reflectivepundit

The Gender Gap in Sports Media and Its Consequences

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Each spring, when the media report on “March Madness,” they hype the NCAA men’s basketball tournament with the NCAA women’s basketball play-offs not even an afterthought. That’s how it was in the past; that’s how it is today. And it is likely that nothing changes dramatically in the foreseeable future.

You can observe gender framing  in sports reporting in print, TV, radio, and online. If covered at all, women sports rarely receive as extensive and prominently placed coverage as male sports. I have observed this for years in the sports pages of the New York Times, for example, but equally on television, such as ESPN and the Golf Channel.

Even the crawls on TV screens show gender bias in that the results of female competitions rank inevitably behind literally all male results, if reported at all. That is not unique but particularly striking on the Golf Channel, where the male PGA tour, the secondary male Web.com Tour, the Champions Tour of male golfers 50 years and older, and the male European Tour rank most of the time before the Ladies Professional Golf Association (PGA) tour.

This morning, I experienced this gender gap online.

Trying to find the schedule of the NCAA’s women’s tournament, I clicked on Yahoo’s “Sports” and found on the left sidebar NCAAB for NCAA Basketball.  I was hardly surprised that a mouse click brought up plenty of information about the Men’s2014 NCAA Tournament, nothing on the women’s tournament.

I found it eventually by clicking “All Sports” and NCAAW among the choices.

Similarly, as usual, Yahoo’s golf page displays today the PGA leaderboard of this week’s tour event but not that of the LPGA’s.  

In the past, when I discussed what I consider gender discrimination in sports reporting, the number one counterargument has been that male sports, professionals and amateurs, are far more popular, draw huge crowds, bring in the big money.

Although  I haven’t seen empty seats watching the ladies of Connecticut or Tennessee or Stanford or Notre Dame or many others now competing in the big tournament, it is true that there is generally far more interest in men’s competition.

Here the old “chicken-or-egg first” question comes in.  Are most people simply less interested in female sports competition or has the mass-mediated gender bias in favor of male athletes caused this gender gap?

I believe that the mass media together with male dominated sports programs contributed, if not caused this drastic difference in the appreciation of male and female athletics.

The notion that greater diversity in the news rooms would diminish all kinds of biases—among them disadvantageous gender frames--has not materialized so far.

Even women at the top of media organizations do not promise change in this respect.

Note that Marissa Mayer is the President and CEO of Yahoo and thus in charge of Yahoo Sports as well.

P.S. This Sunday morning, as I listened to New York based local radio and TV programs, the sports newscasters talked at length about yesterday's results in the men's NCAA basketball tournaments, detailling the major matchups and mentioning in particular how the Connecticut and Syracuse teams had fared. There was not a word about the local St. John's Women's team that was victorious in the NCAA Womens' basketball playoffs nor about Fordham's women who lost a very close game.

Bill O’Reilly: “There's got to be some downside to having a woman president.”

Transcript Excerpts with Comments by Brigitte L. Nacos

With Hillary Clinton the only woman in the discussed line-up for the 2016 presidential race, Bill O’Reilly put forth the argument that there must be a downside to having a woman president. In the following excerpts from the January 26^th “The O’Reilly Factor” program, I added my comments in brackets.  

 

O'REILLY: Last night on THE FACTOR Congresswoman Michele Bachmann said that she believes some Americans do not feel the USA is ready for a woman President -- very provocative. [And that from a woman who ran for president last time around! Ah, well, she did not lose because she is wacky but because Americans were not ready for a woman in the White House] Joining us from Washington is Kate Obenshain a Republican and Kirsten Powers is a Democrat and Fox News analyst.

O'REILLY: There's got to be some downside to having a woman president, right? Something -- something that may not fit with that office, correct? [It takes a male with a superiority complex to make such a statement. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has a downside as head of Germany’s government?]

POWERS: I'm going to say no, Bill.

O'REILLY: So there is no downside to having a woman.

POWERS: Well just because you're female that would something -- let me ask you this. What's the downside of a man being president?

O'REILLY: Oh you've got three -- you've got three years? I mean look at the guys we've had in there since.

POWERS: That's because they are a man or it's because of the people that are in office.

O'REILLY: Look, men are men and women are women. There is a difference, Kate. There is a difference between the genders. [What a smart observation] Now men, they are tied up and a lot of them macho image and that kind of thing and they act like you are not going to push me around. That could be a deficit you know they are not as kind of open to sensitive discussion maybe as women. [Why would that be a deficit since you and your conservative brethren love sable rattling macho guys in Washington? Your guys are not sensitive and discuss, they act] There's got to be a downside for a woman. Do you know one?

KATE OBENSHAIN, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: You know, I'm having a tough time with this one, too Bill. I think it depends on the individual. Of course there is a downside to certain individual women, you know --

O'REILLY: But in general you both don't see any gender deficiency to lead the free world?

OBENSHAIN: I don't generalize all women or all men.

POWERS: Well I actually can think of something.

OBENSHAIN: Oh good.

POWERS: I mean if you can take -- if you can take your example of men being macho a woman might feel like she needs to act macho, for example, maybe feel like she had to take -- vote for say the Iraq war, I'm just going to say theoretically to make it look like she would be a tough leader when she was in office and that she is not afraid to use military force. [Are the female guests falling in line now?]

O'REILLY: That's what Hillary Clinton did. [Yeah—she is the real target of discussion]

O'REILLY: There haven't been that many strong women leaders throughout history. I mean we have Golda Meir.

O'REILLY: We have Margaret Thatcher.

POWERS: Both of them were very tough.

O'REILLY: We have a bunch, you know a bunch of people in American on the senate level and the Congress level. But you know, when you are President of the United States you've got it deal with people like Putin, Kate, you've got to deal with real ornery. There are the mullahs in Iran. [So, we forget about Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher since they did not have to deal with Putin and the mullahs in Iran—the toughest guys of all]

Take a Deep Breath and Think Before Making Missteps in the Ukrainian Crisis

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry told  Bob Schieffer of CBS News that Russia’s move into Crimea is “an incredible act of aggression. It is really a stunning, willful choice by President Putin to invade another country.” According to Kerry, Russia has violated Ukraine's sovereignty and several of its obligations under international agreements. "You just don't in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext," he said.

I wondered: Did Kerry indeed say that in the 21^st century you are not invading another country on completely trumped up pretext? Yes, he did. Obviously Washington’s diplomat-in-chief chose not to remember the invasion of Iraq some 11 years ago that fell squarely into the 21^st century and was trumped up with bogus justifications.

I certainly do not applaud or justify Russia’s military move into the Crimean peninsula. But one cannot ignore that the European Union and NATO contributed a great deal to Vladimir Putin’s reaction, overreaction, to the violence accompanying the political crisis in the Ukraine.

By relentlessly pursuing their goal to bring the former Soviet republics into the fold of the European Union and NATO, the leading European players and Washington expanded their western alliance ever closer to the Russian Federation’s borders with the Ukraine as the latest domino at the verge of falling from the Russian-dominated to the western sphere.

Long part of Russia, in 1954 Moscow transferred Crimea to the Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. That symbolic administrative change came to haunt Russia after the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the subsequent independence of former Soviet Republics. Russia has multiple interests in the Ukraine, most of all in transporting natural gas through Ukrainian pipelines, and in the Crimean peninsula, most of all as access to the Black Sea and site of Russia’s Black Sea fleet.

When the clashes in Kiev and elsewhere unfolded, the U.S. and European governments were eagerly supporting the pro-EU side. I was stunned when a U.S. Assistant Secretary of State visited and encouraged pro-western protesters in Kiev and provided them with cookies. Just imagine the reaction here, if a Russian assistant foreign minister whipped up anti-war protesters before the Iraq invasion before TV cameras and microphones.