Online trolls threatening their physical safety to silence their voices overshadow the triumph of women journalists cracking the glass ceiling.
The online harassment of women journalists is an anti-feminism backlash against women journalists who made some gains towards equality in what was traditionally a male space: political reporting, investigative journalism, and free expression on social media.
The range of online harassment of women journalists include vilification on Twitter and Facebook, mainly through slander: “bitch”, “slut”, “you will be raped”, “we know where you live”, to photo-shopped images of them in sexual positions, resulting in emotional trauma and sometimes even self-censorship, or leaving journalism.
The list of names of South African women journalists who have been harassed online continues to grow: Pauli van Wyk (Daily Maverick), Ranjeni Munusamy (ex-Sunday Times), Ferial Haffajee (Daily Maverick), Karyn Maughan (News24), the late Karima Brown (702) Lindsay Dentlinger (eNCA), Tshidi Madia (EWN), Carien du Plessis (freelance), Qaanitah Hunter (News24), Marianne Thamm (Daily Maverick), Slindelo Masikane (eNCA), Julia Madibogo (City Press), Susan Comrie (amaBhungane), and more.
One of the most significant findings in the largest local research on this topic to date – Genderlink’s Glass Ceilings: women in South African media houses 2018 – was that trolling, or online abuse of women journalists, was on the increase.
Women’s voices add diversity in the public sphere that deepens democracy. Otherwise, it is just the same old elites talking the same language, with male, liberal, white narratives dominating ideologies. As Michele Weldon, director of Medill Public Thought Leaders, observed: “If you have a newsroom that’s predominantly male, then the story ideas, source choices and way a story is presented will reflect that point of view. When that happens, you get a skewed view of the world and that’s not what the world is like.”
Cracking glass ceilings
A glass ceiling is an invisible but real barrier to advancement of women in the workplace, where they can be blocked by sexism, sexist practices, sexual harassment, patriarchal views and prejudices, in hiring and promotions as well as salary disparities with men, according to the International Women’s Media Foundation. There can also be gains for women when they break through the glass ceiling, and then a ‘backlash’ against this triumph.
And so, in South Africa, women cracked the glass ceiling, somewhat, when huge gains were made by having an equal number of women and men in newsrooms, as the Glass Ceilings research showed – yet, simultaneously, the anti-feminism backlash accelerated in the form of cybermisogyny.
Trolling (online bullying and harassment), which includes some of the ugliest forms of sexism, is used to try and silence media women. Cyber misogyny may be a fairly recent phenomenon over the past decade but, like the speed of the social media that spawned it, is guaranteed to spiral out of control if not addressed seriously. Global studies show that trolling affects women more than men.
Cyber misogyny, expressed via online sexual harassment through to stalking and threat of violence, is a psychological – and potentially physical – risk when it spills out into the physical world, to the safety of women journalists. It is also a threat to the active participation of women in the public sphere and civil society debate, and on social media platforms.
Cyber misogyny is rampant internationally
An international study detailed how female journalists face ‘rampant’ online harassment. In the Journalist’s Resource, published by Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Centre, Denise-Marie Ordway wrote what in-depth interviews with dozens of female journalists from across the globe revealed: women in news suffer from sexist remarks to threats of rape. Ordway said researchers found that the strategies women used to deal with such abuse can disrupt their newsroom routines, even prompting some to change the way they report the news.
“Consistently, the journalists we interviewed saw online gendered harassment as hampering their efforts to report the news, engage with the communities they cover, or have a voice in the digital sphere,” wrote Gina Masullo Chen, assistant professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. The study contained vivid descriptions of the abuses women faced, in their own words:
- An online editor from Germany said: “The feedback (on this article) was not criticism, it was threats, it was death threats, it was calls for rape.”
- A veteran newspaper journalist in the U.S. received hundreds of messages after writing about Donald Trump from the perspective of a Muslim woman. “I was shocked by the dehumanisation and demonisation that exploded on Twitter and Facebook as well as direct email to the point to where I thought I should get security cameras.”
Reporters are often required by their editors and media companies to promote their work, and interact with audiences, online. But audience engagement can have ugly consequences, as some people use Twitter, Facebook and other online platforms to attack members of the press.
A few years ago, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) began social media defence classes as an intervention – a strategy media educator Jenna Price (who was threatened online, with rape) welcomed, saying media employers “… need to practice responsible corporate citizenship and ensure their staff have the social media skills and the emotional support required … it needs policy, strategy and action.”
Some South African trolling experiences and what to do
Karima Brown was once sent a brinjal emoji, which represents a penis – depicting rape. Qaanitah Hunter was SMS-ed a picture of a gun by the ANC after she uncovered corruption. Pauli van Wyk was called “bitch”, “witch”, “cunt”. She told to “go to hell Satan” by the EFF after she uncovered the VBS corruption stories. In the Zuma era, Ferial Haffajee’s ‘pictures’ were all over the internet, manufactured as they were by the Gupta troll farm factory in India.
The mastermind was Bell Pottinger, the defunct multinational PR firm employed by the Guptas, who introduced the term ‘white monopoly capital’ into the South African lexicon as part of their propaganda campaign. Anton Rupert was made the face of the WMC. Haffajee had never met Rupert, but a photoshopped image of Rupert walking a dog, with Haffajee’s face on the dog’s body, went viral.
“The attack is patriarchal and gendered: I am the woman as cow and bitch. The contrivers couldn’t get more stereotypical if they tried,” was Haffajee’s response.
Tshidi Madia was body-shamed on social media. Lindsay Dentlinger was harassed and called racist; she was accused of telling a black interviewee to don a mask during the Covid-19 pandemic, but not doing so with white interviewees.
These are only a few example of local experiences. International research such as Unesco’s discussion paper: ‘The Chilling: global trends in online violence against women journalists’ confirm that women are the most targeted group, and the attacks are sexualised.
In South Africa, women journalists said they had been victims of unknown email or cellphone correspondents issuing violent threats, bullying and trolling, often of a sexual nature.
Recommendations
Research on the topic, through interviews with women journalists, shows that this is a serious reality for female reporters working in the political reporting and investigative journalism spaces. Clearly, this is the area to watch and monitor. Women journalists said that media houses needed to provide more support victims and locate cyber bullies and stalkers.
Another suggestion was to create a link, an online tracker that will both report such incidents and follow the perpetrators. “There needs to be some kind of way we can immediately report someone who we see is bullying or trolling us online. Another comment included: “The IT department should build strong defensive software that will protect all employees.”
Perhaps the strongest recommendation, from most women journalists, is to raise awareness of the scourge and its impact, to prompt corrective action. This would apply to all relevant sectors and stakeholders including the government, police, political parties, media players and big tech companies, such as Twitter and Facebook.
The problem in South Africa is that there is little recognition of the problem. Government tells media to report issues to the police, who don’t recognise this as serious violence. They laugh: “But what is this, cyberbullying?” one woman journalist recalled. The big tech companies, which enjoy ‘engagement’ and ‘traction’ for their platforms, are not moderating their platforms effectively and hate speech is not removed fast enough, so there needs to be alliances to pressure big tech into action against the trolls.
So far the only local sectors raising their voices on this are civil society organisations in the media space, such as Sanef and Gender Links.
The digital world, hailed as enabling greater democracy by levelling the playing fields for women, has ironically given rise to cyber-bullying and misogyny. It’s high time this was taken seriously and trolls were named, shamed and punished for this traumatic violence against women journalists.
Dr Glenda Daniels is Associate Professor and HOD in Media Studies at Wits University. She is author of the books: Power and Loss in South African Journalism: news in the age of social media (2020, Wits Press); Fight for Democracy: the ANC and media in South Africa (2012, Wits Press), and co-author of Glass Ceilings: women in South African media Houses, 2018 (2018, Gender Links). She sits on the council of Sanef and the Press Council of South Africa.
