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Opinion
Sport coverage – it’s not about gender, it’s about business! (15 August)
(Opinion) How many articles about women’s sport, of any kind, have you seen in today’s sport coverage? Turn on the radio, open your newspapers, flick through TV channels – you will most likely find very little, if anything, about women’s sport.
“We are not interested in women bouncing up and down,” you might scream like Greg Baum of the Age newspaper who last week published the article in which he declared that “women must deserve sport coverage”. Or you might feel angry that a sport columnist can get away with such sexist statements. Either way, you must be at least curious, if not worried, about what makes women’s sport inferior to men’s sport coverage.
The sports world has always been competitive. On the basic level, sports people are competing amongst each other to be the best in their sport discipline. On the other, different sport codes are competing for their percentage of media coverage, high ratings and tangible profits. There is no doubt that sport is a global industry in which sponsors and advertisers dictate the success of a sport discipline.
This is precisely why women in sport are not represented in the media. They seem to escape the interest of key profit-orientated sponsors.
It is easy to highlight that mega sponsors are integral to the development of sport. We only need to look at our national men’s soccer team. Until recently they were almost invisible in the Australian media. Even though soccer is said to be the most watched and most passionately followed sport in the world, the Australian media outlets seem to concentrate on Aussie rules, rugby league and cricket. However, as we have witnessed just a few months ago, in their quest for profit and high ratings and/or increased readership, all media platforms displayed a great interest in reporting on the qualificatiers for the World Cup.
The Socceroos qualified and consequently secured a major presence across all media platforms. They instantly attracted advertising agencies and secured money-spinning sponsor deals with high exposure. Nike and Energizer were the first ones to seize the opportunity and get behind the Socceroos. Suddenly, soccer was the “’t’ sport. We read about it for the full month – long competition, we watched it on television at four o’clock in the morning and we all talked about it.
The sponsors have executed their job perfectly! They positioned soccer as the most popular and most vital sports code. They made use of the common belief that we love the sports Australian teams are good at. We love winners and Socceroos were winning. The sponsors jumped on the opportunity for national celebration and soccer suddenly turned into mainstream – into our sport! Business as usual…
Our women’s soccer team, Matildas, obviously didn’t make any significant progress. Otherwise we would have known about their success or even failure without doing any specific research. But nothing was reported in the major media outlets. When there are reports on our Matildas, they are only ever found on specialised women’s websites or women’s sport sites. In his book, Globalisation and Sport: Playing the World, Professor David Rowe says that: “Women’s sport generally receives about 2% of Australian media sports coverage, and much of it is stereotypical, trivializing and sexually objectifying.” Even the recent success of our young Matildas (Australian national team under 20 years of age) generated a record of approximately 100 words on The Age online section.
While that’s an encouraging and a significant step in developing and establishing women’s soccer, it is far from satisfying. Our Matildas have yet to position themselves as a lucrative business opportunity. They still need to attract crucial sponsors who will pledge money to raise their profile.
So the circle closes. For a sport to be successful it must be heavily promoted and it must generate constant media coverage. And to have all that, sport must be attractive to sponsors. They are the ones who in turn secure media coverage, public interest and increased sport following.
Sport is business. As such, it provides opportunities for individual athletes, sports organizations, media and sponsors. In this highly competitive environment, the success of
sport is measured by the number of sponsors it attracts.
As we witness an enormous expansion of the sport industry, it can only be said that women are not represented in the media, not because we don’t like to watch them, as Greg Baum asserts so loudly, but because mega sponsors haven’t found a way of exploiting them.
By Gorana Masic
Sources: UWS research; Sage online; the Age
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