Australia - National Report: Who Makes the News?: Global Media Monitoring Project 2020

The Australia - National Report: Who Makes the News? research indicated that women and girls remained underrepresented or typecast in Australia’s news media in 2020. In a sample of 570 stories from 37 Australian news media organisations, females comprised only 32 per cent of the 1706 news sources who were heard or talked about, even though females form a little more than half of Australia's population. Females’ relative invisibility was particularly noticeable in the three types of sources who were quoted or discussed most frequently in the sampled news stories – politicians, sportspeople and businesspeople. Females formed a substantive majority only as sources quoted or discussed people in terms of lived experience -- parents/homemakers, children and retirees. Females were also underrepresented as core actors in news events or issues, i.e., as the topic of stories, spokespeople or experts/commentators. They more frequently appeared as bystanders who encountered or were affected by newsworthy events, i.e., providing testimonials about personal experience, eyewitnesses accounts or vox pops.

For the first time in the GMMP's 25-year history, female reporters appeared to have achieved parity, comprising 49% of reporters in the sampled Australian news stories. However, this still could be considered problematic given that female journalism students have comprised more than two-thirds of Australian journalism students for decades, suggesting that employment and retention of females as news reporters has not been proportional to graduate numbers. By contrast, females comprised more than two-thirds of news anchors, indicating a television industry focus on the presentational elements of female journalists rather than their investigative and reporting skills.

The Australian findings contributed to the 'Who Makes the News? 6th Global Media Monitoring Project' report (ed. Sarah Macharia, 2021), which presented analysis of data from Australia and 113 other countries that participated in the 2020 GMMP. The GMMP has run once every five years since 1995, following the recognition in the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action (Section J) that media monitoring was an important tool for promoting change towards gender equality.