Women speak up on sports

The new CBS Sports show 'We Need to Talk' has a rotating cast of 12 women panelists and women working as producers and directors for the show. 'All the uproar with the NFL and the Ray Rice situation and the Adrian Peterson situation, I’d hear men on talk radio saying, ‘I talked to my wife about this,'" coordinating producer Emilie Deutsch said.

|
Courtesy of ©2014RichardMitchell/CBS
'We Need to Talk' is a new CBS sports show with an all-female cast.

Sexual-assault scandals, child-abuse charges, and hazing have all made national headlines in recent weeks as football teams and players from high school to the National Football League face controversy. In sports as in politics, too often such debates lack female perspective.

Timing, in the case of most sports incidents, is everything. CBS Sports Network launched a new talk show, “We Need to Talk,” on Sept. 30. Every Tuesday at 10 p.m. ET, the hour-long show features panel discussions, interviews with newsmakers, and many of the standard features of sports news and debate shows. The major twist? An all-female rotating cast of 12 panelists, plus women calling the shots as producers and directors.

“We’ve been talking about doing a women’s show for a long time,” says Emilie Deutsch, coordinating producer. “All the uproar with the NFL and the Ray Rice situation and the Adrian Peterson situation, I’d hear men on talk radio saying, ‘I talked to my wife about this....’ ”

Typically, women break through to the NFL, National Basketball Association, and other male sports leagues as sideline reporters with limited airtime. When women figure prominently into sports on TV, it’s usually in regard to women’s golf and tennis, ice skating, and other Olympic sports.

“We Need to Talk” instead takes aim at the most popular teams and leagues. CBS turned to pedigreed TV reporters and former athletes. Among them: former Oakland Raiders chief executive Amy Trask; Lesley Visser, a sports journalism pioneer and the only woman in the Pro Football Hall of Fame; retired boxer Laila Ali; the NFL Network’s Andrea Kremer; and Olympic swimmer Summer Sanders.

The first episode included a spontaneous discussion during which several panelists, including former Olympic swimmer Dara Torres, disclosed they had been victims of verbal or physical abuse in past relationships.

“The response [from viewers] made me glad I said something,” says Ms. Torres. “A lot of times, people are embarrassed to talk about it.”  The emergence of women as serious sports commentators is long overdue, she adds. “I love talking sports. I grew up with four older brothers.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Women speak up on sports
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/TV/2014/1104/Women-speak-up-on-sports
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe