The press covers everyone’s abuses of power – except its own

The numbers are damning enough on their own. Nearly one in three media professionals across 21 countries has experienced sexual harassment at work, according to a multi-country study released last week by WAN-IFRA Women in News, City St George’s University of London, and BBC Media Action. Six in 10 who experienced it never reported it. And of those who did — only 14% said their employers always followed through.

That last figure deserves to sit with media managers for a while. Not 14% of organizations took no action. Fourteen percent were consistently reliable. The rest were somewhere between indifferent and performative.

This is not a new crisis. It’s a chronic one. The 2025 findings are the third in a series stretching back to 2018. The global prevalence rate did dip — from 34% in 2020 to 29% this year — but the researchers themselves flag that changes in which countries were surveyed make direct comparison tricky. Progress, in other words, cannot be assumed from the headline numbers.

What the data does confirm, clearly, is that underreporting isn’t a personal failing. It’s a rational calculation. Fear of retaliation. No trusted reporting channels. Low confidence that anything will actually happen. Lindsey Blumell of City St George’s puts it plainly: underreporting “signals an overall acceptance of violence in newsrooms.” That’s a brutal but honest read.

The case of GMA News senior correspondent Athena Imperial is a useful mirror for Philippine media. Imperial filed complaints for acts of lasciviousness and gender-based sexual harassment against former colleague Nico Waje before the Quezon City Prosecutor’s Office on May 13, invoking both Article 336 of the Revised Penal Code and Republic Act No. 11313, the Safe Spaces Act. A second former network employee also filed a separate complaint against Waje. Imperial’s own statement said it “was not an easy decision” — that it took “time, reflection and support” before she could move forward. That’s exactly what the WAN-IFRA data describes: a survivor who had to overcome structural and emotional barriers just to access a legal right she already had.

The Safe Spaces Act has been on the books since 2019. Its implementing rules cover workplaces explicitly. The law expanded the Anti-Sexual Harassment Act of 1995 and penalizes gender-based sexual harassment in the workplace, public spaces, and online. The legal framework isn’t the gap. The culture is.

That culture gap has real professional consequences. The WAN-IFRA study finds women are 2.4 times more likely than men to experience verbal sexual harassment and 1.8 times more likely to face online harassment. And experiencing harassment, the researchers note, directly increases the likelihood of leaving the industry. Think about what that means editorially — not just for workforce diversity, but for coverage. When the reporters most likely to be harassed are also most likely to exit, newsrooms lose sourcing networks, institutional memory, and the editorial judgment that women journalists have spent years building. Valeria Perasso of BBC Media Action says it plainly: unsafe workplaces “create structural barriers that limit who can participate, lead, and shape editorial decisions.”

Philippine media has no equivalent national study on harassment in newsrooms. The Southeast Asia figure in the WAN-IFRA report — 19% prevalence — is the closest regional reference, but the study doesn’t identify which countries were covered, so it can’t be directly applied here. What we can say is that the Imperial case is likely not singular. It’s just visible, because she had a platform and a lawyer.

The question for industry bodies — NUJP, CMFR, regional media councils — is whether they’ve been tracking complaints at all, and whether the organizations they represent have functioning, trusted, anonymous reporting mechanisms. Not HR hotlines that lead to the same management that hired the person being complained about. Actual trusted mechanisms.

WAN-IFRA’s managing director Susan Makore is right that policies alone are “insufficient.” The failure mode isn’t the absence of written rules — it’s the absence of living culture. Sustained training, survivor support, and leadership accountability that goes beyond paperwork are where the real work is. That includes journalism schools, which shape professional norms before reporters ever walk into a newsroom.

Media organizations spend enormous energy covering abuse of power everywhere else. The reckoning that the WAN-IFRA data demands — and that the Imperial case makes local and concrete — is whether they can apply that same scrutiny inward.

Credibility is not just about sourcing. It is about whether the people producing the journalism are safe enough to do it well.

The WAN-IFRA Women in News 2025 study data and country-level reports are available at sexualharassment.womeninnews.org/research.