Do the media give more attention to beauty or skill in women’s athletics. Dr. Precilla Choi, tells the BBC (Beauty beats brawn that the media spend too much time focusing on the former and not enough of the latter.
Her comments are interesting, but they might carry more weight if she had actually performed any sort of objective study about media coverage of women in sports. Choi complains that the British media vilified tennis star Mary Pierce for beefing up in the gym prior to Wimbledon while giving the beautiful but far less talented Anna Kournikova an easy ride. Unfortunately this is just Choi’s subjective impressions of the coverage she happened to read — she should at least do some sort of objective look at stories on Pierce and Kournikova to back up her claims.
I haven’t done such a study either, but my subjective impression is that in many American sports outlets the tendency is quite the opposite — Kournikova has been derided on a number of occasions for being a mediocre talent who parlays her beauty to get the sort of attention her game otherwise wouldn’t. One male sportscaster I saw ripping on Kournikova has vowed not to say her name on-air until she actually wins something (which means he’s probably never going to have to worry about stumbling over her last name).
In fact a lot of the beauty pageant nonsense comes from either athletes or sports organizers who think that’s what a certain segment of the public wants to see rather than originating with the sports media. Much as there is a definite market for poster and calendars of provocatively posed male athletes (or for an older example, look at the way that Joe Namath marked himself).
Personally, I find this sort of stuff annoying from a sports fan perspective, but the bottom line is that both men and women’s sports today have to appeal to a large audience outside of just sports fans.