Women’s Sports Struggles for Media Attention

Few would argue that women’s sports struggles for media attention. In Australia, newspapers deliver a far greater reportage on men’s sports, and when female athletes are reported on, they are often treated in an ignorant way. News stories are usually written in an exaggerated style and focus more on personal matters rather than the actual sporting performance of the female athlete. In this era of equality and open-minded attitudes, how can this be? Tonight, Media Watch reports on this issue as we examine Australian media’s representation of all-rounder, Ellyse Perry. The media’s role in society is to deliver bias-free information to people. Thus, journalists should aim to be as impartial as possible, to deliver precise information. Nonetheless this is being overlooked by many journalists and on Media Watch, we can disclose that Perry has been represented unfairly in the media and undeniably some of the stories breach the Australian Journalistic Association Code of Ethics (AJACE).

The first article was published in the Sunday telegraph on November 16, 2013 by Phil Rothfield. It highlights Perry’s physical performance in not just a soccer game, but also her personal life. The headline states that “Ellyse Perry was kicked and punched while playing soccer and told she was too soft to play sport”. Perry is represented as “too soft” and a “glamour” girl, which suggests that she has acquired the status of not being sportswoman but a model. The audience is positioned to unconsciously agree with such proposition even before reading the rest of the article. The opening paragraph further strengthens this view of Perry as “Australia’s most marketable sportswoman”. This convinces the reader to admire Perry because of her appearance instead of...

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...ltau’s article conforms more closely to the AJACE rather than Rothfield’s article.

The media is in a very powerful position to set the agenda for discussion about sport. In this case of Ellyse Perry, the Australian media does not always take Perry’s sporting accomplishments seriously. The Australian media have chosen to portray Perry as either nothing more than a “too soft glamour” girl or to represent her as an “all-round” respectable woman whose success is as much attributable to her personality as it is to her sporting performance. In future, it would be desirable to have more news reports similar to the second article by the Sydney Morning Herald, as that newspaper report was unbiased, fair and had an authentic representation of Ellyse Perry which was based underlying the standards of the AJACE. Overall, a plausible portrayal of females, who are Perry good…