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Women Journalists Are Under Fire and Fighting Back

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

"I remember being heavily criticized, because they said, 'You just want to get your face on TV. ... But if something happens, we're going to have to come get you'," she recalled. "If I was a young guy, and I wanted to stay, no one would have said anything like that."

Besides, as the panel pointed out, women are not the only victims of sexual violence. Male journalists also have been targeted, usually in captivity or detention, even if they tend to be even more reluctant than the women to report the crime or talk about it.

One notable exception, Umar Cheema, a prominent Pakistani political reporter, described to CPJ being abducted, tortured and sodomized with a wooden pole in an Islamabad suburb in 2010 in retaliation for his political reporting.

His decision to speak out "has made me stronger and made my enemies more cowardly," he told CPJ in 2011. "Their efforts to intimidate me backfired."

As Logan said in her 2011 "60 Minutes" interview about the attack, women journalists "do it for the same reasons as me -- they are committed to what they do. They are not adrenaline junkies, you know, they're not glory hounds, they do it because they believe in being journalists."

 

What is to be done? I think we make a mistake, whether as news content providers or news consumers, if we make the false choice between safety and good journalism. We need to have both. Women have shown in growing numbers that they deserve a chance to prove themselves as much as men do.

We also need to acknowledge that discrimination and harassment are problems that women tend to face more often and intensely than men do. We need to talk more about it, not try to hide it.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)


(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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