XPost: Bias in media. Dozens of Iraqi Teenagers Stoned to Death for 'emo' haircuts. Not implied until near end of article that all teenagers were male (but didn't mind telling us the gender of the armed men doing it).

chavelah · 2012-03-10T17:27:07+00:00

I think the journalist assumed an amount of knowledge about Iranian culture that most Westerners just don't have. Whoever wrote this story knows damn good and well that any Iranian teenager who is out on the street with tight pants, piercings and a hairstyle that you can see is going to be a male, because female Iranians are subject to purdah. But that is context-specific awareness. I'm not sure it's misandry, but it's definitely not good reporting.

bikemaul · 2012-03-10T17:40:40+00:00

It reminds me the story of a girl raped and assassinated by a gang a few years ago here in Brazil. The headline in a newspaper that I bought was something like this:

"Girl brutally raped and murdered by a local gang"

Almost the entire text of that news described the life of the poor girl, how the crime happened, how the police was trying to arrest the gang, etc... After 5 or 6 paragraphs I found a little piece of text in the middle of the article: "A friend of the victim (male) tried to protect her but was killed too".

That's all! The whole article considered the girl the only victim of the crime and used just a few words to say that a boy was killed too and nothing else was said about him.

2012-03-10T20:24:11+00:00

Journalist here. There's something important you're missing: you're judging an article written by a foreign media outlet by American journalistic standards. Usually, we specify and quantify the gender and ages of victims, which is standard AP style. (ex. "14 boys and 11 girls, ranging in age from 12 to 15, died when the bus plunged off the cliff")

You also have to consider that the original article could have been written in Arabic, then translated to English. A lot can be lost in translation - I'm not familiar with Arabic, but I'm pretty sure plural nouns come in both masculine and feminine forms, whereas plural nouns in English (like teenagers) are gender-neutral.

Also, it's evident they don't know who the victims were or how many of them there are. So they can't say that it was "all males" who were killed, because frankly, they don't know that for a fact. They have the quote from the one fellow who escaped, where he says "boys", but that's it.

Lastly, this Reuters article indicates that not all of the victims have been male, and that those behind the attacks have said that they are targeting both males and females.

So what a bunch of hubbub over nothing. There is some bias in the media against men; this is not such a case.

BinaryShadow · 2012-03-10T12:59:39+00:00

This is a horrible tragedy. However, this is a clear example of anti-male bias in the media.

If all victims are male, then they are almost always mentioned as "teenagers" or "miners" or some other gender-neutral group. Only if the gender is all female is it blasted all over the headline.

BinaryShadow · 2012-03-11T05:42:48+00:00

Update:

Here's MSNBC's coverage:

All victims mentioned as youths or teens. First time gender is mentioned:

Six other young people, including two girls, were wounded in beatings intended as warnings, the security sources said.

johnmarkley · 2012-03-10T19:06:02+00:00

For anybody interested in the subject of how the media often erases the gender of male victims (but not victimizers) I strongly recommend checking out the work of Adam Jones, and especially his article "Effacing the Male:Gender, Misrepresentation, and Exclusion in the Kosovo War.

ThePigman · 2012-03-11T01:01:46+00:00

Nope, can't agree with this one. Not much need to point out that the victims are boys at the outset, not when there is a big picture of what is obviously a boy accompanying the article.

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