GROUP PRESENTATION SUMMARY

For our presentation, our topic was Women and News Ownership. We wanted to highlight the big media corporations, their owners and how that'll affect women in the workplace. While researching, the results we found were staggering. Although more women graduated every year with a Communication B.A. Degree, men had higher positions.

We wanted to present this topic by first testing students' knowledge in an interactive game. The intention behind this was to see if they knew who the owners of these major outlets were. (They were all white males.) It came from a common perception that youth today, college students as well, don't watch the news that often and don't care to.

The second part of our presentation focused on the specifics. In our Powerpoint, we included fact-based slides and videos to show how women in the media are portrayed. Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Anne Curry and Jennifer Livingston are people we chose to focus on. It was important for us to show women with different professions in order to get a broader sense of the overall treatment of women in the media.

Overall, we saw that all women were objectified; it didn't matter what their profession/ title was. If they weren't, they were portrayed as a "man" and were criticized for "being so tough." This came as a result of the fact that male news anchors/ journalists always found a way to devalue a woman by focusing on things that weren't important: her physical appearance. They made comments about everything irrelevant: hair, wardrobe, wrinkles, etc. Hillary Clinton for example is a brilliant woman yet in the media, male commentators refer to her as "strict" and that she reminds them of their "nagging mom." Why is that? Sarah Palin, during the election year would be seen as "sexy." She was once on the cover of Newsweek in shorts. This can skew the public's views of her because how will they take her seriously after that? No male politician would ever be shown in the same light.

We wanted to show as a group in our presentation that the WHO behind all the media corporations really does affect WHAT content you're receiving and women & male dynamics.