‘The Future Of Media’: Looking Kinda Male
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
The Hollywood Reporter has a cover story on CNN’s lineup. CNN producer Josiah Daniel Ryan was pleased, tweeting as follows: “The future of media looks like this.”
The cover already might have Caused Controversy, but that “future of media” bit, evocative of “the future is female,” probably put things over the edge: The internet has collective pointed out that all five people on the cover are men. The future of media? Dudes.
So. Sexism? You betcha. But I’m at a loss here. Call-outs of the sexism du jour have not gotten us far. Someone offends, Twitter responds, life moves on, power structures intact.
And it’s passé these days, even in feminist circles, to care about women’s representation in elite professions. How does it help ordinary women just trying to get by if there is a woman on a cover like that? What’s more difficult to reckon with is that even if the presence of a woman doesn’t much help, the absence can still hurt.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at [email protected]. Her book, The Perils of “Privilege”, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
