The issue of selection of sources that reflect societal diversity in terms of gender, age, and ethnic origin is a highly sensitive topic in German newsrooms. Nearly all interlocutors claimed that they have a strong newsroom commitment to cover gender equality or inequality and diversity issues. The thirtieth anniversary of German unification revealed how Eastern German topics had been neglected for a long time and increased the sensitivity to diversity issues and of all voices being heard in the media. Editors-in-chief and journalists report that they have newsroom discussions on how reporting of such issues should be done, although the use of gender-equitable headlines, pictures, and language was not mentioned in the interviews. The interviewees claim the existence of internal rules and recommendations regarding the promotion of gender equality in media content, although no codes or guidelines exist for this purpose. We did not find any mechanisms in place to monitor and guarantee gender balance in the news subjects, and also no internal rules or recommendations to produce gender-sensitive coverage of gender-based violence.
There is no official institution monitoring the representation of women in the media. The private foundation MaLisa, funded by famous television actors Maria and Elisabeth Furtwängler, tries to fill this gap. The NGO funds research about the representation of women in television and gender stereotypes. One of their findings concerning the coverage of the Covid-19 crisis reports that on television, only one in five experts was female (22%). In online reporting, women were only mentioned as experts about 7 per cent of the time. It was mainly men who were mentioned as health professionals, although almost half of all doctors in Germany are female. Only one in five of the doctors interviewed on television without a management function was female (Prommer & Stüve, 2020). Further studies are accessible online.
According to the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP, 2015), which analyses the representation of women in the media, the only successes were outside of news, such as in portraits, background stories, features, and fiction. Although legislation and public awareness focus on gender equality, women still do not appear equally in hard news. The GMMP further states that the set of factors defining newsworthiness excludes women structurally in traditional media. However, in electronic media, there are less orthodox criteria, which leads to mixing the news, with cat content and celebrities featured alongside political news.
According to the latest GMMP data, 32.6 per cent of all news subjects in the classical media (print, radio, television) and 24 per cent on Twitter and online-news were women. However, it must also be noted that the GMMP’s monitoring day in 2015 was not typical for news in Germany because of a dramatic German airplane crash in the French Alps. A large reason for the high representation of women as news subjects is the fact that Germany had a female chancellor at that time, Angela Merkel. Nevertheless, this is a significant change compared to 2010, when only 21 per cent of the people interviewed, heard, seen, or read about in German mainstream broadcast and print news were women. The report further states that there are seldom stories which highlight gender equality issues. Inequality was only mentioned in the areas of human rights and gender violence. Discussions of stereotyping of gender roles are nearly absent in serious German news reporting.
There is a relevant range of women’s alternative media, offline and online, although the heyday of feminist media is gone, with the focus of feminist activities concerning the media more oriented to changing structures (see Indicator F8 – Rules and practices on internal gender equality). National legal frameworks concerning gender equality and relevant media content do not exist. Only the legislation passed in 2015 by the German parliament – which stipulates that 30 per cent of the members of supervisory boards of DAX-listed firms must be women – may affect the media. The case for the representation of ethnic minorities and migrants is even worse. We observe a lot of activities aiming for the increase of these groups in reporting, but minorities are still a group not speaking for themselves and suffering stereotyping and discrimination.
