OMG! NBC News To Air A Week’s News On Women

Image by George Eastman House via Flickr

Stop the presses! Women are newsworthy.

You’ll forgive me, won’t you, for my lack of rah-rah-ness upon reading today’s story about increased coverage of women planned for next month by NBC News. A whole week, all about us! It makes me want to lift my very old and very heavy non-flat-screen TV and heave it off the balcony. It makes me want to heave in a few other ways.

Women get so little media coverage that even an old study of how little we get wouldn’t read very differently today.

Here’s a better idea. Feature stories on or by women every single day in every single newspaper section and in every single newscast who are not: wealthy, white, powerful, celebrities, celebrities’ wives, girlfriends, mothers, daughters, mistresses, murdered ex’es, politicians, murder or violence victims.

I’m not advocating quotas or skewing coverage. We’re already being fed a skewed and distorted vision when women — 50 percent of the population — consistently receive a lot less than 50 percent of the media’s attention.