Death threats. Racist taunts. Vows of violence. Inside the increasingly personal attacks targeting Canadian female journalists are signs of a climate in which journalists’ job security is at risk, according to some in the journalism field.
A recent article written in an Ottawa newspaper, the Citizen, shows an outpouring of anger among a small but growing group of journalists frustrated with the way their workplace has evolved.
In the article titled “Female journalists need a better deal,” the author, journalist Jessica Broudman, notes her frustrations with the workplace.
“There’s a lot of talk about making the workplace more flexible, but it’s not happening,” she wrote in the article titled “The Women who cover us have it pretty good.”
In the piece, Broudman takes aim at those who say it is necessary to make journalism more flexible.
“Don’t worry about the environment – you already have one,” she wrote.
She accuses some in the industry of advocating a world in which women are second-class citizens.
“The word ‘flexibility’ is used so often in conversation that it’s lost its meaning,” Broudman writes. “What is flexibility, really?”
There’s a small and growing group of Canadian female media workers who want the conversation about their workplace — which they see as being more hostile than in the past — changed.
“And so what I’ve worked on for the last year and a half has been to try and figure out how we are as a profession working today to make some of the best and most influential professional journalism in the world accessible to a huge range of people,” Broudman told CBC News.
“It seems to me we’ve got to think about that conversation about whether we really want to be dealing with the issues of diversity, gender and sexual orientation when it comes to reporting the news.
“I think we need to think about some of these issues in the context of the people we’re dealing with. It’s not to dismiss the concerns of women in our profession. It’s to say, ‘Let’s take a look at what
