A study by media regulator ERC (2019b), regarding the information programming of the four main free-to-air television channels (RTP1, RTP2, SIC, TVI), showed that 75 per cent of the news protagonists were male and 15 per cent were female, in 8 per cent of situations there were both male and female actors, and in 2 per cent of them no clear identification was possible. Furthermore, the only categories where women were more present than men as actors were “family issues” (a prevalence of 85% of women), “public figures and celebrities”, and “doctors and health technicians”. All the other categories largely featured male actors, particularly “political actors” where men formed 90 per cent of the group. There is an interesting gender bias similarity among all the television channels. The presence of women as protagonists or actors in the news was only 15 per cent in RTP1, 16 per cent in RTP2, 14 per cent in SIC and 16 per cent in TVI. The study analysed a total of 7,206 news and features programmes.
The media regulator (ERC) has been paying attention, in recent years, to the issue of gender discrimination in the media, monitoring content in the main news media, particularly in television. In 2018, an analysis was conducted of the main newscasts in prime time, specifically looking at gender diversity and pluralism of the protagonists of news. These results show an even higher prevalence of men than the previous study (2015–2017), as can be seen in Table 8.
[supsystic-tables id=75]
Portugal is involved, along with 120 countries, in the project Global Media Monitoring Project – Who Makes the News, which began in 1995 and is preparing its sixth edition this year (Martins, 2020). It monitors some news published in a single day, based on a set of pre-defined indicators, in order to ascertain how gender inequalities and discrimination are present in the media, either through its sources or through its actors. Similarly, the media regulator ERC is also part since 2014, of the Gender and Media Group that operates within the Network of Mediterranean Regulatory Entities and analyses gender discrimination in the news, and particularly issues of gender violence.
