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I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: Coverage of Women in Sports: By Jane Gottesman "When I was growing up," says Tara VanDerveer, "the only female athlete I remember reading about was Billie Jean King, but I kind of always felt that there would be something more, eventually, for women." VanDerveer, 41, has been a basketball coach at Stanford for 10 years (winning two national championships), and before that she was at Ohio State. She coached the United States national team to a gold medal this summer at the Goodwill Games in St. Petersburg, Russia, and many expect her to be selected to coach at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. In the Game, an hour-long documentary about women's athletics that focused on VanDerveer's Stanford basketball team, aired on PBS's Frontline in March, about the same time that figure skater Tonya Harding emerged as 1994's most visible female athlete. Exactly why the best and brightest women athletes are relegated to media obscurity (while Harding commanded a full-fledged media circus) may be better explained by "sociologists and psychologists," suggests VanDerveer. But there is obvious irony in her voice. She follows up by saying that the reason the media keep women's sports out of the news is because when the "old guard" sees women running free on the playing fields, they bristle at the fact that women aren't "barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen." Q: With more women playing sports than ever before, why do you think they aren't covered? A: People in the media say to me, "We don't have the space, we don't have the resources," but those explanations just sound like excuses to me. People who make decisions about sports coverage simply want to hold on tightly to the status quo. People in charge at newspapers, television stations, at magazines, for the most part didn't grow up playing sports with females, or playing against them, or cheering for them. The only view of women they have in relation to sports is as cheerleaders. To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1264 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

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