The Sports Curmudgeon®

Full disclosure: I have never been employed by the Washington Post or by any of its subsidiary companies. I have never owned stock in The Washington Post Company. My only longstanding association with that newspaper is that I have had it delivered to my home for the last 38 years.

On 19 January 2009, the Washington Post published a Letter to the Editor from a woman living in Brattleboro, VT. This woman had visited the DC area about a week prior to the publication of the letter and she was displeased with the Post’s sports section in the 13 January 2008 edition. She was “shocked to see that the 14-page Sports section had not one photo of a female athlete, coach or team.” When she did find a small story on one of the inner pages about a female high school track athlete that day, it did not assuage her feelings because she concluded her letter thusly:

“I guess no other female athlete, team or coach did anything deserving of coverage on Jan. 12. The unthinkable, alternative conclusion is that in 2008, the patriarchy is alive and well and everyone in The Posts sports department was interested in or unaware of any sporting event in which women competed. Sad.”

I have to admit that in a 14-page sports section in a major metropolitan area of the US, there ought to be something more than a single story reporting on a female high school track athlete that is worthy of consideration. However, the author of this letter did not seem to be able to think of yet another “alternative conclusion” in her quest to “understand” how this could happen. So, with all of the emotional warmth shown by Mr. Spock in the original Star Trek episodes, let me attempt to provide another “alternative conclusion”.

The Washington Post is a business. It does not publish newspapers for any grand altruistic reason; it publishes newspapers and sells them to the public as a means to generate more revenue than the cost of publishing and distributing those newspapers. That’s not very touchy-feely, but it happens to be reality.

As a business, the Washington Post allocates resources – in household terms, it sets a budget – related to what will receive attention in their pages. Once again the resource allocation processes are not altruistic; the paper will spend more time, money and space on those things that its readership finds interesting than it will spend on “other stuff”. That allocation model helps them retain circulation numbers in these economic times when newspapers around the country are looking at declining numbers of readers. By retaining those circulation numbers, the paper continues to receive steady flows of advertising revenues because here is another piece of economic reality: advertisers do not spend lots of money to advertise in newspapers that no one buys and reads.

Continue to think of newspapers and the people who make decisions within those newspapers about what will show up in the newspapers and you may begin to see the dawn of another “alternative conclusion”. Read the political coverage in the Washington Post; you’ll find coverage of the minute details of candidates’ activities in the Democratic and Republican Parties; you won’t find much at all about the fundraising events of the Libertarian Party or whatever the American Vegetarian Party morphed into after its demise about 3 decades ago. The reason is simple. A far larger number of readers care about what is going on within the Republican and Democratic parties than care about all of the other parties combined. That may not be the way someone might wish it were; it is merely reality.

So, back to the sports section… Obviously women play sports; many women excel in athletic endeavors. Anyone who wants to assail either of those points is either a hermit or a sexist - - or both. The problem when it comes to coverage of women’s sports is not nearly so gently stated. Far fewer people who regularly read sports pages care even a little bit about women’s sports than the number who care about men’s sports. Once again, this is a dose of reality.

If the Washington Post spent half of its sports page space on women’s sports – that would be roughly proportional to the overall readership of the paper as a whole – they would lose the majority of the people who turn to the sports section. If those people went to another paper for their sports news or found it online, a fraction of those people might stop subscribing to the Post or stop buying it from a newsstand on their way to work in the AM. That would decrease revenues and you need to go up a few paragraphs to check out the first reality of the newspaper business, which is to have revenues exceed costs. Anyone who is angry enough at the fact that coverage of men’s sports swamps coverage of women’s sports to write to the paper to complain about it is either a hermit or a sexist (in reverse) - - or both.

Of all the sports where women and men compete in the same events, I can only think of three where the women’s version of the sport is more popular than the men’s version: tennis [this was not always the case but certainly is now], gymnastics, and figure skating. While each of these sports has its loyal following and each is far more popular than the fringe sports, none of them could rightfully claim “major” status in the US in 2008.

In every other instance I can think of, there is no contest in terms of following, attendance, TV ratings and participation between the men’s version and the women’s version of the same sport – although I’m sure someone will point one or two out to me pretty soon. It matters not that women competing in many sports do so at a high level nor that their games are highly competitive, most women’s sports do not capture the interest of sports fans. Until they do, the reporting of their games and events in the sports pages of US newspapers will be very small – like the coverage of a Libertarian Party rally in a non-election year.

ESPN did a poll recently that may have some bearing here. And I think it is interesting to note that ESPN would benefit from increasing popularity in women’s sports because such increasing popularity would give them new programming properties to pursue and new ways to generate “revenue streams”. Make no mistake; ESPN is no more altruistic than the Washington Post.

ESPN Sports Poll asked folks to name their favorite female athlete. The top four athletes receiving votes were:

Serena Williams 8%
Mia Hamm 4%
Venus Williams 3.8%
Anika Sorenstam 3.2%

These results are shocking. The percentage of votes garnered by these top four finishers is awfully small; the total here is only 19% of the votes. The reason that total is so low is that over 60% of the respondents said that “None” was their favorite female athlete. If in a political primary election, “None of the Above” got 60% of the vote and the best showing by a living/breathing candidate was 8%, that would be front-page headline news. For the ESPN Sports Poll, that result was not important enough to generate a headline or any significant discussion. I submit that is a measure of the public’s indifference.

If someone wants to engage in the philosophical “chicken/egg” argument here and ponder if the lack of coverage of women’s sports is what prevents women’s sports from becoming widely – and wildly – popular, have at it. Mr. Spock deals only with data and reality. In 2008, the newspaper business is in a siege mentality; cost containment and revenue maintenance are the paramount concerns. In that environment, coverage of women’s sports would engender increased costs – if there were not a concomitant decrease in the coverage of men’s sports – or it would jeopardize revenues via lost readership. In the siege mentality of the business, that’s just not gonna happen.

By the way, that siege mentality and the fear or alienation of readers is also precisely why the Washington Post would not run anything akin to this response to this woman’s criticism in their pages. They print her letter; the writer feels as if she has scored a point; people of a like mind with the writer get to nod their heads and say, “Right on!”. Meanwhile, the regular readers of the sports pages probably don’t even notice this petit contretemps and continue on with their lives.

I know that the woman from Brattleboro VT who wrote her angry letter to the Washington Post will not read this. My suspicion is that if she accidentally did read it, she would not like it. Nevertheless, I hope that I have provided those of you who did take the time to read it with an alternate conclusion beyond her assumption that all the folks in the Post sports department were “uninterested in or unaware of any sporting competition in which women competed.” An inconvenient truth is that most – not all to be sure – of the sports page readers are indeed only marginally interested in any sporting competition in which women competed.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…