Media Coverage In Women's Sports

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Media Coverage in Women’s Sports
There are many people that think women tend to watch more sports that have women playing in them because they are the same gender, but studies have shown that this is not the case. In an article by Erin Whiteside and Marie Hardin called Women (Not) Watching Women: Leisure Time, Television, and Implications for Televised Coverage of Women’s Sports, the authors discuss different reasons why women’s sports is not as popular as men’s sports. Many criticize the media for not covering enough women’s sports, but the media are not the only ones to blame. In this essay, I plan to demonstrate how gender roles, women’s views on women sports and sexuality depictions are all characteristics that effect media coverage of …show more content…
Even though the coverage of men’s sports dominates women’s coverage, female sports have been doing better when it comes to getting airtime. One of the most successful sports coverage was the 1999 women’s soccer World Cup. This tournament received a lot of coverage in the U.S., for two months straight most of the coverage on major news and sports outlets was about the U.S. Women’s National team. The team was very talented and successful in the tournament that they ended up surpassing ratings for men’s soccer programming. Gretchen Miller, a writer for Soccer Politics stated, “In many ways, the success of the ’99 World Cup trumped what many thought was possible in the world of women’s sports and created a template for success in the future,”(Miller, 2009). Even though women’s soccer helped get women sports more coverage, the spotlight only lasted for the duration of the World Cup. Whiteside and Hardin bring up two arguments that might help explain why there is such a weak following of women’s sports. The first argument argued that,” The lack of exposure for women’s sports impedes its ability to gain a faithful audience.” Without there being accurate coverage, this shows women that sports for them are not as important as men’s sports. Veteran sports announcer, Beth Mowins argues that idea and believes that it is the viewer’s fault …show more content…
Sports are male dominated, but when women play sports it adds to the excitement of the game and diversity. As women, we need to show the media that we want to see more female games televised and the way we can do that is by breaking those gender barriers. Women need to stop thinking so much about their looks and start focusing on how they can help society without using their attractiveness to get ahead. Women need to start believing that they are important too and when it comes to sports they can be just as successful as any male
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