Why Female Athletes Remain on Sport’s Periphery

Abstract

In this commentary, Karen Crouse, a sports reporter who is the full-time golf writer for the New York Times, reflects on key issues that underlie the Cooky, Messner, and Hextrum article “Women Play Sport, But Not on TV: A Longitudinal Study of Televised News Media.” Crouse comments on the continued paucity of coverage for women’s sports, not only in traditional media but in today’s multimedia world. She observes, some 40 years after the passage of Title IX and significant advances in girls’ participation in high school sports, that women’s sports are infrequently covered by televised news media and, when coverage does occur, that women’s sports are devalued with female athletes often sexually objectified or trivialized. Using the example of Se Ri Pak in South Korea, Crouse suggests ways that sporting audiences can demand and facilitate change by seeing sport through the eyes of the increasing numbers of girls participating in sports who believe their achievements matter and are deserving of more parity in sports coverage.