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🔗 Quelle: entertainment.slashdot.org
Nieman Lab: In a paper summarizing 30 years of sports coverage on televised news and highlights shows, researchers began by quoting a short segment dedicated to a WNBA game between the L.A. Sparks and the Atlanta Dream. The broadcast was unusual, authors Cheryl Cooky, LaToya D. Council, Maria A. Mears, and Michael A. Messner pointed out, in that women's sports were mentioned at all. They found that 80% of the televised sports news and highlights shows included zero stories on women's sports. The overall portion of sports coverage featuring women had been low for decades and, in 2019, an overwhelming 95% of the sports coverage included in their study focused on men's sports. But, they wrote, the WNBA segment was typical in other ways. The 23-second-long clip was the only mention of women's sports in the six-minute long sports segment -- and it was also the shortest. Other coverage included Major League Baseball games and the men's Wimbledon final, but also segments on a celebrity golf tournament and a competitive hot-dog eating contest. "In short, the WNBA story -- the shortest in duration of the six in the broadcast -- was eclipsed by five longer reports on men's sports, stories ranging from in-season sports (MLB, pro tennis), an out-of-season sport (NBA), to human interest and comedic entertainment only tangentially connected to what most people think of as sports news," the report found. The study analyzed sports coverage on local network television (the Los Angeles affiliates KCBS, KNBC, and KABC) as well as highlight shows like ESPN's SportsCenter over the 30 years. In 2019 -- after sport media producers and others suggested televised news and highlights shows were not as relevant as they once were -- the researchers started to include online and social media sources, like Twitter accounts for the networks. The proportion of coverage dedicated to women's sports in email newsletters and Twitter was higher than TV news and SportsCenter, but only if the researchers included espnW and its online newsletter. ESPN stopped producing espnW's weekly newsletter, however, and, when researchers removed the data from their sample, the proportions dedicated to women's sports mirrored that found on TV news and highlights shows.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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