It would be easy to blame media focus on stories like the Casey Anthony murder trial, the UK phone-hacking scandal, or even the political bickering over America’s debt ceiling for the relative lack of coverage of this year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup in Germany. This quadrennial soccer tournament has actually been playing out over the past few weeks.
Truth be told, however, it did not take competition from sensational news stories for the media to ignore this event. After all, the media almost always give women’s sports short shrift. And since soccer is among the least popular of all professional sports in America, it gets virtually no coverage at all.
For example, basketball is easily the most popular women’s sport, but the WNBA playoffs get only a fraction of the coverage that is routinely lavished on the NBA playoffs. More to the point, though, what little coverage soccer gets mostly goes to men’s matches – which relatively generous media coverage of last year’s FIFA Men’s World Cup in South Africa demonstrated.
That said, international sports competition incites so much jingoism that the media would lavish coverage on a women’s Curling team if it were about to win a World or Olympic championship. No doubt this is why women’s soccer is suddenly getting the most coverage it has had since the U.S. women’s team won the World Cup in 1999.
For, even though this year’s team won a number of thrilling matches in the early rounds, the media – led, interestingly enough, by the women of The View – did not begin significant coverage until after the women defeated perennial powerhouse Brazil in the quarterfinals, which was highlighted by a dramatic penalty shootout.
Now, after defeating France (3-1) in seemingly invincible fashion on Wednesday, the media are heaping praise upon them and stoking grand expectations for a national victory on Sunday when the U.S. plays Japan for the World Cup championship. Japan advanced after defeating Sweden (3-1) in equally invincible fashion also on Wednesday.
Of course, if they lose, this same fickle media will be instrumental in deeming team USA a national failure. Even so, my underdog sentimentality is such that I’ll be pulling for Japan; not least because, after this year’s earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown, the Japanese can really do with a good shot of national pride.
Go Japan!
Related commentaries:
Men’s World Cup South Africa
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