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Women
on a Males Sports Channel
The WNBA kicked off its 10th season on May 20th 2006. With four teams playing on that Saturday. On the 11pm Sports Center, the final live show of the evening, the show reported on the two games that had beeen played during the day. Starting at 11:37:40 the first game was covered and the coverage of the second game ended at 11:38:10. A whopping thirty seconds of air time for two professional female basketball games. During those thirty seconds there were three total clips from both games that were shown, all three were from the best players on the team being discussed. When the Professional Men's Basketball League, NBA, has no games scheduled they still average over 5 minuets of coverage time and when they are covering games it can get up to 10 minuets of coverage.
If you go to ESPN and look across
the top every professional sport is listed across the
navagation bar except the WNBA. To find
the WNBA you have to go into the NBA column and scroll
all the way to the 4th one
from the bottom to find ESPN's coverage of the WNBA.
The LPGA is not even listed as a possible selection. To find the LPGA you have to go to the general GOLF column and once the page loads, search throughout that section of the site to find LPGA information randomly placed around the site. There is not another link to a separate ESPN coverage of the LPGA but as you notice the GOLF page is heavily dominated by the male golfers. So finding any information on the LPGA is a chore in itself.
Women's tennis is also just grouped into with men's tennis just like women's golf is. Even though most times the Womens Tennis is more competitive and more widely watched and overed over mens.
I took a look at recent coverage of men's and women's sports on ESPN.com By going to espn.com for 6 straight days these are some of the differences that I noticed. On March 16th there were only three references to women on the front page of espn.com The three references were about Annika Sorentam who missed her first cut in 68 tour events. Michelle Wie who qualified for the local qualifier to try and make it into the Men's U.S. Open. Lindsey Davenport is with-drawing from the French Open because of a back injury. ( 3 was the highest amount of women sports coverage on the front page for the 6 days)
On March 21st there were NO references to women on the front page of espn.com On average since march 16th to March 21st there have been 2 articles relating to women sports. So in 6 days there were 12 news references to Women when on any given day there are more than 30 news articles about men.