Who makes the News?

How can we promote democratic forms of communication that encourage dialogue, enhance solidarity and promote the democratisation of the mass media?. These are just some of the aims of the World Association for Christian Communication or WACC that recently launched its latest Global Media Monitoring Project entitled "Who Makes the News?" As the WACC's Deputy General Secretary Lavinia Mohr explained to Susy Hodges this project threw up some surprising findings.....
"... we just released a report that covered 108 countries around the world .. and we found that overall ... there is a paucity of women's voices in the news.... in fact we found that 70 percent of the persons we read about or hear about in the news are male ... so women continue to be under represented as well as misrepresented all around the world....."
"... we found that (only) 13 percent of news stories focus essentially on women which mean that 87 percent of news stories around the world focus essentially on men ... so that's quite a glaring gap..."