On June 24, the Indiana Fever and Phoenix Mercury met for the second time in three days. Both games fed Fox News’ WNBA content machine.
During the Fever’s win on June 22, tensions flared, resulting in one chaotic scrum, one ejection, one Sophie Cunningham meme, and five technical fouls.
During the Mercury’s win on June 24, Phoenix All-Star forward Alyssa Thomas’ fist made contact with Fever All-Star guard Caitlin Clark’s throat. The WNBA retroactively levied a one-game suspension against Thomas for “recklessly making contact with her fist to the throat area” of Clark.
Thomas later disclosed that she and her teammates received death threats and racial slurs. Fever head coach Stephanie White and Clark condemned the vitriolic aftermath, as did several other WNBA figures. Instead of heeding that directive, however, Fox News used the Fever and Mercury’s two-game set as a launching pad into a summer of antagonistic WNBA coverage.
Media Matters for America has published a report showing that Fox News has “devoted at least 13 hours and 34 minutes,” including at least 206 segments, to WNBA programming since June 25.
Up until Cunningham’s comments about barring transgender athletes from women’s sports for an ESPN profile published July 21, Fox News almost exclusively discussed “hard fouls” in the WNBA. But from July 21 through Aug. 11, the network’s segments have been disproportionately dedicated to anti-trans rhetoric with the WNBA as the backdrop.
Fox News’ WNBA segments have sprawled across The Five, The Ingraham Angle, Hannity, and Gutfeld!. But while Laura Ingraham, who apparently has granted selective immunity from her 2018 “shut up and dribble” mandate, seems enthusiastic to diagram hard fouls, not every Fox News host is a willing participant in this peculiar pivot.
“This is week three of The Five covering the WNBA, and I have to say, I’m done,” Jesse Watters said on The Five on Aug. 3. “I hate the WNBA. I don’t mind women’s basketball. My girls play basketball, but I don’t want to cover women’s basketball. I don’t want to be a WNBA analyst. We get paid to have an opinion about everything. And this is something I don’t care about.”
At least Watters said the quiet part out loud.
Earlier this week, Fever head coach Stephanie White delivered a powerful statement in the face of even more scrutiny over how she handled DiJonai Carrington’s Flagrant 2 foul on Cunningham.
“The hate, the fear-mongering, the divisiveness, the stuff that’s trying to hijack our league will not win,” White said, in part. “It won’t win. We are united, we are connected, [and] we will not be divided. Every day, these women put their ass on the line. Every day. When they go low, we go high. Love will win! Grace will win! Humility will win! And kindness will win! I stand by them. I will always stand by them. Everybody else can go to hell.”
Will conservative media listen and leave the league alone? History, and the fact that their coverage has never been rooted in WNBA reality, suggests otherwise. Even if there isn’t any controversy to mine, the Fox News powers that be will find one. They already have in Enes Kanter and Royce White’s disingenuous antics.
About Megan Armstrong
Since first getting published as a student by the Kansas City Star in 2013, Megan Armstrong has gone wherever curiosity and stories have taken her, specializing in sports, media, music, and culture coverage. She also has an extensive background in interviewing and profiling public figures. Her work has appeared in Billboard, Boardroom, Bleacher Report, Esquire, GQ, GRAMMY.com, NYLON, Newsweek, Teen Vogue, The Hollywood Reporter, UPROXX, and elsewhere.