Interesting little snippet in the Telegraph today, about how women now make up 51% of viewers on the SciFi channel. Adam Roberts, a professor in English gave an insight into his reasoning about women watching The Matrix..
More women are tuning in to see the relationships develop between wittily-written, complex central characters they can identify with. A film like The Matrix attracted female viewers partly because it was about complicated concepts of life and death. It also had Keanu Reeves running around in leather, which helped.
The other person quoted was Ann, whose take on the whole interviewing and editing down of speech can be found in her post
My heart sank when I read the article yesterday, and I knew I’d have to write a rebuttal, but this became particularly urgent this morning since it seems to have (if I’m honest, probably justifiably) upset some of the lovely denizens of slashdot
So, the actual article seems to have been rather too heavily pruned at the sub-editing stage, because given that Elizabeth was a previous winner of the young journalist of the year award, I’d really hope that the standards for that were a lot higher than the quality of the resulting article, entitled “Adventures of Buffy and Lara see female sci-fi viewers outnumber males”.
She then proceeds with her take on the story, concluding:
So the lesson for today is – just because it’s a “quality” newspaper doesn’t lessen the likelihood of being misquoted, taken out of context or otherwise misrepresented.
