PressEthic

I was struck by two headlines from the New York Times on September 29th -- "Suicide Bomber on Motorbike Kills 8 Afghan Soldiers and a Civilian" and "Suicide Blast by Woman in Iraq Kills 8 Others; 57 Are Hurt".

Both headlines summed up, as good headlines should, the basics of the stories -- suicide bomber strikes in such and such country, x number of people dead. In fact, the stories were remarkably similar as was the reportage. There was the inevitable replay of what exactly happened, the casualties, the time of attack, the significance of the place/people attacked, a rumination about who was behind it, comments from "officials" and then the stories both branch out to include other recent attacks.

However, it wasn't the similarities, but rather the one glaring difference that caught my attention. The headline from the Afghanistan article states that a suicide bomber killed people whereas the Iraq article's headline specifies the bomber's sex -- it was a woman. This continues into the lead paragraph of each story:

Afghanistan:

A suicide bomber on a motorbike drove into a convoy of Afghan soldiers boarding minibuses outside their training base on the edge of Kabul on Wednesday afternoon and detonated his explosives, killing 9 people in addition to himself and wounding 28, the Defense Ministry said.

Iraq:

A woman walked up to the gate of a new army and police recruitment center in Tal Afar, a northern city, on Wednesday and blew herself up, killing 8 people in addition to herself and wounding 57, hospital and security officials said.

The question that arose in my mind, having read both articles, was why was it important to point out, in one case, that the bomber was a woman? And if gender is a factor, why not write that the bomber on the motorbike in Afghanistan was a man? Instead, we have no indication of his being specifically male until he "detonated his explosives" (oh! it's a guy!).

Perhaps if the Iraq bomber's sex had played a central role in her being able to stage the attack or if she was trying to make a point that was specific to the female gender, then there would be justification for slipping the word "woman" into the headline. But if gender is completely unconnected to what happened, then why include it in the headline? In this case, there was no reason to include it. The rest of that story reads just like any other story about suicide bombing and only in the 8th paragraph does the writer mention that "Suicide bombers in Iraq are rarely women, though there has been at least one other." Ok, I suppose that qualifies as interesting or unusual, so fine, include it in the body of the article. But headlines are supposed to communicate the essential facts of a story -- and her being a woman was not important.

I suppose my point in this case is that the headline was badly written. But I think the bigger question that arises is whether we, as members of the media, do report with a gender bias of some sort? Is our reporting slightly different depending on if we're talking about a woman or a man -- even if their sex is unimportant to the story? I suspect that we do.

(and I think I've stumbled onto another separate, though loosely connected, subject in my conclusion, so I'm going to save expanding on that for another blog).