Vol. 53, No. 3 Summer 2025
Thumbnail summaries of this issue’s major articles:
Sunday Morning Sexism: Women’s TV Voices Scarce in Public Affairs Programs
Media watchdog FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, Inc.) has found that guests on the U.S. Sunday morning television talk shows, where a substantial amount of televised discourse from influential journalists and political actors occurs, were markedly less diverse during the latest presidential administration transitions. FAIR documented all guests on ABC‘s This Week, CBS‘s Face the Nation, CNN‘s State of the Union, Fox News Sunday and NBC‘s Meet the Press from November 13, 2016, through January 22, 2017, and from November 10, 2024, through January 19, 2025. FAIR found that the shows’ coverage of the Trump transitions – from Election Day to Inauguration Day – were more heavily white and male than usual.
Animus Toward Women Journalists Documented in International Survey
The Coalition for Women in Journalism and Women Press Freedom’s 2024 annual report offers yet another devastating lens on hostility toward women journalists and their reporting, with profiles of exceptional courage and integrity of those who endure these professional conditions. There was a sharp Increase in press violations: 951 press violations against women journalists were documented in 2024, marking a 56% increase from 2023. Even worse, 21 women journalists were killed, the highest number since Women Press Freedom began tracking in 2019.
Chatbot Trial Shows Success Discouraging Online Searches for Pornography
The reThink chatbot, developed by IWF and the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, and deployed by Aylo (formerly Mindgeek), has led to a decrease in the number of searches for child sexual abuse material on Pornhub UK, as found by researchers at the University of Tasmania. The project is the first of its kind to use chatbot technology to intervene when people attempt to search for sexual images of children and aim to help them stop, or not start, offending.
Latest Study of Australian News Media Shows Incremental Gender Progress
The report by the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia (WLIA) shows business news continues to be dominated by male reporters and experts, although the gender balance in political reporting has improved since the last study in 2021. Male journalists are more prevalent on the front-page stories and receive ‘exclusive’ taglines more than twice as often as women, while women remain underrepresented in newspapers’ premium pages and the opinion and commentary sections.
Research in Depth: Sex Appeal in Commercials – A Conceptual Typology by Jacki Fitzpatrick
Research in Depth: Reflections of Queer Identity – Women-Loving-Women Representation in Television by Kailey Blunk
Plus News Briefs and Book Reviews!