Jemele Hill dismissed calls to add men to WNBA broadcasts as “deeply unserious,” arguing that the sports media industry is overrun by “White men.”
Earlier this week, NBA reporter Ric Bucher pointed to the lack of diversity on WNBA studio shows, which are staffed predominantly by Black women. Bucher suggested networks like ESPN and NBC add a male voice to the conversation.
Hill responded to Bucher’s post by citing what she called the “latest stats.”
“— 83 percent of sports editors are white men — 75 percent of assistant sports editors are white men — 82 percent of columnists are white men — 67 percent of sports anchors are white men — 68 percent of sports analysts are white men — 65 percent of sports producers are white men.
C’mon, Ric. This is deeply unserious.”
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As OutKick argued on Monday, Bucher is correct that mainstream WNBA programming lacks diversity. However, it’s the lack of diversity in worldview that is consequential.
WNBA programming doesn’t necessarily need someone of a particular gender or race to improve the discourse. It needs someone willing to represent the other side of the conversation, someone to challenge claims that Caitlin Clark is overrated, that “white privilege” is rampant, that Black women in the WNBA are victims, that Sophie Cunningham is a culture warrior and that trans women are women.
The public doesn’t care whether that counterargument comes from a man or a woman, or a Black or white commentator. It just wants someone willing to challenge the groupthink.
That said, it wasn’t Bucher’s argument that was “unserious.” It was Hill’s rebuttal.
Her statistics appear to trace back to a 2018 study called the “Associated Press Sports Editors Racial and Gender Report Card,” published by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. Using that study to characterize who holds the most influential jobs in sports media is grossly misleading.
The report lumps vastly different jobs into the same broad picture. An entry-level anchor working weekends at a local station is given the same weight as a lead anchor for NBC, ESPN, CBS, or Fox. And that’s before considering questions about the study’s sample size and methodology.
For example, perhaps there are three white male anchors in Traverse City, Michigan, making $50,000 a year. (This is hypothetical. Don’t protest outside their studios.) In a vacuum, that might suggest favoritism toward white men, or it may simply reflect the gender and racial makeup of sports broadcasters in the area.
Either way, consider the most prominent anchor jobs in sports media, starting with the most prestigious hosting assignment in American sports: the Super Bowl.
A white man has not been the lead host of a Super Bowl pregame or halftime show since, wait for it, 2018. That was Dan Patrick’s final year in the role for NBC.
Since then, the Super Bowl has been hosted by NBC’s Mike Tirico and Maria Taylor, Fox’s Curt Menefee and CBS’s James Brown.
ESPN could buck that trend when it broadcasts its first Super Bowl this season, with either Scott Van Pelt or Mike Greenberg as host.
Nonetheless, as things currently stand, three of the four networks with Super Bowl rights have Black hosts.
There are now industry rumblings that Netflix will join the Super Bowl rotation in 2029. The streamer recently announced Elle Duncan as its lead anchor. Duncan is a Black woman.
NBA hosting assignments are the second most prominent in the industry. There are four NBA pregame hosts across the league’s three partners. Three are Black women: Maria Taylor (NBC), Malika Andrews (ESPN) and Taylor Rooks (Amazon). The other is Ernie Johnson (ESPN), a white man.
Damn you, Ernie Johnson.
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Hill also complained that there are too many white male analysts. Again, maybe during the Saturday wrap-up in Iowa. Likewise, many of the top analyst jobs are held by Black former NFL and NBA players.
Inside the NBA,” the most prominent studio show in basketball, sure isn’t forcing white men down the throats of hoop fans with a cast of Charles Barkley, Shaq and Kenny Smith.
NHL and MLB coverage tends to feature more white or Latino personalities.
Positions like assistant sports editor and columnist are harder to assess. Still, there is a larger dynamic Hill’s statistics don’t capture. As television networks increasingly prioritized DEI since 2017, many white men remained behind the camera while their counterparts of color were given opportunities in front of it.
Put simply, sports media is a strange industry for Hill to cite as Exhibit A for white male privilege.
Consider some of the commentators handpicked and prioritized by networks over the past decade: Maria Taylor, Elle Duncan, Mina Kimes, Bomani Jones, Taylor Rooks, Ryan Clark, Joy Taylor, Emmanuel Acho, Sarah Spain, David Dennis, Monica McNutt, Malika Andrews, Katie Nolan and Dianna Russini.
Of that group, Andrews and Kimes are the two who emerged as lasting centerpiece personalities at ESPN.
Sure, ESPN is now building around the likes of Pat McAfee, Josh Pate, Taylor Lewan and Will Compton. Yet there’s an important distinction: ESPN didn’t build them. They built themselves.
Each developed an audience and established a brand outside the traditional sports media pipeline. Only after they proved they could attract audiences independently did major networks come calling. Networks like ESPN also needed that star power, given the failure rate of the personalities they had hoped to turn into stars.
Ultimately, anyone can mix and match statistics to support any preferred narrative. That’s what Jemele Hill did, in an effort to pretend white men have a distinct advantage across sports media.
The positive is that sports fans are less concerned with the race or gender of the people on television than with the perspectives they bring to the discussion. The average American is not nearly as focused on the skin colors of the people they see as members of the media are.
If the four Black women on ESPN’s WNBA studio show offered genuinely diverse viewpoints, this discussion wouldn’t be necessary.
In fact, if sports media stopped fixating on manufactured crises regarding race, the worldviews of said commentators wouldn’t matter nearly as much.
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It shouldn’t be this hard to find entertaining, likeable people to talk about sports and stick to sports, regardless of their race and gender
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