Volume 38, No. 3, Summer 2010

Coverage of Female Athletes Falls
To Shocking New Low, Study Says

A report issued in June by the Center for Feminist Research, University of Southern California, has found that televised coverage of female athletes has declined to insulting levels.

The report,” Gender in Televised Sports:  News and Highlights Shows, 1989-2009,”shows that

• Women’s sports were underreported in the six weeks of early evening and late night television sports news on the three network affiliates sampled in the study. Men’s sports received 96.3% of the airtime, women’s sports 1.6%, and gender neutral topics 2.1%. This is a precipitous decline in the coverage of women’s sports since 2004, when 6.3% of the airtime was devoted to women’s sports, and the lowest proportion ever recorded in this study.
  
  
• ESPN’s nationally-televised program SportsCenter devoted only 1.4% of its airtime to coverage of women’s sports, a decline in their coverage of women’s sports compared with 1999 (2.2%) and 2004 (2.1%).
  
  
• ESPN and two of the network affiliates (KNBC and KCBS), continually ran a scrolling ticker text bar at the bottom of the screen, reporting scores and other sports news. The proportion of “ticker time” devoted to women’s sports on KNBC and KCBS was 4.6%, more than triple the thin airtime they devoted to women’s sports in their main broadcasts. SportsCenter devoted 2.7% of its ticker time to women’s sports, down from 8.5% in 2004.

The full report is available at http://www.usc.edu/dept/cfr/html/documents/tvsports.pdf

The Turf Ceiling: Columbia J-School
Students Analyze Women in Sports

Students at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism recently researched and reported on the world of competitive sports for women, and on the women who cover sports. The result, “Women and Sports: The Long, Slow Fight Against Marginalization,” is a smart package of articles and visuals that can be viewed at http://columbiasportsjournalism.com/

The package includes:

“The Turf Ceiling” – how female sports journalists have fought against harassment, stereotyping and discrimination to establish themselves as equals to their male counterparts.

“Oh Pioneers! The Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders,” which asks:  Are these cheerleaders more than just a side dish to the main course of football?

“Leaving A Bad Taste” – how beer commercials for sports denigrate women

“From the Field to the Classroom” – after 38 years of Title IX, inequities persist

“A Double Standard” -- Can physicality -- and even questionable behavior -- be accepted as easily for women's sports as it is for the men?

“A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words” -- The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue generates huge profits, but what has been its subliminal cultural message through the years?

“A Cautionary Tale” -- Erin Andrews has celebrity status that tops all other females in sports broadcasting. For years, the sports blogosphere has had an almost cult-like fascination with her.

College Sex Columnists:
A Woman’s Beat

Dan Reimold’s new book from Rutgers University Press, Sex and the University: Celebrity, Controversy, and a Student Journalism Revolution, shows that women are originating and expanding sex advice columns on college campuses. Reimold says his book “explores the explosive student newspaper sex column and campus sex magazine phenomenon. It uncovers the controversies they have caused, the sexual generation they have defined, and the surreal fame they have brought to their student writers and editors.”

“I conducted in-person and phone interviews with 120 current and former student sex columnists. Roughly 80 percent are female. While no hard data is available, I would extend that 80 percent estimate to the student sex column scene in general here in the U.S. and in Canada. A male student will step up independently or as part of a male-female back-and-forth column every once in awhile, but overall it is undoubtedly a female-dominated position. Interestingly, the sex and relationships advice genre has long been handled mostly by women within the professional press, including individuals such as ‘Ann Landers,’ ‘Abigail Van Buren,’ Cynthia Heimel, Isadora Altman, Ruth Westheimer, and Candace Bushnell, to name but a few.”

Reimold’s web site is www.collegemediamatters.com.

Book, Film, TV Critics:  Women
A Distinguished Minority

A new FAIR study of the New York Times Book Review and the C-SPAN program After Words finds that when it comes to politically oriented books, white male authors and reviewers dominate. FAIR's study examined every episode of After Words from March 2008 to January 2010, and the reviews of politically themed books in the Times Book Review from January 2009 to February 2010. In total, the study counted 100 episodes of After Words and 100 reviews in the Times.

In the Times, women made up just 13 percent of the authors and 12 percent of the reviewers. On After Words, women were 24 percent of the authors and 31 percent of the interviewers. Among 231 reviewers and authors combined, the Times included just two women of color: PBS news anchor Gwen Ifill and history professor Bettye Collier-Thomas, both African-American authors. The Times published no women of color as political book reviewers. After Words featured women of color 11 times among the authors and interviewers on the show, accounting for 5 percent of the show’s roster; Ifill appeared twice, once as an author and once as an interviewer. (Women of color are roughly 16 percent of the U.S. population.)

To read the full report and see the accompanying charts, go to:  http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4119

Regarding film and television critics, Brian Lowry, writing for Variety, says he sees increasing influence by female critics, if not a huge increase in their numbers: “In raw numbers, there are doubtless more male critics than females,” Lowry says. “But the gap is narrowing, and I would argue that the influence scale -- that is, critics at top outlets -- has shifted dramatically.” Lowry has particular praise for Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times, Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune (who has announced her departure from the paper), and Lisa de Moraes of The Washington Post for their reporting on television; and for film criticism, The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, Los Angeles Times’ Betsy Sharkey, and USA TODAY’s Claudia Puig. Read more at: http://weblogs.variety.com/bltv/2010/05/sex-part-2-do-men-still-dominate-criticism.html

Research in Depth: Birthing Narratives in the News: Gendered Notions of "Real" Womanhood by Miglena Sternadori

Research in Depth: Women’s Participation as Leaders in the Transformation of the Chinese Media: A Case Study of Guangzhou City by Chunying Cai

Commentary: PR as a J-Grad’s Career Choice: A Wise Decision Long-Term? by Sheila Gibbons

Plus News Briefs, People, and Books, Flicks, etc.!

Media Report to Women has hard copies of back issues dating to its founding in 1972. Indispensable for research!