Women’s Sports Gets 1.6 Percent of Local TV News Sports Coverage

07/13/2010 by Julie Hollar/FAIR Blog

No, that’s not a typo: Only 1.6 percent of sports coverage on L.A.’s three major network affiliates went to women’s sports. On ESPN Sportscenter, it’s 1.4 percent. It’s just slightly higher when you add in ticker-tape coverage. And it’s getting worse, not better: Those numbers are down from about 5 percent in 1989.

And a major part of that drop, according to study co-author Michael Messner of the University of Southern California, is because of a drop in “insulting or trivialization or humorous sexualization of women athletes, like a nude bungee jumper or leering court reports on tennis players like Anna Kournikova or later Maria Sharapova.”

Messner explained:

Read entire blog here.

Tags: , , , , ,

Comments are closed.