Journalists who take on the establishment are routinely abused and intimidated. In this environment, the unconditional support of her colleagues in NWMI has had a special importance, said Neha Dixit in her acceptance speech for the Chameli Devi Jain Award 2016, dedicating her award “to the unacknowledged journalists who have suffered and survived repression and still told stories that need to be told.”
The Network of Women in Media, India, strongly condemns the continuing online abuse and harassment of women in general and women journalists in particular. We believe this growing phenomenon not only amounts to gender-specific hate speech but also represents an increasingly common form of gender violence and a disturbing threat to freedom of the press.
NWMI strongly condemn the shocking attack on the residence of Malini Subramaniam, a journalist based in Jagdalpur, Chhattisgarh and correspondent for the news site Scroll.In. The continuous attempts to intimidate and threaten her into silence must immediately stop and those responsible must be brought to book.
Worldwide, women make up about 50% of the general population but only 24% of the persons heard, read about or seen in newspaper, television and radio news. Only 26% of the people in internet news stories and media news tweets combined are women. These were among the findings of the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP)’s latest study on the portrayal and representation of women in the news media.