Covering a Speech Blog

The speech that I decided to cover within my blog is a speech given by Megan Kamerick entitled “Women should represent women in media” To begin with Megan started off by describing herself as an idealist, which she defined as a person who loves unearthing good stories especially the untold ones, but she explained that she didn’t think that in 2011 women would still be a story that was untold. Megan joined an organization called JAWS. JAWS stands for Journalism and women Symposium. This organization is responsible for promoting the professional empowerment and personal growth of women in journalism. She joined JAWS because she wanted more female role models, and she was not pleased that women were way behind everyone else in the journalism profession. Megan stated, “We make up half the population of the world, but we’re just 24 percent of the news subjects quoted in news stories, and we’re just 20 percent of the experts quoted in stories.” As an example of how women are seen and treated in society, Megan shows a photo of President Obama and his staff tracking the killing of Osama Bin Laden. In the picture you can clearly see Hilary Clinton and another female staff worker in the background. However, when the photo was printed on the cover of an Orthodox Jewish newspaper in Brooklyn Hilary Clinton and the other female staff member’s picture was excluded completely from the photo. The paper explained that it never prints photos of women because they might be sexually provocative. Throughout her speech, Megan made excellent points with statics that shed light on the matter at hand. Some of these mind-blowing statics include, Women are 19 percent of the sources on politics; 20 percent in stories on the economy, men contribute to outnumber women in occupations except teachers and homemakers and are not enough women in newsrooms; report at 37 percent of stories in print tv and radio. Megan explained with a news story that female reporters are more likely to challenge stereotypes than those by male reporters. The story that she illustrated this through was a news story in which an eleven-year-old girl was gang raped by multiple men. The version of the news story by the male reporter made it seem like it was the girl’s fault that she was raped and that she was asking for it. However, the female reporter’s version of the story grasped the reality and horridness of what had really happened to the girl. Megan went on to tackle more biases and sexist issues relating to the media and magazines. She also told how women are seen as sex symbols and not intellectuals in the work field. Megan also explains that women should be more visible and active on women issues because there are certain things that men cannot and should not be able to speak on where women are concerned. Another quote made by Megan was “one way to get more women into leadership is to have other women mentor them.” Megan closes by showing a clip taken from two different perspectives. However, the picture does not become clear until the clip is shown in entirety. The point that Megan was trying to make is that a story cannot be told from just one perspective but must be told in full. Men cannot be the only view that news, stories, and media is told from, but women must have a say in what is said and how it is presented to the world. Everyone is better off when the story is told in completeness.