Jane Gilmore > Quotes

“We assume women are writing for other women, and, within the women’s writing genre, that each group is writing only for its own niche audience. This does a disservice to the writers and the audience. The simplest way to create empathy for people who seem unfamiliar to us is to share stories about our and their lives. The more we see both similarities and differences, the more able we are to understand complexities and not be tricked into believing the unfamiliar is dangerous.”
― Jane Gilmore, Fixed It

“men themselves are not the problem here, but the embedded, self-perpetuating toxic boys’ club culture, dominated by a narrow perspective and wary of challenges to its dominance, can skew the what when and how decisions of everyday journalism.”
― Jane Gilmore, Fixed It

“welfare, immigration and feminism. What used to be known as Fairfax Media has tried to stick to the middle ground of political ideology on all these issues by providing more information on facts and expert analysis, while still acknowledging the more reasonable naysayers. The Guardian has staked its claim to left-leaning readers who reject and dislike the News Corp stance almost as much as News detests the ‘leftist’ view. Their opinion, feature and analysis articles are usually written by people who have already accepted the progressive premise and argue on the details of implementing change they understand to be necessary. All of these publications claim they are producing fair, verifiable and objective journalism. The public broadcaster is left swinging unhappily between all points of view and takes a battering from all sides for doing so.”
― Jane Gilmore, Fixed It

“If I tell you stories of my experiences in newsrooms and dealing with editors and publishers, for example, having a (older, male) publisher say to me, ‘I think you need to stop writing so much about domestic violence; our audience are professional working women, it’s not really relevant to them,’ this tells you a lot more than a list of statistics about perceptions of domestic violence among male publishers. This is particularly true for women from oppressed groups. They break the silence of oppression by speaking about their lives and force change just by this powerful act. The more honest women are about their experiences the more they challenge the norms that have been reinforced by the silencing of marginalised voices. It is even more important to hear about experiences that are shocking to men or other women outside the writer’s demographic. That it is shocking is proof of the silence imposed upon women previously unable to speak. By sharing personal information and stories about their lives, women are able to express the truth of female experience and explain the forces that silence women or cause them to fear for their safety, whether it be personal, professional, financial or sexual. Those forces are often unrecognised because they have been normalised. Memoir exposes them from the side of the oppressed rather than reinforcing them from the side of the oppressors. One of the ways oppression works is by silencing. Speaking about personal experiences of oppression is therefore a revolutionary political act.”
― Jane Gilmore, Fixed It

“Broadly speaking, in online Australian media, News Corp has strengthened its claim to the conservative, male, right-wing media space. Its approach to news stories shows a refusal to recognise climate change as a global threat caused by human activities, which can be seen in the prominence given to climate change deniers such as columnists Andrew Bolt and Miranda Devine, and their clear disdain for unions,”
― Jane Gilmore, Fixed It

“There are over 65 million displaced people in the world in 2018, and it is a global issue that affects almost every country in the world. Making policy and social decisions about how we respond to this requires that we know more than just the simple facts: we need to understand how displaced people feel, what they want, how they would like to live, why they left their homes, what are the variations in their experiences. These are not things we can understand from dry, fact-based reporting. Many social issues, which also impact government policy and community cohesion, benefit significantly when writers include personal stories.”
― Jane Gilmore, Fixed It

“one of the concepts of journalism raised by noted journalism scholar Michael Schudson is frequently ignored by journalists who grew up inculcated with the old-school ideas of objectivity and verification. Schudson said ‘social empathy’ is a basic requirement of journalism. Social empathy encourages compassion for people whose lives are unexplored in public debate and often means using personal stories to illustrate larger themes. This is something he advocated as being particularly beneficial in male-dominated topics such as political journalism and war and conflict reporting, where the human cost is often discounted.”
― Jane Gilmore, Fixed It

“Men in journalism are told they are idiots, fuckwits, dickheads, clueless, left-/right-wing shills but the focus of the abuse is rarely, if ever, on their appearance. For example, they are never called ‘fat’ in the course of such messages. On the flipside, a person who is recognisably not white, straight and able-bodied is more likely to receive abuse that targets their appearance if the abuser disagrees with them. Similarly, age is never a factor for male journalists. They are never too young or too old to do their jobs. Women on the other hand are often told they’re either too young or too old to do their job competently. Too good looking or too ugly. Too fat or too skinny. Too fuckable or not fuckable enough. I’ll explore this in more detail in later chapters. Some male journalists report receiving threats of violence, but they are many fewer than the female journalists who report this and, while insults can come from both men and women, threats and sexual denigration, in my experience, almost always come from men. Men are not threatened with rape as punishment for daring to state an opinion. It is an extraordinarily common threat against women. The logic, as far as I can tell, is that if a woman suggests that men are primarily responsible for rape you can prove her wrong by threatening to rape her.”
― Jane Gilmore, Fixed It

“News Corp’s right-wing stance expresses itself in hostility to feminists and feminist principles, as described by prominent writers such as Miranda Devine, Rita Panahi, Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt. While there are many highly professional and skilled women working for News Corp, some who even express feminist points of view and approaches to news, they are the exception. News Corp’s editors and senior staff are overwhelmingly white and male. Their approach to news is aimed at a primarily male audience, with a strong focus on men’s sport, right-wing politics, sensationalised crime and opinion writing that is deeply hostile to feminist aims. Some women thrive in this environment, such as the aforementioned Miranda Devine and Rita Panahi. Others I’ve spoken to find it impossible to work with and are forced to seek work outside the News Corp enclosures. This is working (for now) as News Corp slowly raises paywalls around most of its content, but the News Corp audience doesn’t only skew male, it also tends to be older than the readership for other publications.”
― Jane Gilmore, Fixed It

“The perception that middle-aged white men rule the world is based in fact. According to the 2016 census, there are around 24 million people in Australia. Around 11 per cent of them are men between the ages of forty and sixty. There’s no data on white men, but if we take the percentages of people with a U.K. background and third-generation Australians as a very rough guide, somewhere between 8 and 10 per cent of the Australian population are middle-aged white men. Assuming that not all male journalists are middle aged, and taking into account that they’re mostly university graduates, it’s reasonable to assume the vast majority of journalists are between the ages of twenty-five and sixty. Men in that age group are still only 24 per cent of the population and white men of that age are around 18 per cent. Which demonstrates exactly how disproportionate that 70 per cent of credited content in the media really is.”
― Jane Gilmore, Fixed It