Minnesota News Council Forum
May 23, 2002

The News Council's public forum on media coverage of the political issues involving women's athletics at the University of Minnesota was broadcast 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.

Almost every Twin Cities news outlet was represented. 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.

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.

Don Shelby, the WCCO anchor and then a 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.

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.

One 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.