COLUMN: How to be the change you wish for in women’s basketball coverage

In my years traveling to cover New York Liberty home games, I’ve developed a fun little routine.

I tune my radio to 880 and 1010 AM to get the traffic reports, hopeful of optimizing my commute into the city. I then keep each station on until the sports report airs.

And then, once an entire rundown of the area’s sporting events and ancillary info is completed, without a mention of the team that’s been playing at the World’s Most Famous Arena in front of thousands of fans since 1997, I yell at my radio, “The Liberty are playing tonight!”

Sometimes I vary it up: “The defending champions are in town!”, I informed my radio, as we inched along together toward the George Washington Bridge en route to a Liberty game against the Los Angeles Sparks. Or “The best player on the planet is about to play basketball at The Garden!”, on a night Maya Moore and the Minnesota Lynx were gearing up for a basketball game at the epicenter of Manhattan.

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Okay, this may not sound like a fun routine. And it occurred to me recently that it wasn’t a proactive one, either. So I decided to do something about it.

I reached out to the news directors for both 880 and 1010. This is what I wrote to Tim Scheid, news director at 880 AM, who was kind enough to respond to me.

Hi Tim,

I wanted to reach out because I’ve been perplexed by the missing New York Liberty within your sports reports on 880 AM. Despite playing in Madison Square Garden, drawing consistently better than 9,000 per game over their 21 years in the city, I’ve not heard the Liberty mentioned on either the schedule for days they are to play, nor their scores after games end.

I’m wondering why they are excluded, and hoping this can change moving forward. I’m in the journalism profession as well, and it’s not clear to me that there’s a strong news argument for excluding the Liberty, given how little airtime it would take to say, for instance, “Liberty host the Lynx tonight”. Thank you in advance for your help on this.

Best,

Howard Megdal

Tim’s initial replay came almost immediately.

Hi Howard,

Thanks for the email. The sports anchors generally choose the stories that they want to run within the time constraints. I would have no issue with them adding a Liberty Score or upcoming game. Truth be told, our afternoon anchor Steve Scott used to do game announcing at MSG for the team a few years back. The reality is, the time doesn’t permit all of the stories worth telling but I promise to bring it up to our sports reporters and let them know it’s fine to include if they were so inclined.

Tim

We continued to discuss it, but there are important points to address here. One is, the sports anchors generally choosing the stories is a great and worthwhile thing to consider. Break that down: it means that anchors used to a certain hierarchy of reporting—the big four traditional men’s sports first, followed by men’s college games and other men’s sporting pursuits—inform every decision made. It would be a mistake to assume malevolent motives, though I am not naive enough to believe some do not exist, and important to remember many of these priorities come from a series of decisions that date back to a pre-WNBA, pre-Title IX process.

But it is also 2017. The media has been forced to ask many questions about its basic procedures and decisions because of a changing world. And so here’s an important one.

Every time a sports update includes a Mets score, but not a Liberty score, it is implicitly making the argument that the Mets are more important than the Liberty. Moreover, when those updates include ancillary information about the Mets—Jose Reyes is hitting second, or the team scored five runs in the seventh, or sound from Terry Collins postgame—but doesn’t even use three second of airtime to note “The Lynx beat the Liberty”, or “The Lynx face the Liberty at The Garden tonight”, it is an implicit decision that listeners need to know granular information about the Mets more than that the Liberty even exist.

The question is: why?

There are arguments to be made, of a news value basis, for the former. I think they are overstated, and depend largely on a society where women’s sports are endlessly marginalized (the very problem we’re talking about here) but I understand using them to prioritize a Mets score ahead of a Liberty score in a roundup where both are included.

But: I do not think there’s a reasonable news judgement argument that going on from there to telling people Jose Reyes is batting second in that Mets game is more important information, in an inverted pyramid sense, than informing people that the New York Liberty are about to play a game in front of 10,000 fans at Madison Square Garden against, say, the defending WNBA champions.

More striking was the decision I recently heard, on 1010, to not only include scores and schedule of the local teams, but to even include sound from the Anaheim Ducks, who were playing in the NHL Western Conference Finals, yet not to even point out the Liberty were about to play the Lynx.

This is far from universal. WBGO, the Newark jazz station, always includes the Liberty in both schedule and scores. It’s not hard. It’s a relative pittance of total airtime. Say it out loud: “The Liberty host the Sun.” Think about how long that takes. And ask why that isn’t just possible, but fundamental to a sportscast’s basic mission to inform the public.

This needs to change in the segments of the media that continue to ignore women’s sports on a basic level.

Look, there is an enormous disparity in coverage between men’s and women’s sports. That study by USC back in 2015 identified an actual decline in coverage of women’s sports compared to 1989. More astonishing still is to contextualize that relative to women’s sports itself. In 1989, there was no WNBA. No NWSL. No NWHL. Major, professional circuits have begun, built followings and demonstrated staying power, yet the women’s share of sports coverage has actually gone down.

Not that the USC study did more than quantify what is obvious—women’s sports, too often, simply aren’t covered at all. Their absence is glaringly obvious to you if you are reading this story, and totally missed by the mass of people who aren’t attuned to such things, because it is the normal course of coverage since time immemorial.

Since he didn’t respond to multiple emails, I cannot say for certain what the process is at 1010 WINS, but you can reach news director Ben Mevorach at Mevorach@wins.com. Again, raising the question, making the request for including the Liberty is the way so many will be informed listeners want this.

And this is the process for all of you in every WNBA market. The reality is that there’s no single silver bullet to solve the enormous disparity in coverage—not lobbying, not a site like The Summitt, not when the gap is institutionalized and the media landscape is so diffuse. But it is clear to me that the frequent club used against women’s sports—the gap in audience, in ratings—stem directly from an enormous chasm between how informed people are about men’s sports, which are covered as a matter of course, and women’s sports, which are seldom covered at all.

And yet: the WNBA has more than survived, it has thrived despite this gap, though there is more progress to be made. And media getting the basics of the league’s schedule out is not a destination, but it is a start. Think it might help the audience of the WNBA if people are aware a team in market is playing that day? There’s no paid media that can compete with that. It’s how everyone follows the world—through information.

Yes, women too. Please don’t come with arguments that “women need to support women’s sports more” as if men alone are informed by the media, but women are supposed to inherently know about women’s sporting events thanks to… women’s intuition? The sisterhood of the traveling newspaper? Please. It’s the same media landscape for men and women, with the same blind spots and same resulting limitations that need to change.

Instead, we all need to do the basic blocking and tackling to be sure our voices are heard, and the status quo, which none of us find to be satisfactory, is challenged.

As for me? I’ll be heading into the city in a few hours. And I’ll be listening. I suggest you do the same, and if you don’t hear what you want, say something about it to the people who make those decisions.