A panel discussion on women’s sports media was held as part of the 13th-annual Oppenheimer Ethics Symposium on March 25. The panel occurred during the Malcolm M. Renfrew Interdisciplinary Colloquium, a weekly event hosted at the library in partnership with the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences.
The panel consisted of Christine Brennan, USA Today; Madison Campos, San Francisco 49ers; Cara Hawkins-Jedlicka, Washington State University; and Theo Lawson, Spokesman Review, and was moderated by Don Shelton, UI-JAMM adjunct faculty.
The primary topic covered at the panel was gender-based discrimination, both present and historical. Although Title IX made it illegal to discriminate based on sex in federally funded programs such as higher education, women’s sports have been historically disregarded by media outlets.
Recently, and in large part thanks to the rise of women’s basketball and the celebrity status of player Catlin Clark, newsrooms have become more willing to cover college and WNBA games. These basketball leagues continue to face issues of poor coverage and only 15% of courtside reporters are women, according to Hawkins-Jedlicka.
In an interview with The Argonaut, Hawkins-Jedlicka said that she views men’s and women’s basketball as two separate sports due to the difference in play styles and culture between athletes.
“Celebrate the sport for the sport,” Hawkins-Jedlicka said.
In language, women’s sports exist in the shadow of the men’s leagues. An example given by Brennan is the classification of the NBA and WNBA as opposed to being referred to as MNBA and WNBA.
With March Madness currently ongoing, the way in which newscasters would use the singular “bracket” instead of “brackets” was a topic of discussion from Hawkins-Jedlicka and Campos. Campos pointed out that the popular singular use of “bracket” still referred to only the men’s team. In 2024, ESPN’s coverage of women’s March Madness received 18.9 million views, 4 million more than the men’s.
Lawson, a sports reporter for the Spokesman Review, said that the paper only had four sports reporters, and not one had the beat of women’s sports. That task is given to a freelancer, a point which Hawkins-Jedlicka responded to in disbelief. Brennan acknowledged that neither Lawson, the reporters nor the editor were at fault, saying that, in her experience, it takes community feedback for coverage to change.
“We should be doing this instead of being on this panel,” Brennan said jokingly, but encouraged the audience to take action to create the local media landscape they wished to see by contacting local media with concerns.
The panelists affirmed that this push for progress in women’s sports coverage is a necessary conversation to continue. Twenty years ago, the belief that male sports viewers would not be interested in hearing women’s voices was pervasive enough to shape reality. Now, despite still being a low overall percentage, women including those on the panel have entered and thrived in athletics media career fields.
“If you can see it, you can be it,” Campos said.
Joshua Reisenfeld can be reached at arg-news@uidaho.edu.