Interrogating inequalities in Sports Media: Examining gender/race representation on ESPN.com

Source: ESPN Online

Category: Gender

Coverage: Front Page Headlines (Links)

Time Frame: 1 Day

48 Front Page Links: 4 about women, 44 about men

            To get a better understanding of the discrepancy in the media coverage of men and women, I monitored the front page of ESPN.com to see how many story headlines pertained to female sports. My findings were quite astonishing. Out of 48 clickable links (story headlines), only 4 where links leading to women’s sports, the rest were men’s sports—also, there were no pictures of women to be found. Near the bottom of the page, if you scrolled down far enough you can find EspnW. EspnW is a section just for women. To give you a context of the size of the space allotted for EspnW; an apple next to the tree it fell from would be the only thing comparable. The fact is, less than 8% of the front page was devoted to women. This by no means helps the media stigma that men hog all of the coverage. Yet, there is more to be observed.

            After clicking on every story on the side “ticker,” I noticed that a lot of these stories about men were written about women. In fact, women wrote nearly half of the dozen stories on the ticker. Thinking about that for a minute, I came up two schools of thought. The first and most obvious would be, “Do the writers get no say in what they write?” More specifically, do women writers get told by the presumably male editors to only cover male sports? The second school of thought would be to assume that like the writers, there is an equal female influence in the front offices of ESPN.com, but still neglects the coverage in the female sporting world. There is no thought process that leads you anywhere near gender equality, but there is claim behind how these stories get covered in the first place. I don’t have access to the employee list of ESPN, nor could I even come to a conclusion if I had it, but it is interesting to ponder the idea that woman are making decisions about coverage, and still ignoring the coverage of their own gender.

            I followed the link to EspnW, and I will admit, I was very impressed. It looked like another site entirely, built with light colors and smooth fonts. There were a variety of stories, written by both men and woman, and many other links to blogs and other media coverage for woman. The biggest concern? Why was this site buried so deep on the ESPN.com page? That to me seems to be the biggest issue. Why is it that we blatantly hide the female media coverage? Wouldn’t it be a quick fix to at least put some links higher up on the page? ESPN is the biggest sports media outlet in the world, so they will constantly be looked at and scrutinized for—not giving adequate coverage of both genders. There needs to be a change in the way we construct our online sources, and it starts with placing links at the top of the page. EspnW was great, where I found it was not.

Reflecting on the Shame of College Sports: Should NCAA Div 1 Basketball and Football players get paid?

            A University of California in Los Angeles football player once said, “I am a UCLA prostitute. I sell my body to them. They pay me to perform for them. When my teammates and I perform well, the school makes lots of money…regardless of how much money the school makes, we get the same, just our scholarship.” (Coakley 2009) That quote was from 2004. The money that collegiate sports make in 2014, makes 2004 money look like quarters found in the sofa. According to University of North Carolina faculty affiliate Dr. Boyce Watkins, “ad revenue from March Madness has crossed the 1 billion dollar mark,” (Watkins 2013). For those who are not aware, March Madness is the moniker for the NCAA D1 national championship, one of the biggest sporting events in the world. How big? According to Boyce, the National Football League took in $976 million; the NBA took in $537; the MLB took in $354 million, which is not to mention all of the t-shirts and other paraphernalia that were sold throughout the year. (Watkins 2013). The difference? The biggest earner was an amateur sport.

            Big time college sports are the perfect business model. You have a revenue source that will never fade, and a work force that essentially works for free. That same work force is also held responsible for maintaining another workload—from the same institution. However, when one workload has millions and millions of dollars at stake, where should you allegiance of time and effort reside? However popular, intercollegiate sports contain a major flaw—the hypocrisy of “student-athlete, while at the same time demanding that one comes before the other. If athletes were to see themselves as investments, why would any of them do anything other than what was destined to turn them profit? That is what the corporations are doing. That is what the cable companies are doing. That is what their schools are doing.

            I have paid attention to college sports for my entire existence, and have read every argument you can make when it comes to dollar bills and athletics. There is no answer that will cover every base; each road heads in a different direction. Do we pay them the money they deserve? That would void their amateur status. So why don’t they just go pro? Well, there are laws saying they can’t. We cannot avoid the fact the money is coming at these athletes, and they do not want to dodge it. To many times have athletes been given “illegal benefits” or “luxury recruiting,” not to mention the exploitation of their names for profit—all to which they get nothing, yet reap every consequence if found benefiting from themselves. What we have to realize is that we set athletes up to fail, and expect to them succeed. We place high expectation on their performance, while neglecting the status of their well-being. We require a full time commitment to the field, and we require a full time commitment to the classroom. Ultimately, we expect the poise of professionals, from the likes of amateurs.

Deviance in High School Sports

            If one were to map out the sporting populous, it would look like something of a pyramid. At the very top, the smallest piece would be the professionals—the athletes who are paid to play sports. The next section (think meat and dairy on the food pyramid) would be collegiate sports. This piece would still be very small; both the population of college and professional sports would not even come close to the amount of participants who follow. The bottom half of the pyramid would be High School sports and below. I group these together because this is the last level of athletics to which there is equal opportunity to play and sport. Why make this analogy? We need it to visualize. We need to visualize just how big of a portion of the sporting world we are blatantly mishandling.

            High school sports have become something of a spinoff to collegiate sports. When TV shows have great success, they create spin off to keep gaining capital on their product; the same goes for amateur sports. We are at a point in our sporting culture to which we value rankings of players who are not even old enough to vote, but we find their categorical placement to be something we take into consideration when choosing them to be part of the big-business world that is college sports. This unfair emphasis on High school athletics had led programs around the country to alienate students who aren’t participating to either; develop poor sporting moral; quit all other sports except for one; feel a sense of false bravado; or even simply decide to not play sports at all.

            If I were to choose one problem in today’s sporting culture, it would be the issue of limited participation—illuminated by Jay Coakley in Sports and Society. Coakley quotes, “when high schools emphasize power and performance sports, they discourage participation by some boys and many girls who prefer sports emphasizing pleasure and participation.” This idea Coakley explains called “power and performance” stems from the schools stresses on winning, and becoming recognized for their performance standards. If we are to truly abolish these issues, recruiting for sports needs to be strictly enforced to only seniors, as well as diluting the media coverage—as far as spotlighting certain athletes, to a minimum.

Once the Cheering Stops: The Life of a Retired Pro Athlete

A professional athlete has in one-way or another devoted every piece of their existence to their chosen sport. So what happens when athletes lose their sense of existence? It is a heavy term set inside an all to real of a question. Professional athletes in the modern world of sport, make enough money to support the average American life style, ten times over. Yet, many athletes find themselves checking their bank statements and asking themselves, how? Imagine hearing about a friend who has just lost their job. The first thing you would do, as their friend would be to ask, “Are you ok? Anything I can do for help?” They might respond in a variety of ways, varying in expression of their emotion, but there will come a time to which they will need to get another job. Maybe your friend searches for a job in a similar field, or uses their degree they earned after attending college for four years to earn a job based on their acquired skills. If all works out, they get a new job, and the world keeps spinning. Now imagine this scenario as if your friend was a professional athlete. Your previous friend did not devote his mind, body, and soul to become an account manager for Best Buy. Yet, your professional football player friend did…and nobody seems to feel pity for them. Sure, they may have made millions of dollars and led the life style of the rich and famous for what? 8 years? Athletes do not fall on this type of money aimlessly, but they do enjoy it—that is all we see. We fail to realize the aftershock of players entering the real-real world. We only see their salaries posted up on the city newspaper. Again, we subconsciously ask ourselves, why should we feel bad?

            The short answer is, you are not supposed to feel bad, but rather find understanding. Facts will show that most of us are not receiving the amount of zeros on the back of our paycheck that professional athletes do, so naturally we do not sympathize with their sudden loss in funds. Players go from receiving big checks week after week, to receiving nothing once their career is over. These players are now left in a world with possibly no marketable skills, no working world experience, and little concept to anything other than sport. There is blamed to be shared in this situation, and our American sports culture has been behind almost all of it. Athletes’ competitive nature and monetary zealous cause them to spend money at will on things that the average American may or may not find valuable—so we can assign some blame there, but why is this the case in the first place? We see on billboards, Internet cites, and TV shows that the rich and famous need these overpriced trinkets to be successful. So when a competitive human being sees what it takes to be considered successful—while also having the means to prove so—spend frivolously to keep up with those in a similar monetary state. Contrast that with the business world on Wall Street. How many times do you think the white-collar workers playing the stock exchange try and out muscle and out shine the other brokers in their field? My point being, whether or not you deem what an athlete sees a valuable to be valuable in your eyes, you need to understand that it is the nature of our culture to try and attain these things…you do not need to necessarily feel bad.

            My opinion on it all? I understand. I have watched sports my entire life, as well as pay attention to the business side of it all. These young athletes, some of whom have grown up with next to nothing, are now rewarded for their life long efforts with a colossal amount of money. Sure, I don’t really strive to wear the gold chains and drive the Ferrari down the city streets, but I understand why they do. When they go broke, I understand. Would I do it differently than some have? I sure I would, but only because I wouldn’t want people to feel sorry for me when it was all over.

Sports, Politics, and the Olympics

            In 1990, the US city of Atlanta, Georgia was selected to hold the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. Just narrowly beating out the sentimental bid from Athens, Greece to host the Centennial Olympics. This would be the first time that the International Olympic Committees’ decision to separate the games into winter and summer segments—rotating every even-numbered year. Atlanta was the fifth American city to host the games, yet the international community did not fall naïve to the previous success of the US…they remained diligent, and were never slow to scrutinize what would later be deemed, “The Commercial Games.”

            When preparing for this massive onslaught of visitors coming into Atlanta, the city turned to its most prevalent corporation for sponsorship—gargantuan soft-drink company, Coca-Cola. These sponsorship dollars became a competition of their own, with both the city’s organization committee and the IOC competing for its funding. Coca-Cola became the official (and exclusive) drink offered at each of the games 25+ venues. The city also gave license to various street vendors to boost sales, offering merchandise that was not part of the official Olympic sponsorship. This sparked an outrage in the international community, claiming that the US and its system of capitalism were marring the essence of the Olympic games.

            Amidst the quarrel was a far more violent demonstration of economic disapproval, the bombing of Centennial Olympic Park—the “town center” of the Olympic Village. Eric Rudolph, responsible for a total of 4 political terrorist attacks, planted a pipe bomb under a bench—taking 2 lives, and injuring more than one hundred. In a statement he gave in 2005, he claimed that his attack was meant to force the cancellation of the games and “eat into the vast amount of money of invested.” He recalled the games celebration of “socialism,” even quoting the song “Imagine” by John Lennon; his claims were also rooted in his anti-abortion views—the US being his intended target.

            The bombing coupled with the commercial fallout, stamped the games with a print of disapproval in the international community. People from various parts of the world felt as if the United States was using these games as means to demonstrate their economic system. Sage and Eitzen’s work on politics in sport highlight political demonstrations from a host nation to be one of their five uses for politics within the sporting realm. Often paired with violence, claiming, “At virtually every recent Olympics there have been political demonstrations, threats, and violence by disaffected groups,” citing the Atlanta games specifically.

            An event like the Olympiad is constructed to be a pure and honored tradition, which brings nations together to compete in sport. However, it is not just the athletes that have their sights on these games, big money has its green eyes planted on events like these every year. It is not just the Olympics, either. American sports have become a cash cow for large corporations—sticking their logos atop stadiums, eating up hours of commercial times on TV, and monopolizing sponsorship deals to increase sales. There is no way, in our capitalist society, to which sport will ever be completely devoid of political interference. That is American nature, and it is here to pay stay.

Colin Carmody