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Media Coverage Of Women In Sports Research

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While scrolling on EPSN, which stands for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, website going through over fifty articles and videos on the main page, I could not help but notice that there were only two videos pertaining to females in sports, which were Mixed Martial Artist Ronda Rousey, who is recovering from a fight and the Connecticut Huskies basketball team, who are currently ranked one in the NCAA Women’s Basketball Ranking. There is a lack of spotlight on women athletes in the media pertaining to their skills or just acknowledging that women have an existence in sports, whether it’s televised or on social media. Diana Nyad, Michael A. Messner, and Cheryl Cooky research led them to finding that when it comes to broadcasting women do not receive as much coverage as men (2010:69). As of 2015, “women receive less than one percent of coverage on ESPN’s SportsCenter and Fox Sports 1’s Fox Sports Live” (Billings and Young 2015:4). However, …show more content…

Cooky et al. (2015: 6), provides the figure above illustrating how the coverage of women sport has always been low. The data in the figure illustrates that males have a 90% or higher rate of being the topic of discussion. In addition, in Nyad et al. study suggest that the women coverage in sports is just a “ticker text bar at the bottom of the screen, reporting scores and other sports news” (2010:69). For instance, the U.S women’s soccer team is seen as better than the men’s team; however, they don’t receive as much coverage. Female athletes have been reduced to just being seen but not talked about for their accomplishments in the news coverage. In addition, for ESPN to be the one in control over sports shows that women are not on their agenda at the network (Eitzen 2015:73). Women represent “40% of sports participation”; however, they the coverage of women sports would make it seem as if women participation is less than 10% (Hardin et al.

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