Pink bus driver and questionable media framing
Several Bangladeshi media outlets published headlines centered on an incident in which a woman driver of a bus service launched for women in the capital and several other cities “failed to get onto a flyover,” framing the woman driver’s failure and a male driver’s assistance in an unseemly way. Experts say this kind of negative framing can reinforce gender-based stereotypes. It could also have a negative effect on society.
Women were hired as drivers and assistants for a special bus service for women launched in Dhaka and several other districts across the country. Various opinions, memes and satirical posts about the women bus drivers spread on social media. On the second day after the “pink bus service” launched, news portraying the women drivers negatively appeared in several media outlets. In published news reports and videos posted on Facebook, media outlets said the woman driver “failed” to get the bus onto a flyover and that “male drivers were needed to rescue them.”
Media framing: Woman driver’s “failure” and man’s “help”
Videos posted on several media outlets and their Facebook pages show a woman bus driver getting up from her seat and a man taking her place. In the video, the woman can be heard requesting that the scene of the seat change not be recorded. Posting the video on its Facebook page, Daily Jugantor wrote, “Unable to get the bus onto the flyover, the woman driver took help from male driver.” Daily Ittefaq posted the same video on its Facebook page with the caption, “Woman driver fails to get bus onto flyover, had to take male driver’s help.” In its video, Daily Inqilab said, “Pink bus got stuck on flyover, male driver rescued it.” The video was also seen posted with nearly identical headlines on the pages of several other media outlets, including Daily Naya Diganta, Daily Gonokontho and Mirror News.
RTV News’s report was headlined, “‘Pink bus’ in trouble getting onto flyover, male driver takes control.” The report said, “It is learned that the bus’s driver, Fahima Sanjan, faced some difficulty while getting onto the flyover that day. When she failed to get the double-decker bus up the flyover’s incline, she immediately stopped the bus. Later, to avoid any unpleasant situation or prolonged traffic jam, help was sought from a male driver. With his help, the bus was safely moved, and he drove the bus onto the flyover.”
Reports with the same information were published by Desh Rupantor (Pink bus driver fails to get onto flyover, male driver helps), Bangladesh Times (‘Pink bus’ fails to get onto flyover, male driver steps in to help), Dipto News (Woman driver fails to get ‘pink bus’ onto flyover, male driver assists), Boishakhi Online (‘Pink bus’ in trouble getting onto flyover, male driver takes control), Daily Ajkaler Khobor (‘Pink bus’ in trouble getting onto flyover, male driver takes control), Times Today (Woman driver fails to get bus onto flyover, takes male driver’s help), Daily Gonokontho (‘Pink bus’ in trouble getting onto flyover, male driver helps), and NPB News (‘Pink bus’ in trouble getting onto flyover, male driver helps). Several other online media outlets carried nearly identical headlines.
In a video interview given to Desh TV on the matter, the woman driver said that when she got up from the driver’s seat to drink water, her trainer went and sat there. She said, “If we can’t get the vehicle onto the flyover, we wouldn’t have taken the steering wheel for no reason.”
In addition, when Dismislab tried to find the geolocation using clues from the video of the driver’s seat change, it found that the bus’s location was about 150 meters before the entrance to the Khilgaon flyover. In other words, the bus was not near the flyover or on it when the video was recorded. As a result, the claim that the woman driver failed to get the bus onto the flyover cannot be confirmed based on the video.
Are such headlines only because the driver is a woman?
Dismislab could not independently verify whether the woman driver actually failed to get onto the flyover and took a male driver’s help. But even if the woman driver had failed, is that an event worth reporting or headlining this way? If a male driver faced such a problem at the start of his career, would it have been reported the same way? Dismislab sought answers to these questions.
Journalist and trainer Qurratul-Ain-Tahmina believes that “woman driver fails” is not a news item. She said, “Our conventional mindset about women driving buses is different. It centers around whether a girl can drive such a big, heavy bus.” She said this thinking is what leads to highlighting the event as a joke, that “the girl couldn’t do it.”
Mercy Ette, senior lecturer in journalism at Newcastle University, explains the concept of gendered mediation in her article titled “Journalism and Gendered Mediation” in The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication. According to her, how media outlets present an event can influence people’s perceptions of the roles and capabilities of women and men.
She wrote, “Mediation becomes gendered ‘when the news reflects sex-based norms and assumptions by, for instance, using masculine metaphors to describe political events or by highlighting the sex or personal life of a political actor despite its irrelevance to the issue at hand’.”
“Through the application of an informal professional code known as news values, journalists peg their stories on frameworks of meanings that are informed by their organizational, economic, political, and cultural environment. Journalists draw on culturally-defined shared meanings to create and reinforce consensual ideas about their society.”
Qurratul-Ain-Tahmina believes this kind of reporting further entrenches stereotypes already present among us. She said, “(This kind of reporting) reinforces the stereotype. When something is highlighted this way, separately, without any reasoning or context, this thinking spreads to others as well.”
She added that such reporting also fails to reveal any structural problems. These reports do not raise questions about the bus’s technical condition or the state of road safety.
(All social media and news media captions, quotations, and news excerpts in this article have been translated into English from the languages in which they were originally posted or published.)
