Female Olympians Sidetracked From Prime Time TV -
When it comes to gender-neutral coverage, NBC’s prime-time Olympics telecast is no medalist.
That’s the conclusion of two newly published studies looking at the American television network’s prime-time coverage of the most recent summer and winter Olympics.
One reported female athletes were marginalized during the 2010 winter Olympics, receiving only 37.8 percent of prime-time coverage. The other found they did significantly better during the 2008 summer Olympics, receiving 46.3 percent of air time during the broadcast network’s evening programming.
However, that figure was down from 47.9 percent in 2004. Furthermore, nearly all of the coverage was confined to a few specific sports the researchers term “socially acceptable,” including swimming and gymnastics.
“Even today, it seems that women are accepted as athletes only if they continue to look and act as women are expected to look and act,” write Kelly Davis and C.A. Tuggle of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who co-authored the study of the 2008 coverage.
Davis and Tuggle report women made up 48 percent of the U.S. team in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and earned 48 percent of the nation’s 110 medals—precisely the same number as the American men. (Mixed-gender teams won another four.) “Nevertheless, males received more airtime, especially in individual events,” they write.