John Vincent Reading

1. Vincent examines how female athletes are covered compared to male athletes by the media. He mostly seems to focus on how the field of print journalism covers the athletes. He looks at everything involved with a paper and compares a number of different aspects of the paper including; headlines, cover stories, where the articles are located and a few others aspects about where and how female athletes are represented in the papers.
He also mentions explanations for why this happens. According to feminist scholars, female athletes are "marginalized and exploited" when it comes to their interaction with the media. Cultural scholars believe that the media plays an important part in telling their audience what to read and in this case how important female athletics are. Political economy scholars think that the media is just doing what their audience wants, so they can make money and sell their product. Out of the three of these theories I would have to agree with this one the most. I don't believe the media is trying to exclude women from their coverage, or make them less important than male sports, but the consumers are simply more interested in male sports than female sports.

2. According to Vincent's study media coverage of women lacks in comparison with media coverage of men. He mentions that women's sport has grown, yet it only receives about 10% percent of the print coverage. He also mentioned that when women's sport is mentioned, it usually involves socially constructed sex roles and heterosexuality contexts. He also mentioned that athletes competing in "gender appropriate" sports generally receive more coverage than athletes competing in "gender-inappropriate" sports. Finally he mentioned that African American female athletes are generally associated with "race appropriate" sports.

3. I think in a perfect world his recommendations would be perfect. Unfortunately we do not live in a perfect world, so I don't think his recommendations could work in today's world. Fair or not, consumers usually do not care about female athletics. I'm not saying that they need to be completely left out of the sport sections, but I think that the most important thing to the reader should be the biggest story and journalists should spend the most time on that story. That being said, I do think it is important to eliminate the use of heterosexual contexts in stories regarding female athletes. I think that reporters need to take the same type of approach when working on a story about females as they would when working on a story about male athletes.