With the upcoming NCAA basketball tournament I thought about what we have previously discussed in class regarding how unequal women’s sport are to men’s in terms of television coverage. The next four weeks are the most television coverage any women’s sport league will receive throughout this year. In saying that television coverage of the tournaments are still not equal.
While researching the amount of coverage women’s sports get compared to men’s I came across a very interesting article on aaf publications. Within the article it broke down various aspects of the coverage between men’s and women’s basketball. The article brought up the differences in camera use, editing, replay, announcing, terminology, and how the differences of that resulted in women’s games having a lower quality to them production-wise. This is something women’s basketball does not have a say in and is definitely a negative for them. Not only do they see very little broadcasting of their games, but when they do television networks are broadcasting them at an unfavorable value? This to me is a bigger issue then the amount of games being broadcasted; if the quality of the broadcast is not present the quantity does not matter as much. The bigger issue then becomes how the television audience’s perceptions of women’s athletics are skewed because of lower broadcasting standards. I think television networks like ESPN need to and should reevaluate the quality of their work at the end of each season, and always look in what ways do they need to improve.
-Tony Fritsch
I thought this article was very interesting and related strongly with what we have been talking about in class recently. I found it unusual that womens sports would be covered so differently from mens because one would think that the networks would want to do their best for ratings. Women are underutilized in are society as a whole so none of these findings about women's basketball surprise me much. I mean that is why even though the BG women are usually better than the men, fans of BGSU care more about the men's team regardless. I recently went to the Gender Power & journalism presentation in the Student Union which pertained to under-representation of women in the media. In their studies they found that only about 6% of women in the media hold upper management positions, a very alarming stat. It is evidence from both that article about gender stereotyping in television and in the Gender Power Journalism presentation that our society is still very sexist. We are "slowly" moving in the right direction but I feel it will take a long time.
ReplyDelete~Max Householder
This was a great find for the article that Tony linked and we will be discussing this more in the next week or so. In fact, the article that we will be reading on "Audience building" was by some of the some authors who wrote the article on AAF. Good job!
ReplyDeleteLike Max I really enjoyed this article. I didn’t realize that the coverage of women’s sports such as camera use, editing, replay, announcing, and terminology was different to men’s. I mean it’s obvious that men’s sports receive much more coverage than that of women’s. Next time I’ll definitely have to pay attention to those specific things. Another thing I found unfair is in the men’s tournament games when they get down to the sweet sixteen and below are all played at night. On the other hand women’s games are usually during the day time, sometimes even during the week. I realize that the number of people watching women’s compared to men’s is much lower. But they also aren’t getting the equal opportunity to be in the spotlight.
ReplyDelete-Alyssa Robinson
Comment by Mark Chipperfield
ReplyDeleteI agree with the idea that women’s basketball is presented differently in their broadcasts than men’s basketball. While watching the two tournaments over the past couple of weeks I have definitely noticed a difference in coverage. One of the things that I noticed that was different was that the men’s tournament was broadcasted on four different channels so that you could watch any game that you wanted on TV. The women’s tournament was only broadcasted on two channels while the rest of the games were only available online. I found this to be fairly odd because ESPN has more than enough channels that they could broadcast all the games simultaneously as well. I just thought this to be a weird difference between the two tournaments.
Going off from what Alyssa commented as far as coverage, this past weekend I went back and watched some of the games from BGSU on TiVo and was surprised of the coverage. For the Men's tournament every single game is televised. This obviously is not the case with the Women's tournament and is not the surprising point. The thing that surprised me was that they did not give the higher seeds much coverage over other match-ups. I liked this fact; it was good to see ESPN wasn't afraid to shy away from a team (Baylor) that they know everyone would care to see over a more competitive second round matchup.
ReplyDeleteAlso while watching a Men's game on TNT the other week; I noticed one of the announcer’s commented a Women's game calling it the girls bracket. It immediately got me thin about the article and how unfair the games are on several fronts. But what was most annoying was that the other announcer was thrown off by it and made it even worse by almost making a joke of the Women's bracket. Even by calling it a bracket over a tournament was weird lingo to use giving it a similar downgrade as using "girl's" instead of "women's".
-Tony Fritsch
Wow. That is mind boggling to read about all of those many differences in the methods of broadcasting between the two different genders. I knew that the Men’s Tournament had a lot more coverage but I never realized that everything was so different on the television. I also definitely think that the coverage is a major deal too because a lot of people are unable to watch the women’s tournament because of all of the day games. Night games are definitely the biggest attraction and commodity because the majority of people working are home for the day by then. Working in the video control room for the first and second round in Bowling Green, I realized that ESPN put almost too much focus on Brittany Griner. A teammate of Griner’s would be shooting a foul shot and instead of focusing on the shooter, ESPN would always focus on Brittany. I just got annoyed with this because the guards on Baylor were amazing and definitely deserved a lot of the credit for their undefeated run so far.
ReplyDelete-Tim McLellan
The comments that everyone made on this main entry by Tony are really excellent and they relate well to the reading that was assigned for Friday, March 30. In fact, the article that Tony found was a follow-up study to the one that was assigned for our online class ("The gender of audience building"). Great job everyone!!
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