media monitoring

      Executive Summary

 The Gender Training and Research Center in Prishtina, as part of its activities aimed at promoting and strengthening the position of women in the society, has started to monitor the Kosova press.  Articles with topics of interests for the Center have been filed and analyzed to examine patterns, the overall situation and to get a big picture about the position of Kosova women and children as seen by the press.

            During the monitoring, the following newspapers have been monitored for a period of six months: daily newspapers

• Koha Ditore;

• Zëri;

• Kosova Sot;

• Bota Sot;

• Epoka e Re;

weekly Java, monthly magazine Teuta, as well as the Macedonian paper in Albanian Fakti. More than 470 articles have been selected and filed. Out of these articles, seventy-five percent have examined issues connected to the position of women, and twenty-five have featured problems that Kosovo children face today.

            Women in the press

            Position of women in the Kosovo society continues to be very poor.  This can be seen by the representation in the press as well.  Even though everybody is aware that there is work to be done, none of the newspaper has featured an organized campaign that would have regular articles on the position of women, on specific problems that need to be addresses.  Rather, the newspaper have articles on ad-hoc basis about different topics.

            There have been two major analyses on the report.  One of the analyses tries to stress major topics that are featured in the newspapers and the other is the analyses of the position of women in different spheres of life like culture, economy, politics, sport etc.

            In the first analyses it can easily be seen that the biggest number of articles talk about the achievements of women in different fields.  The next category are articles that talk about gender equality and the need to increase the participation of women in different fields.  However this positive news is followed by two very negative topics.  One of them is prostitution and human trafficking and the other is domestic violence and rape.  Prostitution continues to be one the main problems not just in Kosovo but in the whole region of Western Balkans.  It is clear now that there needs to be a regional effort to fight against this main branch of organized crime.

            The other main problem as mentioned are cases of domestic violence and rape.  The number of articles that report about these cases has been constant in the first six months period, which brings us to the conclusion that the situation is not getting any better.  Knowing the fact that number of reported cases is much smaller than the real number, the magnitude of the problem gets multiplied several times.

            As for the position of women in different fields of life two fields have proved to be more important.  Women are represented very much in culture through famous artists; and a smaller representation in politics.  Even though a third of the parliament are women, the representation in the press about political issues is many times smaller.  Women continue to be poorly represented in articles about economy and sports.

            The report also features an analyses of the articles written by women journalists.

            The report also features a table of statistics about the number of articles in every newspaper, number of articles for all the topics, number of articles per each month, and the division of articles on the basis of their origin, whether they are Kosovo based or international.