Nix the headline grabbing media fiction designed to divide women.

A strange duality affects the news media today. The more that women advance in the worlds of business, academia, medicine, and law, the gloomier news about women and their achievements becomes. As statistics report the rise in the number of women obtaining college and advanced degrees, the media increasingly tells them that this is a terrible mistake and that only by returning to traditional roles of wife and mother can women find true happiness. This message, often based on specious “scientific” studies and reports, gets played over and over again in televised newscasts, print newspapers, the internet, and other media outlets purporting to be objective.

Caryl Rivers has been tracking major media narratives over the past decade for her new book, “Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women.” (Book due out April 2007)

Some Media Myths About Women

• The Opt-Out Myth
• The Mommy War
• The Boy Crisis
• Day Care Causes "Disruptive Behavior"
  

So what's wrong with stories that are wrapped in a veneer of “research,” badly skewed science, and that overhype or misinterpret findings?

Here’s why that matters: if journalism repeatedly frames and/or reports the wrong problem, then the folks who make public policy may very well deliver the wrong solution

LINK: Common Dreams
LINK: She Writes Like She Talks
LINK: Send a message to CBS, NBC, and ABC know it's time to move beyond the false rhetoric of the 'Mommy Wars,'