http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/sports/football/after-nfl-scandals-female-journalists-find-stronger-voice.html 2014-09-21 22:38:32 After N.F.L. Scandals, Female Journalists Find Stronger Voice Female sports broadcasters driving the Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson stories see this as a potentially watershed moment for their profession. === Last week, the “I spent the week answering seemingly impossible questions about the league’s biggest stars,” she said, her voice starting to crack with emotion. “ ‘Mom: Why did he do that? Why isn’t he in jail? Why didn’t he get fired?’ And yesterday: ‘Why don’t they even have control of their own players?’ ” The commentary, which closed out last Sunday morning’s “SportsCenter,” spread like a brush fire across the web as football fans struggled to reconcile their love of the game with the unflattering portrait of the N.F.L. that had suddenly come into focus with the Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson stories. Storm’s voice is one of a handful that have risen above the saturation coverage of the controversies. Notably, many of the others also belong to women. Rachel Nichols of CNN Female broadcasters have been part of the sports landscape for decades. But they have been cast in relatively passive roles: reading headlines, interviewing players on the sideline and facilitating conversations between male analysts. “Women are almost treated as the pretty face,” Nolan said. “The culture for women right now in sports media is to be attractive and smart enough to form a sentence.” But in the wake of the recent scandals, women have been driving the story, providing a perspective that their male counterparts simply cannot. Female sports broadcasters see this as a potentially watershed moment for their profession, a turning point that could bring them more fully into the conversation. “It’s not an admission of inequality to say that women can have different perspectives,” said Sally Jenkins, a veteran sports columnist at The Washington Post. “We’re not after some idea of total sameness. That’s boring and not revealing.” Those perspectives are suddenly in demand on sports radio and TV. Some female journalists have taken the N.F.L. to task; others have emphasized that domestic violence is not a football problem but a societal one. Some have stay focused on the facts. Others have gotten personal, even emotional. Nichols earned widespread praise for her aggressive questioning of Goodell, questioning among other things his choice of the former F.B.I. director Robert S. Mueller III For her part, Storm said a couple of male producers suggested that she do the essay after hearing her talk about the experience of dealing with the Rice story with her football-crazy daughters. She spent 24 hours honing the two-minute piece and barely slept the night before she delivered it, she said. “It was like jumping off a cliff,” she said. “I had no idea how it would be received.” A number of men have also spoken passionately about the N.F.L. scandals, including Keith Olbermann, who after initially calling for Goodell’s resignation Jane McManus of ESPN said the news media’s focus on domestic violence by N.F.L. players was long overdue. When she joined ESPN New York in 2010, one of the first stories she was assigned to cover was the statutory rape prosecution of the Giants great Lawrence Taylor, who “There was outrage that she would charge him with a crime,” McManus said. “I remember being horrified by that.” McManus has done some of the most aggressive reporting on the Rice case. Over the summer, Since the publication of the video of Rice punching his fiancée, her reporting — and presumably her gender — has given her a much higher profile on ESPN. Her columns for ESPN’s women’s site, espnW, have been front and center on ESPN’s home page, and she’s become a familiar presence on “SportsCenter.” It is the power of the video that has made the Rice story so difficult for the N.F.L. to put behind it, but the cacophony and diversity of voices have also helped keep it alive. As the popularity of football has exploded, so, too, has the number of outlets covering it. And more than any other league, the N.F.L. has actively marketed itself to women. In that sense, it has invited this criticism. “More women are coming at it like, let’s back up a little, and let’s look at the N.F.L. as a whole,” said Jane Coaston, a writer for the website SB Nation who was sharply critical of the league’s initial two-game suspension of Rice. “What are the messages it’s sending about women? How is it responding to criticisms as a whole?” The proliferation of female broadcast voices covering this story is a testament to the progress women have made in a profession that was once a male bastion. Women weren’t guaranteed equal access to professional locker rooms until a 1978 lawsuit. And even after they were allowed inside, they weren’t necessarily welcome. In 1990, Lisa Olson of the Boston Herald Things are much different now, but female sports broadcasters say they are still not full members of the fraternity. In general, their point of view hasn’t been integrated into the mainstream sports conversation. ESPN has a separate site for women’s issues; CBS is starting a show for women that has been described as a sports version of “The View.” In her video on the N.F.L., Nolan, of Fox Sports, said that until this changed — “until women have a seat at the big boy table” — not much else would. “Because,” she added, “the truth is, the N.F.L. will never respect women and their opinions as long as the media it answers to doesn’t.” The question now is whether the current series of scandals will change that — if this really is a watershed moment or just the temporary effect of a news cycle. “This might have been the catalyst for new voices,” Storm said. “But if we are going to provide a really rich and intelligent dialogue about sports, all of those different voices need to stay front and center.”