NBC: World's best girls give it their all in the women's downhill

As Julia Mancuso whipped around the gates during the women’s downhill at the Vancouver Olympics, the NBC announcers noted the icy and difficult conditions. “She likes a course that is rough and bumpy,” said analyst Christin Cooper. “She says that it eliminates some of the advantage of the larger girls that have more mass that can kind of go like freight trains down a smooth course.”
Later, Cooper said during Elisabeth Goergl’s bronze-medal run, “These girls have got to really nail it aggressively all the way down the course.”
In fact, Cooper repeatedly referred to the women’s skiers as girls, something that also appeared on NBC’s liveblog of the event, which noted that “it's scary to see these girls go down at such speeds.”
Calling the women’s skiers girls trivializes and delegitimizes women’s sports participation in two ways.
First, each instance in which the skiers were labeled as “girls” came at a time when the related description violated gender norms in some way. For example, femininity is at odds with the notion of a “big” female moving like a “freight train.” In the same way, aggression is culturally marked as masculine, and attacking a mountain at break-neck speed is hardly a traditional feminine quality. Calling the skiers girls in a context where they are being described in terms that often reference masculinity neutralizes that apparent oxymoron – and ultimately preserves a more traditional representation of gender.
Second, “girls” playing sports don’t violate gender norms in the way that “women” playing sports do. When you are a “girl,” it’s okay to engage in trivial and fun pursuits like sports; women, on the other hand, are expected to perform traditional forms of femininity, which is at odds with the masculine notions of competition and sports.
This logic also adds another level of explanation to Deford's question about the lack of attention given to the UConn women's basketball team. The undefeated Huskies do not enjoy the fan adoration Lindsay Vonn receives, which Marie Hardin notes is largely because Vonn participates in a sport that doesn't challenge gender norms in the way that contact sports like basketball do (see below).
Still, the Huskies have a much stronger following than any WNBA team -- after all, they're still college "girls," which makes their violation of gender norms in a contact sport less egregious than the professional women.
--Erin Whiteside

"Synergy 1, Journalism 0"

Steve Silafer's "On Watch" column in a recent Sports Business Journal argues that the traditionally cozy relationship between journalists and sports properties crossed the line in the over-the-top coverage provided to CBS Scene, co-owned by the Patriots, by a CBS affiliate in Boston. Silafer argues that in shilling for the restaurant, WBZ-TV jeopardized its ability to cover the Pats "objectively."
Although I appreciate Silafer's column, and I agree that with his concern, I'm afraid that his complaint about the "synergy" between journalists and sports teams that could compromise reporting is too little, too late. These kinds of relationships are part of the reason that sports journalism has traditionally been seen as the "toybox" and has not had a strong record of investigative, public-service reporting. There are many more points on the board for "synergy" than Silafer gives it -- and that won't change until the public demands it does.

Dropping sports coverage: The answer to declining viewership of local newscasts?

No, argues UNC professor Charlie Tuggle, in the latest edition of Electronic News.
Tuggle says the trend toward scaling back or getting rid of sports segments is misguided. The problem is in how they present sports, which he calls "banal." He accuses too many local sportscasters of being "ESPN wannabes," chasing national stories when they should instead focus on local athletes.
While I think Tuggle is right about the lack of priorities for in local sportscasting, the problem for local newscasts may be much bigger than their sports segments, making the question of how to improve those segments a very low priority for news directors.