'Dislike Female Commentators'

So you probably heard this one a couple weeks ago, about the female college reporter who was trying to send an online complaint to espn, and accidentally discovered there was an actual complaint category for "Dislike Female Commentators." You know, so your complaint gets routed to the right department, you get to pick: ACC Blackouts, Tape Request, How Do I Get ESPNU, Dislike Female Commentators.

Here's that story, with some detailed links embedded therein. http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=5257

One of the links includes this: "....an ESPN vice president wrote her a longer personal apology in which he explained that the comment field for complaints about female reporters was a a relic from some 10 years ago, when the the network first began assigning female play-by-play announcers to cover college football games and received criticism from some fans." http://mashable.com/2012/02/08/espn-female-announcers/

A relic from 10 years ago?? It just sat there, for 10 years? And no one saw it, or acknowledged it, or used it to register Dislike for Female Commentators, or said, hey, you know what, this is not right?? Bullshit. Buuuuullllshit.

And then I thought about the high drama this week over the Jeremy Lin comments, this one publicly fired and that one publicly suspended, and I have heard of at least a couple other hush-hush-sorry-we-have-to-do-this related suspensions....and I want to punch someone in the face at the hypocrisy of it all.

This morning I saw this commentary by Christina Kahrl, a baseball writer for espn.
http://espn.go.com/espn/commentary/story/_/id/7586496/misogynists-not-disappear-soon-life-getting-better-women-covering-sports
It's about women in media struggling to find acceptance, and I will admit, it annoyed me. I read her piece, it grabbed me as very mid-1980ish, and I thought 'Seriously, why are we STILL having this conversation??' And then I read the AJR story about espn, and thought, if espn is still allowing viewers to complain about its female commentators--AND CLAIMING NO ONE KNEW IT FOR 10 YEARS....well, I guess we're still having the conversation.

 

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I saw the controversy a couple of weeks ago, and had a different reaction from most I've seen. I didn't really fault ESPN so much as I thought "Jeez, they get so many complaints about women that it gets its own category?" I don't know that ESPN necessarily deserves the ire here. It's pathetic that we're still having the conversation, but if ESPN wasn't getting the complaints, they wouldn't have the option on the complaint form.

Whatever faults ESPN may have, I don't know that this is an area where it deserves a lot of flack. It's the only major outlet that has women do play-by-play of men's sports. God knows it has a rough history with sexual harassment and creating a bad environment in the workplace, but it seems to me it has a pretty good track record of giving women on-air opportunities, at least compared to the competition.

 

Deadspin editor-in-chief Tommy Craggs, probably ESPN's biggest critic, explains how it works pretty well.

It would seem that the category exists based on computerized analysis of the complaints received. Should ESPN have been looking more closely at it? Absolutely. But it doesn't sound like any one person is at fault here, and it definitely doesn't sound like anyone did this intentionally. ESPN has done a lot for women in broadcast media. I often criticize the World Wide Leader, but I don't think this merits it.

 

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21, not to excuse the inexcusable, but in terms of longevity, you can find so many things on the average major website , if you dig deep enough, that have been around 10 years or more that haven't been used or referenced in years. It's more work than it's worth to try to go through and clean up selectively out of hundreds of thousands of pages, although certainly, this might have been a good exception.

 

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