Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women | Caryl Rivers

Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women | Caryl Rivers | News media ignore facts when it comes to women

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Selling Anxiety: H...

	Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women Caryl Rivers UPNE, 2007 - 180 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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A strange duality affects the news media today. The more that women advance in the worlds of business, academia, medicine, and law, the gloomier news about women and their achievements becomes. As statistics report the rise in the number of women obtaining college and advanced degrees, the media increasingly tells them that this is a terrible mistake and that only by returning to traditional roles of wife and mother can women find true happiness. The message is that if women do achieve, they will make themselves and their families miserable. This message, often based on specious "scientific" studies and reports, gets played over and over again in televised newscasts, print newspapers, the internet, and other media outlets purporting to be objective.

Rivers, a journalist who has written extensively in the behavioral sciences, exposes the many ways news media distort stories about women. According to Rivers, these stories "sell" because they play to the fears of affluent women, one of the most desirable consumer markets. Rivers's topics, literally "pulled from the headlines," include negative representations of working mothers and "latch-key" kids, stories that exaggerate the perils of childcare and divorce, media treatment of powerful political figures like Elizabeth Dole, Teresa Heinz, and Hillary Clinton, and news as "poli-porn" (sex and death-obsessed tales of pretty, white girls and women like Jon-Benet Ramsay, Chandra Levy, and Natalee Holloway). Rivers also revisits ongoing debates about male and female brainpower and the claim that the attention paid to girls in schools is ruining boys' chances for achievement and success. She examines how the media has collaborated with George W. Bush and the political right to wage war on birth control and abortion. Her conclusion suggests what can and must be done to halt the news media's assault on women.

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Lies, damn lies, and statistics...

Because of advertising and viewers demographics, the news media present stories with a clear bias-how to scare women. Whether it's the idea that divorce will ruin children, looking older will ruin women, or that feminism ruined everything for everyone, media outlets took anecdotal evidence and poorly run (and quickly discredited) studies to prove whatever sells quickly and salaciously in a sound bite-and women suffer for it.

This would make an excellent book club book. The entire time I read the book, I wanted to discuss it with someone else. Because of the scope of the book, the author stuck to examining issues in the media as it pertains to scaring women-how can we freak out the women through news, advertising, and politics. It really is a brilliant policy-but it overlooks many other factors. Again, I understand that this is because of the scope of the book. I wish the author had put notes at the end of each chapter or footnotes in, instead of putting everything as an endnote at the back of the book. The work is well-documented, though-you can't fault the author on that. This is a great read, right along with The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women

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News media ignore facts when it comes to women

Extended, often repetitive, often ranting descriptions of how news media ignores scientifically valid facts and research in favor of perpetuating popular and fashionable myths about women. Eleven chapters look at issues and stereotypes such as working women as either `Superwomen' or `Twitching Wrecks'; smart women can't find husbands; childless women are unfulfilled; daycare harms children; mothers are dangerous and selfish; women can't `have it all'; women ignored as journalists, pundits, and anchors; media attacks on Hilary Clinton, Teresa Kerry, and Martha Stewart; right-wing female pundits (e.g. Ann Coulter, Phyllis Shlafly Marabel Morgan); media displaces substantive issues with `gossipy' obsessions with beautiful female victims (Jon Benet Ramsey, Laci Peterson, Terri Schiavo, Jennifer Wilbanks); women's brains are different and not equal; Bush administration's war against contraception and condoms. Well researched, thoroughly documented, points clearly presented. Probably a more important read for younger women - for those of us who lived through struggles of the 60s and 70s this book is more a reminder than a revelation.

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