Female sportscasters, sports columnists and anchors flexed some muscle this week, and deserve praise for keeping the Ray Rice abuse story alive, driving public opinion and pressuring authorities to enact a punishment.
The and blew up on the Internet, sparking public outrage particularly after the NFL gave Rice a slap-on-the-wrist two-game suspension.
The stomach-turning video made a mockery of the league’s inaction.
Were it not for Christine Brennan of USA Today, Jemele Hill on ESPN’s Numbers Never Lie, Brooke Baldwin of CNN and other prominent female reporters, the incident might have been buried like too many others in the past.
Brennan wrote Monday: “…now that we’ve actually seen the video, seen the punch, seen how quickly Janay Palmer dropped, and how long she was out, it’s as if this terrible act of domestic violence happened all over again. That is exactly how NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell should treat it, as something new. Then, based on the new domestic violence policy he announced less than two weeks ago, he should suspend Rice for four more games, for a total suspension of the new league standard of six games. Goodell also should leave himself the option of declaring Rice suspended for the entire season should new details come to light.”
After further demanding that Rice be cut, ESPN’s Hill was deluged with negative responses. She tweeted, “I’ve had to block more people today than any other time on Twitter. If I were Homeland Security, the ignorance level would be orange.” What did the NFL know and when did they know it? Hill speaks for many when she says “someone is lying.”
On CNN Monday, Baldwin asked fellow panelists, “Can we all just agree, A, it’s horrendous and horrible and disgusting and fill-in-the-blank adjective, and kudos to the Ravens for terminating him.”
But Rachel Nichols, host of CNN’s “Unguarded,” shot back, ” I’m not going to start throwing applause to any organization that took this long and took an outside organization like TMZ to collect the video to terminate him now….If TMZ could obtain the video, the video is obtainable. There’s no excuse… The fact that they didn’t do that when they had that at their disposal as well tells me I don’t know how interested they were in getting the truth.”
Legal analyst Lisa Bloom went further: “The NFL has some real explaining to do. Did they have this video in their files when they made a decision to give him a slap on the wrist of just two-game suspension? If so, how could they have done that? Is it now that it’s public and now that they are publicly embarrassed, they are changing their tune, or did they not have it because they did such a lame investigation? NFL, does it take TMZ to do an investigation for you when a woman is punched in the face, knocked out and is unconscious on the ground?”
In the old days, the League was adept at image control, better able to keep a lid on coverage, better able to spin. During the Brett Favre sexting scandal of 2011, the NFL released a terse statement: “We are reviewing the matter,” the League said a day after Sports blog Deadspin posted voicemails and nude pictures of himself that Favre allegedly sent in 2008 to former Jets game-day host and Playboy model Jennifer Sterger. Favre was fined $50,000 for failing to cooperate with the NFL probe, but the league said it could not determine that he violated its conduct policy.
The New York Post quoted Sterger’s lawyer as saying, “An NFL star player was given preferential treatment. [The] decision is an affront to all females and shows once again that, despite tough talk, the NFL remains the good-old-boys league.”)
Remember watching NBC sportscaster Marv Albert’s sex assault trial on Court TV (now CNN) way back in 1997? It was a TV sensation, with all the elements to draw ratings: sex, sports and celebrity. If a video had existed, things might have gone differently — at least more quickly. (After being fired by the network, Albert was rehired two years later.)
Recall sportswriter Lisa Olsen, driven out of the country after being abused by the Patriots. In 1990, while at the Boston Herald, she claimed she had been sexually harassed by New England Patriots football players in the team’s locker room. Olson sued the team, won, and after much foot-dragging, the team’s general manager was fired.
But after continued harrassment from Patriots fans, she accepted the paper’s owner’s offer to transfer to Australia. She won the battle, lost the war.
That would not happen now, at least if videos were involved.
The women of the media, particularly in sports, would not sit by.
Now that social media, security cameras and everywhere/all-the-time video is a reality, nobody has cover-up image control. Not even the NFL.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830, jostrow@denverpost.com or twitter.com/ostrowdp
