2021 Best Of Burn It All Down Part 3
In this episode Amira Rose Davis shares her favorite episode (From Star to Scandal: The Story of Medina Spirit) and interview (Jessica Luther with Dr. Cheryl Cooky on the study of women's sports media coverage) from 2021.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Music in this episode is by Ketsa. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Amira: Hey flamethrowers, Amira here with your third and final best of episode. Happy new year!
Before I start, I want to walk about my own personal resolutions and goals that I’m looking forward to in this new year. Of course, you know I love Peloton, but one of my favorite Peloton instructors, Jess Sims, has a saying that’s really been sticking with me because I think it applies so much to my own journey as well as how we think about a lot of sports that we cover, and that is that “you’re a masterpiece and a work in progress at the same time.” Now, when I hear that, you’re a masterpiece and a work in progress at the same time, it really reminds me to pause and think about all of the ways I’m striving, everything I’m reaching for, but not losing myself, not beating myself up, not getting stuck in inadequacies – even while you’re reaching and pushing yourself for change, or for more skills, or patience with yourself, whatever it is, whatever those goals are.
And I think we have this tendency at the beginning of the year to decide all the things we wanna change or, you know, you start the workout plan, you do this, you do that. And I think that, especially the past two and a half years, time has just condensed in a way that it feels really counter-productive to put ourselves on these imaginary timelines. And so thinking about the duality of being both a masterpiece, just who you are in yourself, and also a work in progress, feels really liberating to me. And I think about this for myself and the ways I wanna have patience with myself and push myself and challenge myself, but also not do so in a way that requires me to talk down on myself or get in my head about who I am or what I’m doing.
But I think about that when we think about sports that we love and that we want to do better, and a lot of what we do here at Burn It All Down is exactly that work. There’s things that we love, even with leagues that are constantly on our burn pile, and there’s things that we continually want better for the sports that we consume. We strive to uplift and hold up the examples, those torchbearers, as well as get rid of, shed, and burn down the things that are just the excess baggage, that are just at the frames of the picture that we don’t want in there, that we wanna crop out. And I hope we continue to bring that energy into 2022, and last beyond that. So that we continue to make both sporting futures and our whole selves each day.
And so in that spirit, the first segment that I am bringing to this episode is Brenda’s amazing narrative storytelling about the horse, Medina Spirit. Now, Medina Spirit recently just passed away, which, if you’ve listened to this before, seems like the epilogue to this wonderful reporting that Brenda did. But I put it in here because it’s a masterpiece in terms of storytelling, and I hope that in this next year we continue to bring you really interesting stories in really creative narrative ways. I think Brenda exemplified that in this piece right here.
Brenda: When the Kentucky Derby doping scandal involving winner Medina Spirit and his trainer Bob Baffert erupted in May, like a lot of people, I didn't really understand what on earth was happening. So I talked to three experts in the horse racing world and an entire universe unfolded that I never knew existed. So, buckle up flamethrowers, for a story about sex, drugs, and hay. Medina Spirit, a thoroughbred full, was born on April 5th, 2018 to Protonico and Mongolian Changa in Ocala, Florida.
[audio of foal neighing]
Medina Spirit boasts a decent pedigree, including Secretariat, who still holds the fastest Kentucky Derby time from 1973. But Medina Spirit’s parents hadn’t performed up to expectations and he simply didn’t look like a winner. At auction, he fetched a mere $1000, which is chump change in horse racing. Top yearlings can sell well into the millions. A year in, Medina Spirit started to show potential, what trainers call precocity – competitiveness and speed – and became a good fit to help his cohort train. Word spread about the colt and Saudi venture capitalist Amr Zedan snatched him up for $35,000. Two years old thoroughbred prices range widely, topping out at $16 million, but by all accounts $35000 is well below the average. Here’s Amr Zedan on Dubai racing.
Amr Zedan: He showed a science of ability all the way when we picked him up for sale. If you really take a deep dive and say sporadically it's experience distance.
Brenda: The dark bay colt is named after Zedan's home city of Medina, one of the holiest sites in Islam, and the horse’s grandmother, Alpha Spirit – quite a divine name.
Amr Zedan: He showed a heart that is bigger than itself. He just refuses for anyone to pass him.
Brenda: Zedan then sent Medina Spirit along with his first string horses to legendary trainer, Bob Baffert.
Amr Zedan: And if there's one thing to say about Bob Baffert, he's an artist. He is someone that just felt it.
Brenda: Under Baffert, Medina Spirit just kept outrunning his better bread competitors, and he qualified for the Kentucky Derby because of the points he earned in lead up races. Still, Medina Spirit was maybe Baffert’s number four or five horse. Then…
News host: Today news broke that one of the top Kentucky Derby contenders, Life Is Good, undefeated for hall of famer Bob Baffert, announced he is off the Derby trail.
Brenda: The undefeated Life Is Good, who was poised to win the triple crown, was sidelined by an injury just before the Kentucky Derby.
News host: As much as we talk about Kentucky Derby, when we talk about Bob, how deep is his bent still, even without Life Is Good?
Brenda: This was Medina Spirit’s chance to take the Derby. A first place prize of $1.86 million.
News host: Bob Baffert will be in Kentucky for the Kentucky Derby this year. It's a question of what's his biggest bullet.
Brenda: Still, the experts didn't focus on Medina Spirit, even as a dark horse contender. On May first at Churchill Downs racetrack in Louisville…
Commentator: Nineteen three-year-olds, all in line, and ready for the start. [starting bell rings] They’re off, in the Kentucky Derby!
Brenda: A 12-1 odds unfavorite, Medina Spirit’s win was truly a Cinderella story.
Commentator: …Come in to the final furlong. Mandaloun, fighting for the front! Medina Spirit battles on. Hot Rod Charlie on the outside. Essential Quality on the far outside. All four of them heading to finish in the Kentucky Derby! Here’s the wire! Bob Baffert does it again! Mendina Spirit has won the Kentucky Derby! Mandaloun was second, Hot Rod Charlie…
Interviewer: What does it mean to set the record now, Bob? This is the seventh time, nobody's ever won this many.
Bob Baffert: I just can't believe it. It hasn’t sunk in yet.
Brenda: The horse racing community blew up with analysis and speculation following the Derby.
TV host: But the funny thing is, I suppose, going into the race, hardly anyone was talking about your colt.
Brenda: Bloggers wondered, maybe it was the brilliance of John Velazquez, the Puerto Rican jockey that many consider among the all-time greats.
John Velazquez: I do it for us in Puerto Rico. It's one of the best ever.
Brenda: Or was it just the Bob Baffert touch?
TV host: Well, it goes to show, if you overlook a horse in the Kentucky Derby that is trained by hall of famer Bob Baffert, there's a good chance he'll make you look foolish.
Brenda: How had so many who knew so much about horse racing ignored Medina Spirit?
Commentator: That little horse, he won today. I mean, he doesn't know how much he costs, but you know what, what a little race horse. He was all race horse today.
Brenda: But the Cinderella story took a tumble when Medina Spirit failed a post-Derby drug test for steroid use.
News hosts: Happening right now…Drug tests that Medina Spirit failed after winning the Kentucky Derby….The horse tested positive for a banned steroid after winning the Derby…The horse was busted for doping…Betamethasone, an anti-inflammatory, which is prohibited on race days at Churchill Downs…
Brenda: After a second sample came back positive for betamethasone, which is prohibited at any level on race day in Kentucky, Maryland, and New York, the sanctions, the lawsuits and recriminations began.
Joe: The horse, all he did was run fast. He did what he was supposed to do, okay?
Brenda: That's Joe Drape, an expert on horse racing, who covers the sport for the New York Times and has written multiple books on the sports history.
Joe: You know, you can't really discount his achievement, but the humans around him failed him. And if it was an accidental dosage, that doesn't matter – the rules are the rules. If they did something intentionally, that's terrible.
Brenda: From a medical perspective on betamethasone, I spoke with Dr. Megan Kerford, a racetrack veterinarian who specializes in horse sport injuries.
Megan: Sometimes with race horses, just like human athletes – pro football players are a good example – they get wear and tear in their joints and they get arthritis. And so then we inject the joint. So, commonly in horses we use betamethasone. It has a very strict 14 day withdrawal –
Brenda: Which means it takes 14 days to exit the horses system.
Megan: – and in Bob Baffert’s case they were using a topical ointment with betamethasone in it, and the withdrawal is different for topical versus if you give it intra-articularly, which means in the joint or in the muscle. It's different. It absorbs differently through the skin. So, the amount that the horse had probably did not affect how he ran. Now, the rules clearly state you can have no betamethasone in your system, regardless of how the horse got it in their system.
Brenda: In horse racing, medications are so harshly regulated, not only to keep the playing field even but to prevent serious injury to horses who really aren't healthy enough to be racing.
Megan: We do not want to mask any pain. So, if a horse is running and they feel pain, we want them to stop before they have what we call a catastrophic injury, which has a breakdown on the racetrack. Like, a human will stop, if I'm in a race and I'm like, oh, my knee hurts, I'm going to stop. A horse won’t. They will keep running.
Brenda: Which is why PETA, among others, have blamed doping, even drugs that can't be detected, on keeping horses running even when they shouldn't. So I wondered to myself, has racing always been so grueling for the horse? Had it always been like this?
Katherine: Some listeners may just really be shocked at what the 19th century demanded.
Brenda: In short, yes. I asked Dr. Katherine Mooney, an associate professor of history at Florida State University and author of Race Horse Men: How Slavery and Freedom Were Made at the Racetrack. How do you compare today's horse racing with the past in terms of the physical demands on the horse?
Katherine: Well, first of all, they were racing horses older. So, they were more likely to race four and five-year-olds or even six year olds or older, and the highest prestige prizes before say the 1890s were heat racing, where it was best of however many. And the sort of most prestigious races were four mile heat races. Theoretically, your horse could be going 12 miles in one day. So, the differences in what we demand in terms of distance are obviously just like worlds, worlds, worlds apart.
Brenda: Today, the most prestigious events are dash races – one time short sprints. It's why some consider the Kentucky Derby the most exciting two minutes in sports. But according to Dr. Mooney, young horses competing in dash races has its own set of issues.
Katherine: How fast is this horse being asked to go, how was the worst being bred to encourage precocity and also trained and developed to encourage precocity at a very young age so that, you know, the horse may still have physical vulnerabilities and be less able because it's still growing to stay healthy while competing at that speed, even on shorter distances.
Brenda: Another thing that has sort of changed but sort of not in horse racing is who it's for. Horse racing has been the sport of royalty since ancient times. In the US antebellum period, horse racing relied on slave labor. And while that has changed, the sport is still a site of elite elbow rubbing and grossly expensive women's hats. So it shocked some to see Bob Baffert, who seems more like a sunglassed, silver fox mafioso than British royalty, become the winningest trainer in the history of the Kentucky Derby with Medina Spirit’s win. But Medina Spirit’s positive test isn't Baffert’s first doping violation. In fact, Baffert has had five horses test positive for banned substances just this year alone. In the weeks after the Kentucky Derby, Baffert appeared across the news media to defend his multiple violations. And he showed a flair for explaining away his horses’ tests. Here he is on the Dan Patrick Show.
Bob Baffert: The last couple of years I've had some, like Justify was the big one. He ingested scopolamine, which comes in the hay. I couldn't have prevented that. And we resolved that. It was a bad headline. I had a groom that urinated – he had COVID – and after he was getting over it, he urinated in the stall and the horse ate it. It was a cough medicine. We resolved that. You know, things like that happen because they're testing at these really extremely low levels.
Brenda: Saturday Night Live even did a skit mocking Baffert’s presence.
Michael Che: So Bob, your horse tested positive for steroids, but you deny any involvement?
Beck Bennett (Bob Baffert): Of course I denied, Michael. Bob Baffert's not stupid. I don't cheat. Do I look like a shady character to you?
Michael Che: Honestly, yes, Bob. Yes you do.
Beck Bennett (Bob Baffert): I think if people got to know him you’d see Medina Spirit’s actually a really cool guy. Normal horse. Check it out. He’s got everything a normal horse has: throbbing muscles, backne, the perfect square Zac Efron jaw, baseball bat shaft, pea sized balls.
Michael Che: You call that a normal horse?
Beck Bennett (Bob Baffert): Yes, Michael! And here he is on vacation…
Michael Che: Is he at a Mexican pharmacy?
Beck Bennett (Bob Baffert): Oh, so now horse can’t party? Come on, Michael. And here he is hitting his 73rd home run.
Brenda: So, now that we have the tests in, Medina Spirit may have his Kentucky Derby win retracted.
Joe: What has happened here with Medina Spirit is he's now confirmed that the drug tests failed, two of them. They’ll go to a hearing; he's likely to get disqualified. That means Mr. Zedan, the owner, does not get the $1.8 million first place check, nor does Baffert and the jockey get their 10% of that.
Brenda: As far as I understand, a lot of this finance is about recouping losses because these owners don't actually necessarily care most about profits. Is that right?
Joe: Yeah, I got a good anecdote about that. Jerry Moss, who won a Derby with Giacomo and owned probably the greatest race mare of our time, Zenyatta, he started A&M Records, okay? He’s got beautiful things and palaces all over, and he's a really nice down to earth guy, a guy from the Bronx. And he said, “With all my success in the horse race, I've never made a dime in it.” And he says, “Anybody who tells you they're going to make in a horse race, they’re lying to you.” And there's a saying, you know, how do you become a millionaire in horse racing? You start as a billionaire. [Brenda laughs] You know, and I’ve owned horses throughout the years, and it really…All you want to do is get some money back.
It's a lot like gambling. I guess the dream, it's like playing a lottery ticket, is if you can buy, own, breed a Kentucky Derby winner – boom, you know? There’s your 30 million, there's your 60 million. And I think that's the dream that drives guys and women with money. I mean, Trump owned a horse at one point, Steinbrenner owned a bunch. There's sheiks, there's all kinds. And it's their ego, but no matter how successful they were and whatever they did before, they're brought to their knees by horse racing because it's not a game that you can put a system on. I mean, it's nature.
Brenda: And historian Katherine Mooney agreed. More than money is at stake in horse racing, and horses aren’t just horses –
Katherine: – but animal who is understood to represent you is competing, and in that sense I think it's a really powerful way of sort of suggesting, hey, I didn't get to be incredibly, incredibly, incredibly rich and live on fifth avenue because somehow the world isn't fair. I want to be in this position because I actually deserve it, because I'm a winner. Right? And if only you were a winner, you could be in my position too, right? I mean, it’s one of the great sort of displays of ostensible meritocracy in this weird, by proxy way. And that means that the horses themselves come to represent all sorts of things about, you know, their masculinity and their identity and their power and, you know, whatever. And that means that the horses in a weird way end up not as tools but as alter egos.
TV host: But as a winning owner, what was it like?
Brenda: Again, Amr Zedan on Dubai Racing.
Amr Zedan: Well, it was really emotional, to sum it all up. But at the same time, you know, as a parent, and my boys are young, and my daughter, everyone's just so proud of it. It's just a legacy you'd like to leave. You'd like to leave something that's intangible, something that you can’t just acquire.
Brenda: So maybe actually winning races is for the ego and recouping losses from those races is just part of the business which most owners do by breeding. Top studs can make up to $250,000 a breeding session. In other words, to have sexual intercourse with a mare. This can be three times a day and they can be flown all over the world to mate. But to get that kind of clout, it's necessary for the horses to be seen and succeed in major stake races. And that's likely what Medina Spirit will be doing in the near future. On top of the intense breeding and doping, there are other concerns about horse racing that have surfaced over the past few years. There have been a spate of catastrophic accidents, and maybe most puzzling and striking was during the 2019 winter-spring meeting where 30 horses died at Santa Anita, a prominent racing track.
News hosts: Another horse has died at the Santa Anita racetrack in Southern California…The dying at racetracks is not uncommon…A four year old colt has died while training at Santa Anita racetrack today…30th horse death yesterday here at the park…
Brenda: Just this summer, Santa Anita has had three fatalities, including a horse named Pushing Sixty. The chestnut filly was exiting a far turn when it fractured her left front ankle. The injury was considered too severe for recovery and Pushing Sixty was euthanized. That was the 11th racing or training death at Santa Anita since the meeting started in December, 2020. So I wondered to myself, could the sport even survive these tragic accidents and these scandals? I mean, I hear more about the scandals and problems in horse racing at this point than about horse racing itself. Well, Congress is actually trying to help. At the end of 2020, Congress passed and the president signed the horse racing integrity and safety act. It's actually a piece of cross-party legislation that is supposed to take effect on July 1st, 2022.
The act demands standards and conditions for thoroughbred racing because of the tragedies, also to make uniform the medication rules and regulations, because currently the rules on substances are set at the state level – which to describe as chaotic would be a gross understatement. Regardless of Congress's actions, it’s the stakeholders that may in fact force reform. And by stakeholders, I mean the original source of the term: the gamblers. A group of gamblers, or as Joe puts them, horseplayers, Betting Betters, has filed a class action lawsuit against Baffert.
Joe: Horseplayers, which I count myself among, are a cranky, erudite bunch. And you know, it's not just about the money, it's about being right. And if you're right, you get rewarded. So, for those of us who bet on Mandaloun, the second place horse, and several million dollars worth of it, we don't get our money back. Medina Spirit has been paid, and that money has already been spent, likely, by various betters on that. So, a group came together and sued both him, Baffert the owner, and in another case Churchill Downs for the money they lost.
Brenda: Given everything that has occurred, you might think our experts would feel conflicted and concerned about the continuation of the sport itself. And you’d be right. Here’s Katherine Mooney.
Katherine: I have very mixed feelings. Speaking as a historian, I would say that our understanding of animals as, you know, to be cherished and to be sort of cosseted that way and not to be work animals, is such a relatively new idea that to historicize it is probably helpful. But also, I would say as somebody who has spent a lot of time very happily with performance horses were very well taken care of, I know plenty of horses who've loved to compete, who were just like, “I'm gonna show you something! Yeah, you’re gonna really like this.” And I don't want them to lose that. But that doesn't mean that I don't sympathize with what I think is the very sincere desire to protect those animals. And that has to be at the core of everything we do.
Brenda: Veterinarian Dr. Megan Kerford emphasized that scandal is not the defining feature of the sport.
Megan: I honestly think we're heading in the right direction. Like, it's really been cleaned up, and I just hope that what's happened recently doesn't taint…I hope the actions of one person doesn't taint the view of all the wonderful people in the horse industry that are following the rules and are trying to do everything correct and love their animals.
Brenda: And for Joe Drape, the future of horse racing is that a pivotal moment.
Joe: I like it sort of as a fan. I started following horse racing long before I ever became a reporter. I grew up going to the tracks. I've been to 140 of them in like 12 countries. I don't want it to go away, but it can't sustain this level of corruption. I mean, we didn't even mention the 27 trainers and vets who got indicted for doping horses in the beginning of 2020 and are going through the federal system right now. So, I hope this is the final wake up call, and it can't sustain this way, but we'll see.
Katherine: A horse should have an innate dignity and an innate right to safety, and to…I mean, I don't know if it sounds overly sentimental, but to happiness or contentment.
Brenda: Horses captivate people. Artists see them as challenges, authors like William Faulkner tested human nature in their relationships to the animal, and the ancients made them into demi gods. Our language is littered with euphemisms. We use horsepower. We get charley horses. We hope to hear things straight from their mouths. As for Medina Spirit, his urine samples are criss-crossing the country, literally on planes, traveling to testing labs as part of the legal wranglings, which are sure to go on for months if not years. But it's nice to think that he's oblivious to it all.
Amira: And for the interview on this best of episode, I had to go back to Jessica’s wonderful interview with Dr. Cheryl Cooky on the study of women's televised sports, because it is packed full of information that is exceedingly relevant today. And as we get into the heart of women’s basketball season, as we think about the Olympics coming up, as we continue to get into the postseasons of some these events, as we watch the NWSL rebuild, you know, all of these things…I think it’s great to revisit this study and reaffirm what we’re working towards, which is more robust coverage, which is better angles and framing of coverage, which is so many things that this interview covers, laying the foundation for the work that we do. And I think that it is a great interview to bring into the new year as we kind of create a blueprint for fixing some of these things.
Jessica: Jessica here. I’m joined today by Dr. Cheryl Cooky. She’s a co-author of the excellent book No Slam Dunk: Gender, Sport and the Unevenness of Social Change. Most importantly, for the conversation you’re about to hear, Dr. Cooky is one of the lead researchers on a three decades long study on the amount of space and the kind of reporting women’s sports gets on television. Spoiler alert: it’s not great. Any of it. The latest version of the study was recently released in the journal Communication & Sport and it's available to anyone, no paywall involved. We will share a link to it in our show notes. I’m very excited to have Dr. Cheryl Cooky on Burn It All Down to talk about her work. Cheryl, please tell our listeners who you are and what you do.
Cheryl: My name is Cheryl Cooky, I’m a professor of American studies and women’s gender and sexuality studies at Purdue University. I study, teach, and do research on the intersections of gender, sport, culture, race, media, and I’m just grateful to be here today.
Jessica: How did you get into that topic? Because as we're gonna talk about, you’ve been doing this for decades now. How did you first get into this? How did you end up in this work?
Cheryl: Sure, yeah, that’s a great question. I’ll try to keep this short for the listeners. It really was just sort of by accident. I don’t, although I could, identify as an athlete. I played a lot of sports growing up as a kid, and I think was good enough to get by and do a number of different sports, but not incredibly skilled to really excel at any one. So, I think that works when you’re in elementary school and junior high, but once you get to high school the stakes are sort of raised a little bit more.
Jessica: Right.
Cheryl: I was on the gymnastics team freshman year and dropped out, in large part because I just didn’t really see a whole lot of support, either from my family – and it wasn’t like they were unsupportive, just sports weren't really a part of my parents’ experience growing up. My peer group, the culture…I didn’t really get a whole lot of messages that valued what I was doing, and in fact it seemed like the girls at my high school that did play sports, particularly those that were in not-feminine or masculine sports, were often ostracized and made fun of. Those messages really impacted me, unfortunately. So, I dropped out. How does somebody who drops out of sport then become [laughter] devoted to sport such that it's their entire career?
You know, I’ve always kind of enjoyed sports. I’ve been a fan of sports. Sports fandom has been a part of my family in different ways. My grandfather was a Cubs fan, so he and I had stood on the porch in summers and listened to ball games. But undergraduate for me was very different in the sense that I was first generation college student, not a lot of people in my family really went to college other than a cousin or two, and I didn't really know what I was doing, and so I was kind of working my way through, thought I’d be pre-med, thought I was going into physical therapy. I was taking all these kinesiology classes that are focused on sport and human movement.
Jessica: Yeah.
Cheryl: And kind of found my way into that after doing about 400 hours of clinical work in a PT clinic, realized that wasn’t for me. But I love to learn, I love to do research, found myself in graduate school because I didn't really have any job or real job prospects after undergrad, and came to know sociology as a field, realized there were people that were studying sports from a socio-cultural perspective, and I just…
Jessica: Look at you now.
Cheryl: Yeah! Yeah. [Jessica laughs] The rest is history, I suppose, as they say.
Jessica: So, Cheryl, you have been tracking and analyzing – this is your wording, so I’m just copying you.
Cheryl: Yeah.
Jessica: You have been tracking and analyzing the quantity and quality of coverage of women’s and men’s sports in televised news and highlights shows for 30 years now.
Cheryl: Yeah.
Jessica: And that work is foundational to how we understand in the massive underrepresentation of women's sports and athletes within sports media. Anyone listening to this who cares about women's sports, you’ve heard the 4% number, and that’s your number – we’re gonna talk about that in a little bit. But I was wondering, this 30 year study, the longitudinal – I practiced that word! – longitudinal study across decades. How did this project get started?
Cheryl: That’s a great question. The Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles, which was a non-profit entity that was formed out of the proceeds of the 1984 Olympics, held a conference in the late 80s or somewhere around there, and the conference attendees were mostly just industry people, journalists. At one of the sessions at the conference the speakers talked about the racism and sexism in sport media. After the presentation the audience – again, many of whom were journalists and broadcasters – challenged the speaker in saying, you know, the examples that you gave are just anecdotes, you're kind of cherry-picking examples to make us look bad, this certainly is not characteristic of what we do, in fact these are anomalies and this is not indicative of sport media.
So, the Amateur Athletic Foundation commissioned Mike Messner, who’s my co-author on the study, and Margaret Carlisle Duncan, who was one of the original co-authors on the project, and who were also in the audience that day and asked them, hey, can you help us out? Can we get some research to find out if in fact are these really sort of the extreme examples or is this more indicative of a larger issue? Help us out here. So, that’s how the study got started.
I came in in 1999 as a research assistant for Mike when I was his graduate student at USC, and then sometime around the mid-2000s Margaret Carlisle Duncan retired and she was sort of transitioning off and I happened to call Mike, because Mike and I still kept in touch, and said hey, timing-wise, you guys should be gearing up for the next iteration of the study. Like, what’s going on? Fill me in on the details. He’s like, ah, I don’t know. You know, Margaret’s retiring, she’s kind of stepping back from research. I’m just not sure if I have it in me or the bandwidth – I can’t remember the exact language that he used. I said, no, Mike! This is an important study! [Jessica laughs] You have to do this! I said, you know, if I can be so bold, I would volunteer to help out and I’d love to collaborate with you on it. So, I kind of–
Jessica: Elbowed your way in there.
Cheryl: Yeah! I kind of elbowed my way in. [Jessica laughs] Yeah, so I kind of became the starting quarterback and Mike now sits on the sidelines and helps calls plays or whatever the appropriate sport metaphor might be. So, in 2009 I kind of took on that lead role and we’ve been kind of at it ever since.
Jessica: Yeah. And like I said, that 4% number I think is probably the most famous part of this continual study. I wanna say, you talking about was this indicative, was this anecdotal…You have found that this is systemic, right? And this number is sort of a rallying cry of the systemic issues, and I think it's maybe one of the most depressing things about this study, the fact that there has been almost no change in this number across these three decades. We're talking about the coverage of women’s sports on TV news and like, ESPN, SportsCenter.
Cheryl: Yeah. So, I wanna be really clear, with this particular study we are looking at televised news and highlights shows, and we added on in the 2019 data collection online daily newsletters and social media accounts of those same media outlets that we look at in the televised part of the study, right? So, I do think what is surprising about the study is the fact that in over 30 years – again, looking at specific media outlets and the specific timeframes that we examine – that there has been relatively little change and it’s varied over time, right? So, we’ve got a spike up to about 8% in 1999; it dropped back down, it was as low as 3.2 or around there the last iteration. It has kind of “jumped up” to about 5%, which is where we started in 1989. I can talk a little bit more about the 5%.
Jessica: Well it's interesting, because the data for the latest one is 2019 and even though it feels like last year that 2 years ago now the women’s world cup happened and, so you say, everything is skewed here. In fact, if you remove the women’s world cup coverage we get down into the 3%. We’re talking about all of the sports coverage that you guys looked at. 3% if you take out the women's world cup because you addressed that nationalism…There's a way that that forces stories forward. But I just feel like…I don't know even know if you can answer this question, but I just feel like…Is there no hope here? This is so good to have this data and we’re all out here yelling 4% all the time, but when I read this last night I was like, oh my gosh.
Cheryl: Yeah…
Jessica: We are just in the late 80s. [laughs] How can it be the same?
Cheryl: Yeah, that's the million dollar question, right? I think there's a number of things that we point to maybe why it's the same. In come cases with he local affiliates it’s the same broadcasters from like 20, 25, 30 years ago, right?
Jessica: Yeah.
Cheryl: So in that sense, I think there’s a way that at least within these kind of legacy media spaces – we’re talking about the big sport media outlets like SportsCenter, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, you know the major networks, the major news media outlets – I think there’s a way that the logics by which those organizations operate are so deeply entrenched in a particular worldview that is so outdated, and also so resistant to empirical evidence that would suggest that there actually is a market for women's sports, that there actually is an audience for women’s sports, that there actually is interest in watching and following and consuming women’s sports and knowing about sports athletes. It's sort of that those organizations are just immunize or kind of resistant to taking that in. For me I think that speaks to how deeply rooted sexism is in those particular organizations and institutions, such that even if you are able to include more women or even as commentators, as broadcasters – which I know ESPN likes to sort of champion its gender diversity, which relatively speaking according to Richard Lapchick…It’s something, right?
Jessica: Yeah, it is something.
Cheryl: Yeah.
Jessica: Yeah. It skews all his data, like, if you take ESPN out of his data then everything gets way worse. They actually are, all things considered, doing alright. [laughs]
Cheryl: They’re doing alright. They’re doing alright. And we didn’t necessarily systematically measure this, but in terms of the qualitative analyses, of of the things that I was noticing was that it wasn’t as if, oh, now there's a woman who's the anchor or a woman who's the commentator and we're getting a much different view or we’re getting different types of sports coverage or we’re getting a different kind of delivery and excitement. It's like, no, this is actually Brewer, who was at KABC–
Jessica: Right.
Cheryl: And then I think last I checked she’s now at ESPN. You know, she’s doing the same type of stylistic delivery and presentation that the male anchors were doing and she was covering men’s sports and talking about baseball before it even started. Again, I don’t think the commentaries themselves have a lot of power in terms of maybe setting the agenda of what gets covered, but certainly I think this idea that if we bring more women in there's gonna be some change…You know, when you asked, Jessica, “Is there hope?” and I think when I look at our data and I look at our study, it’s just super depressing. [laughter] It’s surprising, yet at the same time I’m not surprised.
Jessica: Yeah. It feels that way.
Cheryl: Where I find hope as a researcher and where I find hope as a fan of women's sports and an advocate for gender equality is – and I hate to say this, but I’m gonna plug your show, right? I find it in this podcast. I find it in the work that you and your co-anchors are doing with respect to writing about sports from a feminist perspective, to amplifying women athletes and stories about women’s sports. I look to all the diversity in terms of maybe what we would call niche media spaces, right? So, podcasts and blogs and those kinds of spaces where, you know, journalists and oftentimes kind of younger women journalists are pushing against that kind of business logics that I was talking about earlier and kind of pushing against that entrenched sexism to talk about women's sports in different ways.
The other thing that gives me hope too, and I'm still not sure how I feel about this – and we can talk more about this or we can move on. Deloitte and a couple of other entities, you saw the report, the forecasting on the untapped potential market for women's sports.
Jessica: Yeah. There's a lot of money there.
Cheryl: There's a lot of money to be made in women's sports. I think there's going to be a sea change as a result of that, or at least I'm hoping there will be. And if there's not, then I think then I feel like all will be lost. But at the same time, I feel somewhat ambivalent about using the kind of commercial, economic arguments to advocate for women's sports. I haven't quite worked out why I have that ambivalence, but I do. Money might help, but I don't think it solves the problem. The thing that I worry about is that then what happens when that market potential is tapped or the well has run dry. Do we go back to doing the same thing?
Jessica: Yeah, and I think your study, part of what your study shows is that even if you present this kind of data, that like you said before, people are resistant to it. So, you know, I feel that ambivalence because it should be about more than that. Like, I shouldn't take that, is how I feel. And it's interesting to hear you talk about this depressing part of the study because all I was like, yeah, this is why we named the show Burn It All Down. It does just feel like we gotta start from somewhere new because the old is just so entrenched, as you said. So, let's talk about the, the most recent study. You did this along with fellow researchers, LaToya Council, Maria Mears, and Michael Messner, as you talked about before. It’s called One and done: the long eclipse of women's televised sports, 1989 to 2019. You published it in the journal of Communication & Sports. Let's talk about the title: One and done. What is the significance of this? Why are you referring to it in the title?
Cheryl: Yeah, that's a great question. It really came from me doing the qualitative analyses of the coverage. I just found that when you sit and you watch these shows, I mean, this was what I did last summer. Just back to back, back to back, you can see kind of things, patterns emerge in ways that maybe you wouldn’t if you once a week watch SportsCenter or what have you. Right? And so, what kept kind of coming up repeatedly was there would be this story about a women's sport event and it was usually, you know, maybe it was a segment on the women's basketball tournament, maybe it was a segment or two on women's tennis in the summer, it was a segment or two on the World Cup. And then once that segment was done, women's sports coverage was complete. Whereas with men's sports, one of the things that we noticed was that the stories about men's sports would repeat over time and there would be different angles.
So, for example, when we were collecting data, Anthony Davis signing to the LA Lakers was a story and it was not just that the story itself got repeated, like the same segment, which sometimes that happens. But it was, okay, now we're gonna talk about Anthony Davis meeting with so-and-so and now we're going to talk about Anthony Davis and his press conference. And now we're going to talk about Anthony Davis and some social media exchange that he had with LeBron James or whatever, and now we're going to talk…And so, the story about Anthony Davis signing to the Lakers is a story that's told through multiple lenses over multiple segments, either within the same broadcast if we're talking about SportsCenter for example or across different broadcasts if we're looking at the local affiliates.
Whereas with the women's sports it was the one segment, or the one sport event, or the one topic and then it moved on, right? So, it just so happened that the way we sample...And we have to do this in order to be able to make comparisons over time. But it just so happened that our sampling date caught the end of the Women's World Cup. I think we got the day of the World Cup final, and then the day after, and as soon as Monday was over, I think there was maybe a couple of stories about the parade in New York, and then it was done, right?
Jessica: Done. One and done. Yeah.
Cheryl: We didn't talk about women's soccer after that or, you know, again, if it was, maybe it was a couple of weeks after our study stopped collection and it's a short segment. But we don't see the kind of wall-to-wall 24/7 coverage of men's sports and especially kind of the men's big three or four, we just don't see that with women's sports. The analogy that I give is it's like, if you buy a plant and you only water it once a year, it's going to be really hard that plant to grow, right? Whereas if you buy a plant and you, I don't know, say it needs to be watered once a week. You water it once a week, and you give it fertilizer and you put it in the sunlight and you trim back its leaves and you do all the kind of fun stuff with the soil that you can do with plants – that the plant is going to grow, it's going to flourish. And it's going to sprout out new little baby plants. And we just don't see that with women's sports. Did that analogy makes sense? I don't know. Does that work? [laughs]
Jessica: Yeah, it makes so much sense. You know, obviously the kind of work that I do is not part of the study cause I write and publish online and stuff like that, but it makes me think of, I had the story that was big a few years ago – and I talked about this on the show a fair amount – about girls who play baseball, and it took me five months to place the story, and it was huge when it landed. Like, it was so huge that nightly news, NBC nightly news, did their own segment. HBO real sports did their own segment. Like, it was a viral success. And I knew it the whole time, and that's why I pushed really hard to get this out. But part of the story is that it got rejected over and over and over again. And at an outlet that I won't name because I still write in this world, I was told, well, we already wrote about girls who play baseball and they sent me a link from two years before.
Cheryl: Oh gosh.
Jessica: And it was like…To this day, it was like, what? It's that kind of feeling of like, you can't have the same, like with women, if that one story exists, then like we are finished here. And then also that feeling of...And this just recently happened, where a friend was worried because the story they were going to publish, someone else published something similar. I was like, there can be two! [laughs] There's enough space for us to have two of these, but like you said, with the Anthony Davis trade, there were probably one million articles, right? But with women's sport, the scarcity model is just like so ingrained in us. And so it makes sense that it's reflected up on screen.
Cheryl: Yeah. And sort of speaking to that, I mean, I think that’s unfortunately a reality. In some of our data what was interesting was that not even when it happens but two weeks before major league baseball starts, I mean, we were getting segments on the local affiliates and on ESPN, SportsCenter, about the start of spring training. Spring training, I mean, it's nice. It's great, whatever. But I mean, it's not high stakes. There’s all kinds of ways that through the coverage that you communicate to audiences that this is important. This is exciting. The countdown of the start of spring training. Two weeks left, 10 days left. This is something that we should all be looking forward to. It's like Christmas on the calendar, if you celebrate Christmas, and you're checking off the X's on the calendar, just waiting for Santa to come.
And with women's sports, the event happens. It may get some coverage, as soon as the event's over. Like, we checked off our box. You don't know what happens afterwards. What happens to these athletes? Where did they go? What are they doing in the offseason? What are the important stories? I mean, it's just confined to that moment. And then what was interesting is with the women's tennis coverage, it was actually like once Serena got knocked out of the tournament literally the coverage...There was like no reason to cover the women's tournament. I think it was Wimbledon. Yet men's tennis continued to be covered. I think it in part, because it was Roger Federer and Nadal.
Jessica: That's interesting. Lindsay, just the other day, was talking about a study that she read a few years ago about how the coverage for women's tennis was either racist, sexist coverage of Serena or no coverage. Like, so you're either invisible within the coverage or you’re Serena and you're taking on this intense, racist, sexist media all the time. So, I'm not surprised at all to hear that. Sounds like there's lots of data.
Cheryl: And I mean, that's a pattern that we see and I've noted in some of my research. I think other folks have talked about this as well, is that that the controversies in women's sports tend to gain a lot of visibility and a lot of attention. This is not to say that similar controversies in men's sports also do not generate attention.
Jessica: Right. They just get all the other stuff and women don’t!
Cheryl: Exactly, right? It's it's within this broader landscape where we get to learn all the things. And in fact, I haven't empirically studied this, but my sense is I knew more about the weight room at the women's tournament than I did a really about any of the teams. I think what was able to kind of push through that sort of glass ceiling in sports coverage to sort of rise to the top was that conversation – and this isn't to say that having conversations about sexism in sports and gender inequality aren't important topics. I applaud the media for drawing attention to these issues, and especially, I mean, it was really social media that I think got on the radar of some of the mainstream sport outlets. But we also then need to keep talking about the tournament otherwise these kind of moments of inequality are going to persist.
Jessica: You do have a section in the paper titled March Madness: still mostly for men. I would guess, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but that this was ready for publication well before any of this news broke about all the inequities this year. So, I mean, the inequities that we saw were not site inequities, the way the testing was done differently. Like, this isn't the media. And your piece is about how the media is unequal in its coverage. But I wanted to know, like, do you see this all as related? The quality of the tournament for the women and the lack of coverage, like, are these related to you?
Cheryl: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I definitely think so. This might get a little bit complicated and if I were in a classroom, I'd probably get out my whiteboard and start drawing a diagram.
Jessica: [laughs] Alright. Take me through, professor.
Cheryl: If we think about one of the justifications that the NCAA itself gave for the unequal treatment of the women is the fact that the men generate revenue, right? That the men's tournament generates revenue according to the NCAA – although there's some other evidence to suggest otherwise – and the women's tournament loses money. So, a big reason why the men's tournament generates revenue is because the NCAA sells the rights to broadcast the tournament to the networks. So, the networks pay millions of dollars to get those rights fees so they can broadcast the games. The way the contracts work is that the men's NCAA basketball tournament is negotiated separately from the women's tournament and the women's tournament is packaged with all the other NCAA championships.
Jessica: Okay. Got it.
Cheryl: So, one thing we can think about is what would it look like if the women's tournament was packaged with the men's and there was a kind of sharing there. Okay, so, now the men's tournament is generating more and more revenue because the networks are willing to pay millions of dollars to the NCAA because they know millions of people are gonna watch and tune in. So their ratings for these games are going to go up. Now, they operate under the assumption that the ratings aren't there for the women's, which some evidence suggests otherwise, but we'll table that conversation as well. So, now the networks want to pay the money because they can get the ratings. Why do ratings matter for networks? Ratings matter for networks because advertisers base how much they will pay for commercial time during an event based on those ratings.
So, that's why the Super Bowl, those networks get, whatever it is. I think it was like 5 million for a 30 second spot last time I checked, it's probably even higher than that. I'm not quite sure what the NCAA men's tournament gets for a 30 second commercial slot. But this all matters, right? Because of the audience piece of this matters. And so why do audiences tune in? The NCAA final four tournament, the men's tournament – and I would say maybe to a certain extent the women's, but the men's tournament for sure – is now I think coming to the level of the Super Bowl, right? This is a cultural event.
Jessica: You can't miss it.
Cheryl: You can't miss it. This has been for years now, that offices, you know, back in the day before times, when we all worked in offices – the brackets and the pool office pools and everyone's watching the game.
Jessica: The shared experience. Like, I watch the Super Bowl because I want to be able to talk to people about it. Not because I necessarily care about what's happening. We did a Burn It All Down Super Bowl watch thing, like, because it's about that…So, I agree. March Madness on the men’s side has that shared experience that goes along with it. I feel like you're going to tell me that they have investment in making us care this much. [laughter]
Cheryl: Yeah, they do. And so the news and news media and the sport media play a really powerful role in helping to create for audiences beyond just the viewing experience an exciting atmosphere that surrounds the event, that makes it really easy for me as a fan to engage. So, I want to fill out my bracket. I wrote an article several years ago for a feminist blog, The Feminist Wire, me ranting about how difficult it was to fill out my bracket. And even today, I think there's been some changes and improvements. There's now actually an app for the women's bracket, although I struggled so many times to find it because I feel like ESPN kept moving it in different spaces [laughs] on their smartphone platform or app. Even the stories, right? So you tune in tune to SportsCenter or you log into social media, you see what people are talking about and if they're talking about the men's sports, right? I can learn so much about the men's basketball season as somebody who's just either a casual fan or someone who's not a fan of sports at all, but wants to be a part of it.
Jessica: I call it osmosis, like, I know about the NBA just from existing. I don't watch it. I have very little interest generally, but I can talk about it in a pretty good way. And so I just feel like it must be osmosis that I'm just receiving, whereas for women's sports I've curated a very specific social media following, the newsletters that I read. I have done a lot of upfront work in order to make that less work now as March Madness is happening and we're about to have the draft and NWSL Challenge Cup is coming up. I know all that because people on my social media feeds are telling me this and I work with women who care a lot about that but, you know, there's a lot of work involved.
Cheryl: Yeah. And I think that's the important thing I really want to highlight, that it's labor that fans have to invest to be able to follow women's sports and have a similar kind of experience as a consumer, as a fan, as a spectator. It’s a much different kind of labor and investment. I love that idea of osmosis, right? It doesn't take a lot of work. It doesn’t take labor.
Jessica: Yeah. It just comes into your skin.
Cheryl: Yeah.You open up your whatever, your social media feed or what have you. It's there, it's there. And again, I think it's not to say that you cannot find information on women's sports. You just have to be willing to do the work, to do the labor, to be committed. There's a small segment of folks that have the ability to do that that kind of work. And then further, I think the rest of the casual fans that are out there it's just sort of like, ah, you know…You either don't know what's happening or you just sort of don't really have the opportunity to find out what's going on.
Jessica: Yeah. So, the idea is like if the media that you're covering, if they would do a better job, if it wasn't the one and done, if they were creating the same kind of constant sustained coverage that we see with the men, more people would tune into the women. When it came time to negotiate these contracts for these TV stations for the coverage of something like March Madness, you could sell them for a lot more. And as soon as you sell the women for a lot more, everyone becomes more invested and then the cycle ramps up. It's just so hard to break this inertia where we keep screaming. I feel like we're all screaming about it all the time. We were slowly getting…It was very exciting last weekend for me to go between the two tournaments between on ABC and CBS. I was just like, wow, like the women are on ABC. The men are on CBS. This is incredible. But it does also feel very strange that it's 2021 and what a big deal that we're on ABC! I did want to ask about one other term that comes up in the study this time, and I think was in previous studies, but: gender bland sexism, which is such an interesting idea. Will you tell me what gender bland sexism is?
Cheryl: Yeah. So this is kind of a concept that we developed, and it was originally presented in the previous iteration. Michela Musto was the graduate student working with us at the time, and this was something that she had kind of picked up on in her qualitative analysis. We developed this concept to talk about the ways…I should backtrack. So, we developed this concept borrowing from Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s concept of colorblind racism. Colorblind racism is essentially the ways in which racism operates in society and in more covert ways. I won't go too much into those details, right? So, it's not the explicit “you can't sit at the front of the bus” but it's these more kind of implicit, covert ways that that racism manifests. So, we sort of took that and sort of tweaked it to talk about not just gender blind sexism, cause certainly gender is quite visible in sports spaces.
Jessica: It's always visible. Yeah. Yeah.
Cheryl: Yeah. The gender bland element is the way in which kind of the bland delivery, flat delivery, is itself a kind of form of, of sexism. So, in previous iterations of our study we had advocated for more respectful coverage of women's sports, because back then the sexism was quite overt, right? It was a story about a woman naked bungee jumper that had painted her body with green paint on St. Patrick's Day. It was a trivialization of women athletes. It's making fun of them or using them as the object of kind of sexualized humor, humorous sexualization. So, when you see those, this is quite overt, clearly sexism, most people can identify it and point to it. We're advocating more respectful coverage, more respectful coverage. But what we found was that in part due to a lot of changes, which I can talk a little bit more about, then the media at least within our sample, sort of stopped doing the kind of sexualization we saw that sort of fall out of the qualitative analysis.
Eventually we got to a point where the ways in which women's sports stories were delivered was in this monotone, flat delivery. They weren't sexualizing athletes, but they also weren’t infusing in the coverage the kind of high production values, exciting language, colorful adjectives and commentary that we saw with the men's. It really kind of created this very distinct difference in terms of how you as a viewer were seeing women's sports versus seeing men's sports. So it's a kind of sexism that operates under the radar. Most people aren't going to pick up on it cause it's like, oh, well, they're talking about the sport and they're highlighting that, they're talking about the game and they're showing a highlight reel or what have you, but it's absent from these other high production values.
So what we argued using this concept then is that the message that viewers take away from that is that women's sports is less exciting. Or in other words, women's sports is boring. And it is that way not because the production values aren't there, because the excitement and exciting delivery and all that, you know, the bells and whistles are absent, but it gets interpreted or understood, or has the potential to get interpreted and understood as women's sports are just less interesting and therefore we really don't have to focus on uncovering them.
Jessica: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And especially because a lot of people who aren't already women's sports fans, that’s going to be their idea of women's sports to begin with. That's like a cultural idea that women's sports is the boring inferior version of whatever it is the men are doing. So then if that's reinforced in the coverage, you can see how that would be particularly damaging. It's just telling people like, it is exactly what you thought it was, like, we have to report on this. But, you know, that's so interesting, the idea that if you're watching this over and over again, you're going to see that comparison in a way that maybe I wouldn't even catch if I was watching.
Cheryl: The kind of exceptions to that, where we did see the high production values, the investment was in for example the the coverage of the Women's World Cup finals and the aftermath, right? The colorful commentary, the graphics, the transitions, the interviews, the experts coming in, Julie Foudy coming in and giving her take on what happened, interviews with the players. All of that. But again, and so that's great, but if we can get that on a more consistent basis and not that one and done.
Jessica: Yeah. We talked about this a lot on the show, the nationalism, well, you know, Trump, the sexism, and it's such a powerful thing. That's why the Olympics are such an interesting media landscape too. So, now that we've talked about all this stuff: how do we fix it? [laughter]
Cheryl: I paused because I always loved this question.
Jessica: I know. It's not necessarily…I don't think it's fair. Like as a journalist, I get this, as if I have to have the solution in order to point out the problem, I think that there is something deeply unfair about that. But I do wonder now that you've been doing this for so long, maybe a better one was like: if you could just change one thing right now, what would be the very first thing? [Cheryl laughs] What would be the most important first thing that you would change if you were like the magic wand?
Cheryl: Yeah, I've thought a lot about this and I think we have recommendations and previous iterations of the study. So, we in the past have advocated for increased quantity of coverage. I think in our last iteration, we suggested going from…And there was a rationale, which we provided in the study, but we suggested going from the 3% and pushing that to 12 or 18%, and that was based on kind of the particular rationale.
Jessica: It feels like pie in the sky, one fifth of the coverage feels like…12% even, yeah!
Cheryl: Yeah. And we had advocated for not just more women but more people in decision-making positions who are invested in women's sports. So, hiring people who are invested in covering women's sports with the same quality as men’s. I n this iteration of the study we sort of walk through some of those recommendations and talk about how after five years even some of those basic things that we had called for didn't really seem to come to fruition. So, after 30 years or so of sort of advocating and recommending, I do get somewhat frustrated with that question. And I get that a lot from a number of folks, right? People want to know. It's kind of Debbie downer, if you're just like, yeah, this sucks! Okay. Peace out, bye!
Jessica: Yeah, I understand. Yes. I do Debbie downer work and people are like, well, what's the solution? I'm like, well, ask the people in charge! [laughs]
Cheryl: Exactly, exactly. I love Sara Ahmed's work, and she talks about, you know, the feminist killjoy and the importance of the feminist killjoy. So, I think there is some some value in a critique. If I were to say, you know, what would I want to see? And I thought a lot about this in anticipating this question coming up, and to be honest with you, I think one of the things that I would like to see happen – and I don't know it happens, so I'm not going to tell you how! I will tell you what. I think I've given up hope that some of these kind of legacy media outlets are going to change. And in fact, you know, as I sort of walked us through the origin story of the study, I failed to mention that in this latest iteration we included the online and social media coverage in part because the last time the study came out back in 2015, one of the responses we got from somebody inside the industry was that no one watches SportsCenter anymore. No one watches television, no one watches television news, no one watches SportsCenter. You need to look online. You need to look at social media.
Jessica: And lo and behold, what did you find?
Cheryl: So, we did that. Lo and behold, I mean, they were right. It is better. But we're talking, you know, 9% versus 5% or 10% versus, you know, 5 or 6%.
Jessica: And even that you guys found that ESPNW skewed everything.
Cheryl: Yeah. So, if you take ESPNW out of that equation, the numbers are abysmal. What was the issue that was really sad with ESPNW was that their newsletter wasn't a daily newsletter. It was a weekly newsletter. The publication was quite erratic, and in fact in the middle of our data collection they stopped publishing the newsletter. So, the one kind of space within the study that we were able to sort of identify some coverage of women's sports, right? So, I think going back to your question, I've given up on the legacy media, right? I'm sort of like, I've talked to you as much as I can. You're not going to pick your socks up off the floor. So I think what we what we need to do is we need to start investing in other media spaces. We need to stop – we being those of us who are women's sports advocates, feminists, people who care about women's sports, fans of women's sports, women athletes, girl athletes – we need to stop asking the mainstream for access and for inclusion and we need to start, like you were saying, burn it all down, like, create our own spaces, which people have, and we need to start investing in those spaces.
And so, you know, for me, what that looks like is that's me subscribing to podcasts about women's sports. That's me…And this is local level changes, right? But that's me signing up for Lindsay Gibbs’s Power Plays newsletter and investing money in that instead of renewing my ESPN Plus subscription. I don't want to put the onus on fans to do that. But I think we need to shift the conversation away from…And I say this as somebody who did this research, right? But I think we need to shift the conversation away from looking at legacy sport media or mainstream sport media and start looking at the spaces where the work is actually being done and try to elevate and amplify those spaces and those voices and invest in those spaces and voices.
Jessica: Cheryl, thank you so much for your work, for your time today, for coming on Burn It All Down. This has been wonderful. I feel like I could talk to you for another hour. Where can our listeners find you and your work out there on the internets?
Cheryl: Oh, that's a great question. So, the study itself is published, it’s open access, so it's not behind a paywall, so hopefully you'll be able to link to the study.
Jessica: We’ll link to it!
Cheryl: So, they can find me there. I'm also…I say “on Twitter” very loosely @ProfCooky. I don't post very much.
Jessica: Smart woman.
Cheryl: You know, you can find me on the Purdue website. Social media, that's a whole other story we can have a conversation about. [Jessica laughs] Where else can you find me? Facebook? I don't know. Just, you know, Google me. I'm out there. I'm on the web.
Jessica: She’s out there. Thank you so much for coming on Burn It All Down. This has been wonderful.
Cheryl: Thanks so much.
Amira: That’s it for this best of episode of Burn It All Down. We’ll be back with our regularly scheduled episodes and interviews starting January 18th. This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. And shoutout to Shelby Weldon who holds down our web and social media. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network. We can’t wait to get back with you on a regular basis, and until then of course you can keep up with the podcast on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can listen and subscribe, rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And of course, check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. There you’ll find show links, transcripts – you can find the full episodes of the little snippets that we gave you these last few weeks.
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