John Meyer (john_meyer@geocities.com)
Fri, 22 Jan 1999 14:44:50
At 06:42 PM 1/21/99 EST, you wrote:
>Thanks for the advice. Some of us moms really need to know how best to
>''appeal'' to journalists so that they can take pitty on us and begin giving
women/girls what they rightfully deserve...do fathers ever have to go begging so
that journalists can cover their sons events???? No thanks.
>The loss is to the media and the general public as much as it may be to our
daughters. it is NOt a question of First Amendments here, is a matter of sexism
at is best ...as always!!!!!!
Okay, where in the First Amendment does it say that anybody "deserves"
coverage in the media? I don't care who you are, if you come to me as a
parent and "demand" that my paper starts covering your kid's games, I'm
going to tell you where to stick it, pure and simple. The fact is, Title
IX advocates who want to force the media (and that includes _all_ media,
print, broadcast, electronic) to give equal time come up against a barrier:
the U.S. Constitution. You try to fight that battle in front of the
Supreme Court, and I don't think you're going to get far.
Trying to get the media interested in your particular sport is a bit tricky
if its not a major player. It's not begging; begging never works. It sure
isn't _demanding_ equal coverage. It's making your sport appealing to an
interested journalist or journalists that want a good story. Try to look
at it from the journalist's view: that journalist has all sorts of people
that want the journalist to write a story about that person's
sport/hobby/thing.
A journalist can and often is assigned a story, so you
can appeal to editors, but you still have the problem of what makes an
interesting story, not what makes equality. If, for instance, you have a
female soccer player whose mom was a soccer player and whose grandmother
was also a soccer player, that's intersting. If you have a basketball team
where three starters speak one language and two starters speak another,
that's another great angle. This is all from the feature standpoint; news,
well, to be blunt, winning helps.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Mon Jan 25 1999 - 10:06:16 EST