Who's afraid of timing women?

When Marshall McLuhan coined his famous phrase "the medium is the message," he was referring to the medium as a transmission channel. But the aphorism can also be applied to a specific medium. For example, when The World The headline "Competition will measure the time women speak on the news on all TV channels" stands out on the front page. It's not hard to guess, based on the newspaper's editorial line, that it sees this as news about public authority interference in freedom of expression. The current climate of cultural war encourages this to be interpreted as further proof that feminism is a nuisance and, once again, has gone too far, to the point of carrying a stopwatch.

The reality is much more prosaic. The Competition Authority only does what the 2022 audiovisual law requires it to do: an annual report on the representation of women on the various television channels. Spoiler alert: it won't help. In fact, in Catalonia, the Catalan Audiovisual Council has been preparing a similar one for years, and beyond the diagnostic task, there's no evidence that the study is a lever for any change. Furthermore, it's impossible to unravel the crux of the matter: do the newscasts under-introduce women because they reflect a sexist society, or is society sexist because the newscasts perpetuate it by minimizing female voices? Both premises are true, and I wish them good luck trying to objectively determine the percentage of each. In any case, it's good that studies like this raise our spirits. And turning it into critical, or unsympathetic, news gives wings to the parties that thrive on exploiting male victimhood, neglecting the historical (and current) privilege they continue to enjoy.