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.
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