding Advertising Images" - Submission to the Canadian Advertising Foundation: Revision of Sex-Role Stereotyping Guidelines

1994: "Front and Centre - Minority Representation in Canadian Television"

1994: "Women and TV: A Survey of Women's Response to Television"

1994: "Cover to Cover Magazine Analysis"

1994: "Please Adjust Our Sets - Canadian Women Watching Television"

1995: "Global Media Monitoring Project"

1998: "Women Strike Out"