Fair Play?
For everyone to develop a true sense of the roles women can and do play in the events of the world, the media have to provide us with an accurate report of the way things really are. Yet a new study shows another way in which women are literally left out of the picture.
More American women are playing sports than ever before--a third of all NCAA athletes are female. But you'd be hard-pressed to notice it in the country's top newspaper's. Coverage of women's sports is minimal--and may even be slipping, reports the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles after tallying the number of sports stories in USA Today, the Boston Globe, the Orange County Register, and the Dallas Morning News.
In each paper, fewer than 5% of the stories were devoted to women only. On the whole, articles focusing on men outnumbered those about women by a ratio of 23 to 1. Men dominated the visual images as well, capturing more than 92% of all the photos on the sports pages.
