8.3: Case by Case – Women in For-Profit TV
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- Matt Sienkiewicz
- University of California Press
The post-Taliban period by no means represents the first time women held prominent positions in the Afghan mediasphere. The period of Soviet influence and control from the 1960s to 1989 brought a number of women into the field of journalism, as a select class of urban elites prospered while others across the country faced tremendous violence and persecution. 20 Today, older Afghan media institutions, such as the state-run Kabul Times newspaper and Radio Afghanistan, employ a small but significant number of veteran female journalists, most of whom left as refugees during the Taliban years and returned after NATO and the Northern Alliance took control of Kabul. Like all Afghan media workers of this era, however, these Soviet-trained individuals are routinely dismissed as “unprofessional” by younger figures in the field. In addition to lacking training in contemporary media technology, they also, according to multiple sources interviewed for this study, are believed to lack the audience-focused approach to production required to succeed in contemporary Afghanistan. Whereas in other environments wartime experience might be a source of cultural capital, in contemporary Afghanistan the wholesale remaking of the local media system on primarily capitalist principles has largely marginalized the older professionals whose experiences are tainted by the communist era. 21
The vast majority of media producers in Afghanistan, male or female, have thus emerged over the past decade, as the country moved from a single radio broadcaster to a loosely organized system in which hundreds of outlets compete for creative talent, spectrum space, and audience attention. As a result, the overwhelming majority of television producers in Afghanistan are comfortably under the age of thirty, with radio workers skewing only somewhat older. Top-rated television programs such as Tolo’s Afghan Star and On the Road , for example, are both lead-produced by men under twenty-five.
The rapid ascent of the Afghan mediasphere offers a unique set of obstacles to female participation. As was emphasized in American discourse surrounding Afghanistan in the preinvasion period, formal education for women was virtually annihilated in the country during the Taliban’s reign. Thus the desire to quickly craft a robust media system in the postwar period left little time to train and recruit young women who could balance the gender aspect of Afghan media labor. Instead, labor needs were filled largely by a combination of returning refugees from Iran and Pakistan and local men with basic educational backgrounds. As Barker points out, subsidies for new stations, both local and national, were granted overwhelmingly to politically connected, well-resourced individuals identified by Americans as entrepreneurial enough to thrive in a commercial environment. 22 Such individuals, by local definition, had to be males able to curry favor either with urban political elites or rural community leaders with religious legitimacy. A combination of local resistance to female participation in the public sphere and foreign demands to quickly establish a commercially viable system left little opportunity for women in media during the earliest stages of Afghanistan’s reconstruction and established a system in which men currently possess a near monopoly on “experience” and “professionalism.”
However, the profit motive of Tolo TV, combined with the organization’s interest in establishing itself as capable of relating to Western supporters, has advanced the place of female producers in remarkable ways. In part, this results from the financial strength of the station, which draws upon the resources of its partner organization Newscorp to provide expensive services such as child care and door-to-door shuttle services, which are particularly important to women working in the dangerous environment of contemporary Kabul. These benefits are, for many potential female employees, absolute necessities that are often unavailable at the smaller-scale media operations that exist throughout the city.
Tolo has also made a concerted effort to hire women as producers, particularly in the areas of family and lifestyle programming, which are associated with primarily female audiences. Tania Farzana, for example, was recruited back to Kabul, after years in the United States, to produce a local adaptation of Sesame Street . Numerous other women, many of whom grew up in Afghanistan during the Taliban period, have risen to similar roles as producers within the organization. However, in speaking to a dozen female producers in Kabul in the spring of 2014, I was unable to locate one who considered an Afghan, not Western, woman to be her ultimate boss. 23
In my attempt to identify the most experienced female producers in Afghan commercial television, I was consistently steered toward women between the ages of twenty and twenty-three. Rokhsar Azamee ranks as one of the most experienced female producers in Afghanistan, despite having left the industry at twenty-two. Feverishly working from the age of seventeen after being introduced to Tolo management by a neighbor, Azamee produced several programs, primarily in the health and morning talk show genres. Having freelanced at a number of local stations in Kabul, Azamee enthusiastically attests to the freedom allowed women at Tolo TV as well as Ariana TV, another for-profit station. She suggests that these outlets, especially Tolo, encourage female freedom of expression by never introducing the concerns of “the government” or religious leaders into programs on sensitive topics such as health and education. This is not to say, however, that working at Tolo comes without risk. As Wazmah Osman notes in her history of postinvasion Afghan culture wars over television, women who work at Tolo, particularly on air, face precariousness in the most literal sense. A famous, tragic example is that of Shaima Rezayee, an on-air personality murdered after months of criticism from conservative cultural elements. 24
Perhaps with such factors on her mind, Azamee, at an age at which her Western counterparts would have been fighting over volunteer internships at local stations, reached what she felt to be a natural conclusion to her television career. She moved into the more lucrative and stable telecommunications industry. 25 This remarkable trend toward youth currently cuts across gender lines at Tolo, although trends suggest that young men are more likely to remain with the organization for the long term. Although Kabul University offers a degree in journalism, Tolo TV recruits its creative staff by casting an enormously wide net, bringing in large numbers of young people with negligible skill sets and quickly assigning them surprising levels of responsibility. Most recruits wash out quickly, while the survivors take on relatively high-ranking producing roles within months.
This system succeeds in bringing in a fair number of women alongside a much higher proportion of men. However, Tolo’s trial-by-fire approach is far better suited to the lifestyles of young Afghan men. The hours are long, sometimes bordering on abusive. 26 In a cultural space in which women working at night and women engaging in the public sphere are both points of great controversy, this system of long hours and high stakes at young ages is particularly precarious for women. Ultimately, it is untenable for most Afghan women to continue working such hours for the pedestrian pay that even the well-funded Tolo is able to offer. 27 There are many men willing to endure these conditions during their twenties, gaining professional experience and prestige while putting off family life and the economic exigencies that come with it. However, this is less of an option for women, many of whom wish to marry during this time period.
As a result, the Afghan for-profit mediasphere is remarkably successful in bringing women to positions of responsibility in production but is far less successful in keeping them there. In my interviews with producers at Tolo TV, the station was often described as a benevolent institution insofar as it granted expressive freedom to young women and opened doors, including opportunities at Western media organizations like the BBC. It is not, however, a stabilizing force for women wishing to gain an economic foothold in Afghanistan’s uncertain economy.