Since launching their A Touch More podcast this year, women’s sports icons Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird have consistently weighed in on the media’s role in shaping narratives around women athletes.
As high-profile, pioneering stars in their sports, both Rapinoe and Bird have strong opinions about interacting with reporters and the good and bad the media can do for athletes. That has given them a natural entry point to sharp criticism of sports media this WNBA season, which has been shaped by the good and bad of explosive growth thanks in large part to the arrival of rookie Caitlin Clark.
In a conversation on A Touch More on Wednesday, Rapinoe challenged reporters to be more diligent about starting from a foundation of facts rather than using social media chatter to develop a starting point for their coverage. Rapinoe zoomed in specifically on the ongoing drama between Christine Brennan and the WNBA players’ union after the union called out Brennan for bad-faith coverage and many drew attention to her preferential treatment toward Clark while interviewing opponents like DiJonai Carrington of the Connecticut Sun.
“Hopefully people are starting to understand what’s happening (in the WNBA) and the fact that journalists do have choices, and the media has choices in what they choose to cover,” Rapinoe said. “It begs the question of just where are these narratives coming from, and then what’s the responsibility of media.
“If you’re just like, ‘well people are saying that X, Y and Z,’ well who are people? If those people are just a bot farm or you only got it from social media and it’s not actual people, that’s not real. So it’s the journalist’s job to sort of see through all of the talking that’s going on to get to the truth of the matter and get to what’s actually happening.”
“journalists do have choices and the media has choices on what they choose to cover …”
Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe talk a little bit more about WNBA coverage and media responsibility pic.twitter.com/Lzu8Liiv3J
— Lyndsey D’Arcangelo 🏀 (@darcangel21) October 9, 2024
In an interview with iHeartMedia reporter Sarah Spain following the WNBPA callout, Brennan defended the value of her line of questioning toward Carrington under the pretense that it was newsworthy and would interest the USA Today audience.
Rapinoe believes Brennan was falling into the same trap as many this year, who operate under the bad-faith assumption that WNBA players are out to get Clark and that before her arrival the league was floundering — which is not true.
“The ways in which these male journalists or talking heads are constantly using a negative framework or a diminishing framework to talk about women’s sports is very harmful,” Rapinoe said.
While significant chatter about sports and every other topic does now occur on social media, Bird argued that reporters at the very least have to strive to find a balance. If they are going to use social media to generate ideas for their reporting or check the pulse on an issue, they have to be smart enough to filter out the BS.
“For journalists, how do they navigate the social media aspect of their coverage. And that is probably going to be the question that all journalists are going to have to ask themselves,” Bird said. “When it becomes too much social media troll, that’s when these narratives start taking over.”
The WNBA Finals begin this weekend, but it’s clear that everyone around the league is taking a step back to refocus the conversation and weed out the bad actors who broke through so often during Clark’s rookie campaign.
In this case, Rapinoe and Bird offer useful considerations for covering the growing world they spent their professional lives in.
