| By
Gary Gilson
Wonderful
and extraordinary things happened at the News Council’s public
forum on media coverage of the political issues involving women’s
athletics at the University of Minnesota.
The
forum, at the end of the last academic year, was broadcast in early
January on Twin Cities Public Television as a one-hour Newsworthy
special.
The
discussion contained real news, which the media have yet to pursue.
The
forum followed closely the University’s elimination of its
separate department of women’s athletics and the end of Chris
Voelz’s tenure as women’s athletic director. She attended,
with many members of the advisory council on women’s athletics
at the U. They, like many advocacy groups before them, had asked
the News Council to arrange a public get-together with the news
and sports media.
The
first wonderful thing that happened was that almost every Twin Cities
news outlet was represented.
The
second was that, without being defensive, they generally acknowledged
that they had failed to scrutinize the University’s rationale
for eliminating the women’s department: to absorb it into the
men’s as a way to save money in extremely hard times.
The
third was that members of the public asked very savvy questions,
such as "Where was the skepticism the media are so noted for?"
Reporters
said they just took the U’s word for it and never checked the
financial numbers. The advisory council had a consultant whose analysis
contended that the merger would not save money. She asked why the
media didn’t report that after she and her colleagues held
a news conference.
The
fourth wonderful thing was the honest way in which Don Shelby, the
WCCO anchor and News Council member, carefully explained why reporters
toss aside such analyses when they are handed out at a news conference.
Shelby
said no reporter wants to spend hours going through materials that
every other reporter gets at the same time, because there’s
no payoff in the form of an exclusive. He advised people who have
a story to tell to cultivate a reporter with an offer of an exclusive
so that the many hours of preparation the reporter needs will be
justifiable to his or her newsroom.
The
extraordinary things at the forum included all of the above, but
most of all the amount of truth-telling that went on. More truth
in an hour or so, I would say, than you’d learn in a year’s
worth of print or broadcast coverage of the power games that went
on at the U over these issues.
A
former Pioneer Press sportswriter, Gary Olson, said he’d delivered
documents to both his old paper and the Star Tribune detailing cost
overruns by the men’s athletic department of a million dollars
a year for the past two years, but neither paper, he said, had pursued
the lead. The sports editors of both papers stood up and said they
would definitely look into the matter, but through the end of 2002
not a word about it had appeared anywhere in the media.
The
targets of most of the criticism by the advisory council members
— the sports columnists Patrick Reusse, Dan Barreiro and Sid
Hartman — did not attend the forum. Their editor, Glen Crevier,
said he’d like to hire another columnist who would disagree
with their negativity toward Voelz and the women’s department,
but he didn’t have the $150,000 he said it would take.
Shelby
said that although the merger was now history and nothing could
be done about it, there still is an important story to be told,
but not on a nightly newscast: the story is too big for that, he
said; the story is worthy of an article in The New Yorker.
What
is the big story?
The
future of women’s athletics across the country, in the face
of hostility not only from sportswriters but from the national football
coaches association, now lobbying Congress to drop the requirements
that Title IX imposes for parity between men and women in college
sports.
Shelby
said he, too, used to feel that way toward girls’ and women’s
sports. But that all changed, he said, when he became the father
of three daughters, all of whom became athletes.
Another
wonderful thing happened when a member of the public stood up and
congratulated the media for significant improvements in reporting
on women’s sports, as opposed to the politics around them.
And
another when Jane Helmke, a KARE-11 news manager, acknowledged the
compliment but said the media still had room for a lot more improvement.
She said she tried very hard to get her station to cover the University
merger story, but no one cared.
Toward
the end of the forum Voelz said she was breaking her 14-year silence
about the relationship she saw between coaches of men’s teams
at the U and the Star Tribune’s Hartman. She said they used
Hartman to maintain their power.
When
the women’s basketball coach at Southwest Missouri State became
the front runner for the opening at the U last spring, Hartman reported
that a former men’s coach there had bad-mouthed her to Gophers
men’s coach Dan Monson, who told Hartman about it. The woman
withdrew her candidacy.
Voelz
said she had no problem with columnists expressing opinions, but
she challenged the Star Tribune to ask other men’s coaches
at the Missouri school how they got along with their female colleague.
Voelz said the paper would discover that those men did not share
the resentment toward her that her critic expressed, and that her
critic couldn’t stand the fact that the women’s team outdrew
his.
In
the end, the women’s advisory council wanted the media to keep
an eye on the athletic department at the U, to see whether it was
honoring the letter and the spirit of Title IX.
In
the meantime, the women said, they’d keep an eye on the media.
My
conclusion: both the media and the public at that forum gave and
got good tips. The dialogue proved that good things can come of
the public’s assertiveness in asking tough questions, the media’s
non-defensiveness in answering them, and mutual respect throughout.
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