Subjects and objects in media coverage

Everyone should read Jessica Luther’s argument for de-centering the athlete in coverage of campus sexual assaults committed by members of various sports teams. She rightly points out that when media place athletes who commit sexual assault at the center of narratives – rather than survivors, the idea of consent or institutional responsibilities – those stories are telling us to worry about who is going to play Saturday above all else. Serious crimes with terrible consequences are reduced to obstacles to be overcome or distractions from getting on with the serious business of winning.

What Luther describes in the context of sexual assault can be extended to the role of media in reproducing all manner of social inequality. Work in media sociology has illustrated the ways that professional practices and news routines tend to reinforce and extend power dynamics. Gaye Tuchman’s classic Making News describes the ways news organizations deploy resources to areas of a community where they believe news is likely to occur. In doing so, news organizations are making judgments about what matters within a community. We have cops and politics and sports reporters because that’s where journalists and editors and publishers and have decided is where news happens. This elevates them.

I view this process as the construction of subjects and objects. Subjects in media representations have power. Their perspectives are fully explored and their definitions of situations tend to become the dominant frames through which issues are discussed. Police have incredible definitional power. So do politicians and football coaches. Objects are acted upon. They are defined entirely by their relationship to a subject. This is not say that subjects get treated well in the media all the time. But they get to be full-fledged individuals whose motives and actions reporters fully reflect in coverage. In the long term, that is an advantageous position.

Jameis Winston is a subject. He won a Heisman Trophy and a National Championship as Florida State’s quarterback. He will be the central figure in multiple four-hour national television broadcasts on network television (not even the President gets that type of exposure). The woman who reported Winston raped her is not a subject in the normal course of media work. We don’t really know who she is, which means all sorts of motivations and personality traits can be attributed to her. In contrast, look at how Walt Bogdonovich covered a sexual assault investigation at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York. The piece generally is told from the point of view of the woman who brought the charges. Football is present, but secondary. Of course, most people don’t have a pre-existing relationship with the Hobart Statesmen or its players, although similarly strong reporting has been done at Florida State.

Yet the ways media cover sexual assault make perpetrators in the subjects and survivors the objects. It is obvious that a rape charge is going to look different to the accuser and the accused. Yet if we have a pre-existing, though parasocial, relationship with the accused person, and are hearing only from the accused person’s lawyer and coach during the investigation, and ultimately want to watch the accused person play sports, that is going to have an effect on how we view specific cases and sexual assault in general. Demanding that victims of sexual assault become public figures is unreasonable. The already high personal costs of reporting sexual assault are compounded by fame and provincial sports allegiances.

The challenge for sports journalism to take up these questions in ways that keep the playing field level. Luther points to the new CBS Sports Network show We Need to Talk, in which discussion of this issue included members of the all-woman panel discussing their own experiences with abuse. That’s certainly one way.  I don’t have a good prescription for others, but this is a discussion worth having.

That discussion should start with an understanding that sports journalists should never treat serious social issues as incursions on the fun and games. Sports are part of a society, not distinct from them. Issues are part of the entire package. Efforts to keep them separate are efforts to avoid hard topics. The routines of sports journalism are built around access and promotion. This is not necessarily problematic. We have decided a society that organized sports are important, which makes games and the people who play them meaningful topics for journalism. But sports journalists should approach their work with what David Rowe calls a problem orientation, a willingness to point out racism and sexism when it intersects with the playing field.

Games are fun, but there are other subjects to write about.

Men’s Health and the masculinization of data

A consistent punchline for the circles I tweet in is a terrible piece of clickbait from Men’s Health, since taken down, teaching men how to talk to women about sports. The magazine’s advice was to ignore statistics and tell women about the human stories, because women only care about emotions.

The premise is ridiculous. I want to stop, however, and look at the offhand divide the piece sets up, one in which data is masculine and story is feminine. Guess which one is valorized in this era of big data?

Achieving truth untainted by emotion is an Enlightenment value. Data feels like a really great way of doing this, and, in fact, using observational methods rather than logic to test propositions has been a really important advance. Sports have been a fruitful area for data-minded folks, and that approach has adopted by journalism at large. At the same time, judgments about rationality can be wielded as a weapon. Describing a person or a set of people as overly emotional, unable to grasp data, or unwilling to listen to reason is a really good way to marginalize them. It’s on the first page of the playbook for sexism, racism, ableism, and any other –ism you can name.

But the other thing it does is reinforce the idea that this masculine data is independent of storytelling in some way. This is also nonsense. Sports fandom is neither natural to men nor based in any way on objectivity. Sports are emotional and emotion is important.  It is entirely bound up in story, both those of the people who play the games mediated through the press, and in the way fans understand the experience of watching with each other.

When the TV crew flashes a batter’s hitting statistics on the screen, it is giving us a backstory of the person at the plate. Those numbers extend the drama. It’s not just team vs. team, batter vs. pitcher, but also batter vs. his own limits or his own past.

When the broadcaster says “Jones is hitting just .134 this season,” that is not simply stating Jones’ batting average, a factual datapoint. Rather the broadcaster is saying that Jones is bad at hitting, that it is unlikely he will get on base, that failure is imminent, that if anything good happens it will require a certain amount of serendipity. That is a story, just as surely as when the sideline reporter tells us about Jones’ daughter and her battle with cancer.

And the data being presented, the batting average, is more argument than truth. Batting average is a specific discourse about what makes for a good baseball player, but the basis for the statistic is that the guy back in the 1860s who thought it might be a good idea to keep data on baseball games valued base hits because they corresponded best with cricket skill. People who care about this use other metrics, like the rate a player makes it to first base, or the number of bases they get per hit. That doesn’t make batting average wrong. But it means our so-called objective descriptions of skill are actually a subjective story about baseball and personal achievement. These are culturally determined and not particularly objective.

A three-paragraph throwaway article in Men’s Health relies on a large degree of cultural agreement. An expression of common sense sexism is a reflection of those currents embedded in a society. The stakes are low when we talk about it in the context of sports. But gendering it there lets us get comfortable with that idea in other contexts, ones that block women from management roles and treat their absence in data fields as natural rather than the result of structural sexism. That’s why this matters.