The Independent Media Commission, the Department of Journalism at the University of Prishtina (UP) and the Kosovo Media Institute (KMI), today organized a roundtable discussion on child representation and gender representation in the media.

In the framework of the IMC cooperation with the Department of Journalism, IMK and with the support of the OSCE Mission in Kosovo, two researches were conducted regarding the representation of children and gender representation in the media: 1. “Monitoring the appearance of women in televised debates during the campaign for the local elections 2021 ”and 2.“ Presentation of children and minors in the media in Kosovo ”. The monitoring reports were conducted by four students of the Department of Journalism, who monitored the media on a daily basis, in the IMC office.

This roundtable was organized in order to present the findings of this research, which were the subject of discussion and are an opportunity to provide views and recommendations of stakeholders in the field of media. Participants in the meeting were representatives from the IMC, the Department of Journalism at UP, IMK, Save the Children, the Agency for Gender Equality, the Kosovo Center for Gender Studies and the OSCE.

In the framework of the first report "Monitoring the appearance of women in television debates during the campaign for the local elections 2021" was presented the methodology of research work, the main findings of media monitoring and conclusions. The main points of the report are:

the representation of women in electoral shows on monitored televisions was small, the participation of women in electoral shows on television was symbolic, the number of women represented by political entities was small, in relation to the men invited, in In most cases, when women were invited to the shows, they had a limited time of only up to 5 minutes. In most cases, the topics such as health, justice, corruption, employment, etc., were not the main topics covered by women and only in topics about women's rights and education have dominated with women invited to shows.

In the framework of the second report "Presentation of children and juveniles in the media in Kosovo" was presented the methodology of research work, the main findings of media monitoring and conclusions. The main points of the report are: most televisions do not provide sufficient content to introduce children and juveniles in their newscast scheme, Kosovo Public Television (RTK1) offers extremely limited space on topics that address children's problems and juveniles, chronicles in which children's problems are discussed are usually listed at the end of the editions, which means they have less relevance of treatment, chronicles in the field of education are those that dominate children's chronicles but child use remains high in In the political context, most television reports show images of children, a large number of television reports show the identities of children, and in most of the monitored reports there were no statements of children.