Media

As long as newspapers, magazines, radio, and television have been in existence they have been used to communicate information to the masses. Most of what we know is based on news reports we see on television and read in magazines and newspapers. The media uses these tools to manipulate how we view world issues so why wouldn’t the sports report also influence how we view athletes. Even people that are athletes themselves are sometimes only set in focusing on the particular sports that they participate in. For this reason, most of the way people view the athletic world in America and worldwide is through magazines like Sports Illustrated and networks like ESPN.

However, just like most news shows these shows can be biased towards a certain sport or, as we have noticed, a certain gender. Being athletes ourselves, our group noticed that female athletes have been given the short end of the stick in terms of media coverage. Now maybe there is a reason for this, which is what we hope to learn and prove through research of the most popular sports magazine, Sports Illustrated and the most popular television network for sports, ESPN. We also realize that women are not completely left out of media coverage so we divulged into researching the women that did receive attention and the reasons for it. We came to some very interesting findings and results and we hope that you will too.

We felt that there was not enough media coverage about women and their talents in sports. The first issue We look a look at was "What it takes to make the headlines" which deals with four topics, Playing with the boys, Human Interest Stories, Special Achievements, and Good Looks. The second topic is a timeline of "Female Firsts" in sports and media. By looking at the time period from 1400-1899, 1900-1949, 1950-1999, 2000-present we can get a better look of how far women have come in terms of sports and media breakthroughs. The third topic is "Sports Illustrated". This topic takes a look at the magazine Sports Illustrated and its coverage of womens sports. This site will divulge into issues about Sports Illustrated for Women and Sports Illustrated for Kids. There is also a special category called How Often is There an Article About Women? where we analyze articles about women that do appear in Sports Illustrated. In our last section we look into the most popular sports network ESPN and Women, which is currently associated as a male sports channel. In the first section, Women on a Males Sports Channel, we discuss how often women make appearances on ESPN and how their website espn.com is presented. In the next section you have an opportunity to browse The Women of ESPN Sports Reporting and lastly take a look at Sex Sells, which will detail how sex is portrayed in womens sports.