The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport has released its 2012 study of minorities and women covering sports at America’s news outlets this week, and unfortunately, its findings haven’t changed much since it released its first study in 2006.

According to the Institute, 90 percent of sports editors are white and an equal percentage are men. As the first chart below shows, whites make up at least 86 percent of all assistant editors, columnists, reporters, and copy editors covering sports too. And as the second chart shows, at least 80 percent of those in each category are men:

The most interesting part of the study, though, is that without the world’s largest sports outlet, the numbers would be far worse. ESPN is the target of constant (often deserved) complaints in the world of sports journalism, but when it comes to diversity, the Worldwide Leader is leading the way, as the Institute’s president Richard Lapchick wrote at Sports Business Daily:

In the new report card, of the 12 people of color who are sports editors at “Circulation A” media outlets (the largest newspapers and dot-coms, with a circulation of 175,000 or more), four work for ESPN, which employed two of the six African-American sports editors and two of the four Latino sports editors. If ESPN’s people of color were removed, the percentage of sports editors in the “A” organizations who are people of color would drop from 15 percent to 11 percent.

Of the 11 women who are sports editors at this circulation level, six work for ESPN. If the ESPN sports editors who are women were removed, then the percentage of female sports editors at this level would drop from 14 percent to 8 percent.

Those numbers translate down the ladder too. Without ESPN, the percentage of columnists of color working at top outlets would drop from 20 percent to just 7 percent. Without ESPN, the percentage of female columnists at top outlets would drop from an already-low 13 percent to just 5 percent.

Indeed, ESPN has a strong diversity hiring policy outlined on its web site and it has won numerous awards for hiring a diverse cast writers, editors, and columnists. It regularly features minority and female hosts, analysts, announcers, and journalists on both its scheduled programming and its live broadcasts. ESPN is proof that there are qualified minority and female reporters and editors out there, and it is also proof that the rest of the sports world needs to do a better job finding them.

But ESPN also has the benefit of being able to cherrypick from the entire sports world, since most of its reporters are already established names before they join the Worldwide Leader, so the idea that this is a problem that begins and ends with the hiring process fails to explain the problem entirely. The problem starts well before hiring and runs far deeper.

As Chip Cosby, a sports reporter and former colleague of mine, explained in September, minorities face obstacles involving access, economics, and history. Many young minorities don’t see journalism as a way into sports, and many are less able to pursue jobs that are pretty low-paying before a reporter climbs the rungs to a top beat or columnist job. Even if they wanted to pursue writing, many don’t see it as a profession that is accessible to them, since they don’t often see minority reporters writing and talking about the sports they follow. Most of those problems also extend to women, who still face stigmas when reporting on sports, especially when they cover men.

Many of those problems are beginning to fade, thanks in large part to ESPN, which has made both minority and female sports reporters covering sports more visible and prominent. But as the latest edition of the Institute study make clear, many of the barriers blocking both minorities and women from entering the world of sportswriting still exist.

During the first episode of CBS’s new police procedural Golden Boy, which premieres tonight at 10 PM, Walter Clark (Theo James) tells a reporter who is interviewing him about his rapid rise from street cop to police commissioner, “Inside me there are two dogs at war. One good and one evil. Now which one wins?” The reporter knows the answer immediately: “The one you feed the most.”

The language might sound a bit stiff. But it’s a great premise for a television show. Many major problems in law enforcement today are the results of gorging the evil dog, from the profits police departments can make from asset forfeiture, the kinds of quotas that were the subject of the third season of The Wire, and an arms race between police departments and criminals that have made it more likely cops will bring military-style force to bear on civilians. Golden Boy, which flashes back and forth between Clark’s arrival in the Homicide department seven years before his appointment as Commissioner and his early days performing his duties in that new post, sets itself up as the story of how Clark acquired the principals that guide him in his post. It could have been a fascinating—and dark—look at how someone acquires the sense of power that allows them to become former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, who is currently in jail for committing conspiracy, mail fraud, and lying to the Internal Revenue Service, or to see how The Wire‘s Ervin Burrell turned into the kind of craven career-hound he was.

But Golden Boy doesn’t have the guts to go there. Instead, the show is the story of Walter Clark’s journey from hotheadednes to sober spouter of aphorisms. Commissioner Clark is the kind of man who says of confidential informants “They’re an important part of the job and they die forgotten…It’s doubtful his associates know he was a snitch. It might bring trouble to the family,” failing to acknowledge the kind of pressure that police departments put on suspects to turn them into confidential informants, and once they’re doing that job, that the incentives can encourage such sources to bring in false information. He is, apparently, the police brass equivalent of television’s bevy of moderate Republicans, a guy who turns his back on the Mayor to meet with victims’ advocates because he’s appalled by the suggestion that he’d “Blow off a victim’s advocate for a guy I don’t like?” As a fantasy of police immunity from political pressure goes, this dream practically comes spangled in My Little Pony-style rainbows and sparkles, it’s so sweet optimistic. And the show seems to exist in a world where there’s no such thing as a bad police shooting like the ones we saw in the Los Angeles Police Department’s hunt for Christopher Dorner—Walter’s shooting of a suspect in the case that made him a hero was good, and as Commissioner, he tells a shaky female cop not only that “Preliminary investigations indicate it was a clean shooting in a difficult situation. In my view, that makes you a hero,” but that she should get all the PTSD treatment she needs before coming back to work.

This is an irritating enough framework. But Golden Boy, despite its innovative framing of police questions, falls into cliches in its execution. Initially, it looks like the show’s use of Chi McBride as Detective Don Owen, Walter’s older partner, is promising. When the two of them first go out on assignment, Walter leaving their office building through a haze of reporters eager to cover him as a tabloid-moving Hero Cop, Walter mistakes Don opening a car door as a courtesy. “Who am I, Morgan Freeman?” Owen asks him. “Open your own damn door.” And when Walter breaks into a suspect’s apartment to try to advance the case against him, Owen tells him that “All this information: useless. If this gets out, this guy is going to walk,” and points out that Walter’s endangered Owen’s prospects for a secure retirement, being careless with the man who is suposed to mentor him in an already-difficult situation. But he quickly devolves into aphorism, revealing himself to be Walter’s union delegate when he’s caught talking to a reporter, an event that apparently has no real effect on their relationship. Owen, it seems, is mostly there to admit minor personal flaws for the sake of drama and to steer Walter in the right direction.

Structurally, the show couldn’t have him reject his protege or really dislike him, but I wish it would at least engage with why someone like Owen couldn’t be police commissioner while Walter can. Is it race? Ambition? Does Walter’s willingness to bend the rules to bring in big collars and more media attention make him a more attractive candidate than someone who wants to do the job with integrity? Golden Boy would be a much more interesting show for posing these questions, and for offering up a different, but more discomfiting, end result.

Because I read everything that Film Crit Hulk writes, I was particularly eager to see his take on the debates about what makes something funny, or not, in the wake of Sunday’s Oscar-related controversies. I was particularly struck by this section, and the question Hulk poses in it, after which he goes on to discuss the creation of comedic personas and the balance of revelation and harm in individual jokes, but that I wanted to take in a different direction:

COMEDY CREATES INHERENT DIVISIONS OF THOSE INSIDE THE JOKE AND THOSE OUTSIDE. AND QUITE FRANKLY, YOUR REACTION LARGELY DEPENDS ON WHETHER YOU RELATE MORE TO THE MAKER OF THE JOKE OR THE VICTIM. OFTEN COMEDY IS CONSIDERED THE MOST PALATABLE BY SOCIETY WHEN IT’S IN THE FORM OF LIGHT RIBBING AND INCLUSIVE LAUGHTER, A COMIC RAKING OF THEMSELVES OVER THE SAME COALS AS YOU OR HULK. BUT ALSO WITH PURPOSE IS THE COMEDY OF SCATHING INDICTMENT, WHETHER DIRECTED AT SOCIAL MORES OR SOCIETY AT LARGE. BUT WHAT RESONATES WITH AN AUDIENCE IS LARGELY DEPENDENT ON THE COMEDIAN’S INTENT.

SO IN A WORLD WHERE WE ARE FREQUENTLY BOTH PERPETRATORS OR VICTIMS OF COMEDY DEPENDING ON THE IDEOLOGY, WHAT UNIVERSAL APTITUDE DO WE HAVE TO TELLS US WHEN A LINE OF COMEDY IS OKAY? HULK KNOWS WE CAN’T DICTATE THE TERMS OF “WHAT” CAN ACTUALLY BE SAID, BUT WHAT MAKES OFFENSE PALATABLE?

One thing I’ve been thinking about a great deal recently is the unique and contradictory ways in which we seem to react to jokes. I think we generally understand that there is not a normative definition of what is frightening and what is not because most of us have been exposed to the lessons of Room 101, the place in George Orwell’s novel 1984, where prisoners are exposed to “the worst thing in the world”—which happens to be different for everybody. When we look at paintings in a museum, no one has a problem with the idea that some of us are going to respond more strongly to Michaelangelo or to Robert Rauschenberg. And internet commenters aside, we tend to recognize that there are a lot of kinds of physical beauty it’s possible to respond to.

But we also recognize that if a movie, television show, or book fails to achieve what the author seems to have intended, including in cases where those pieces of art—be it intentional or unintentional—glorify sexual assault, racism, or violence, we’re allowed to critique its creator without being accused of violating the First Amendment. But criticize a comedian, whether he’s standing on a club stage, soft-shoeing in front of the Dolby Theater audience on Oscar night, or Tweeting from an institutional account, and a different set of rules seem to apply. The act of criticism is taken as proof that the critic speaking lacks critical judgement. We’re told that comedians get a pass because their job isn’t to make people comfortable, but to speak difficult truths—but if that is their privilege, we’re also not allowed to ask questions about whether or not they’re fulfilling that responsibility. Criticisms that suggest that jokes were cliche, ineffective, or fail to live up to the standards that are invoked to argue that comedians deserve special protection get recast as evidence of bias or humorlessness. A perfect example of this is how frequently feminist calls for rape jokes to be constructed precisely and their targets to be chosen with care are recast as evidence that feminists don’t understand comedy. Unlike every other form of pop culture, comedy seems to have a special status. At one stroke, the idea that people are allowed to have multiple opinions is invalidated, and replaced by the idea that there is an objective correct view of any joke—that it’s funny, and the comedian was correct to make it.

This is a rotten state of affairs for any number of reasons. It’s an incorrect and unproductive interpretation of the First Amendment, one that suggests that the right to speak also includes the right to be free from judgement and criticism, a profound distortion of the functioning of the marketplace of ideas. A related problem, as my friend, Salon TV critic Willa Paskin, put it a conversation between us, is the presumption in many of these discussions that it’s a normative good that we shatter all taboos, simply for the sake of shattering them. It’s an attempt to shut down discussion, which is always a sign of intellectual anxiety. And it denies people who are doing comedy a discussion of efficacy and joke construction that could help sharpen their material, which you’d think would be sad for them, or for any artist. Immunity is rarely a helpful state for people who want to grow in any professional capacity. And if we’re going to give a class of people extra credit for calling out societal hypocrisy and harm—an argument defenders of comedians under fire often employ—of course we have an interest in making sure that they’re actually doing that job, not just hiding behind the job description, and doing it well.
Read more

The bridge is yours.

-”Your intentions are not more important than the effect they have.”

-Yes, it’s too early to talk about the 2014 Oscars.

-Connecticut lawmakers are holding a hearing today on whether or not to keep kids away from violent video games in arcades.

-Thank goodness Oscar season is over and it’s almost Game of Thrones o’clock again:

Reading through the Women’s Media Center’s latest report, The Status of Women In The U.S. Media 2013, which is really an invaluable compilation of the results from a host of media monitoring and academic efforts, I was struck less by yet another year of evidence proving that women are dramatically underrepresented in every sector of media than by a series of numbers that sketch out where women are working in media than on what.

In movies, for example, the report notes that:

“Traditionally, documentaries have been more welcoming of women and diversity in general because the (financial) barriers to entry are lower than they are in narrative features,” Lauzen told The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman in August. “That director role is traditionally the most male role,” Lauzen said. “With narrative films, whether they are independently produced or produced by a studio, there is still that celluloid ceiling women have to overcome.” Women were most likely to find work on documentaries, dramas and animated films. They are least likely to be hired in the action, horror and sci-fi genres.

I’d be fascinated to see someone take a look at how the presence of women in a genre impacts the other work by directors there. It doesn’t surprise me to see male directors like Kirby Dick making strong documentaries on issues faced by women, like sexual assault in the military, a subject he tackled in The Invisible War in the same way it was striking to see Steven Soderbergh make a female-oriented action picture like Haywire, because the mix of subjects and emphases in the genres in which they’re working. But that’s an impressionistic reaction, rather than a systemic one.

Similarly, I’d like to see some cross-referencing of the data on movies written and directed by women and the impact of their presence on the positioning of female characters on movies. As the report notes:

While female characters are on the rise, female protagonists have declined. In 2002, female characters accounted for 16 percent of protagonists. In 2011, females comprised only 11 percent. Female characters remain younger than their male counterparts and are more likely than males to have an identifiable marital status, according to “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World: On-Screen Representations of Female Characters in the Top 100 Films of 2011.” And female characters are much less likely than males to be portrayed as leaders of any kind.

There are two reasons to want more women making popular culture (and to make sure they’re paid equally and have access to similar levels of support for their work): equality of opportunity, and the actual impact that their presence has on content. It’s clear, and it’s been clear for a very long time, that women are hired at lower rates in the entertainment industry, paid less, and have greater power on lower-profile projects. But the impact of female perspectives on end results (not to mention people of color or LGBT creators) is more a matter of anecdote at this point rather than established by data. I think we can make the argument that creators like Shonda Rhimes are valuable, both creatively and commercially, because they provide a perspective that’s utterly lacking elsewhere on television. But I’d like to have more data to see if I could argue that she’s an underacknowledged rule, rather than an exception.

If you get your internet through Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision or Time Warner, and you’re still downloading music, television, or movies without paying them, you may start feeling something in addition to your guilt. In collaboration with the Center for Copyright Information, a group that includes both those internet service providers, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, Independent Film and Television Alliance, and the American Association of Independent Music, the companies will let you know they’re watching what you’re up to:

As part of what’s known as the “six strikes” system, the ISPs will deliver to consumers a graduated series of six messages that starts with a warning and ends with some sort of action…While the first two alerts serve as warnings or reminders, the second two require consumers to confirm receipt of the message. The final two, called mitigation alerts, could result in some sort of action, like slower Internet connection or suspending service. The CAS doesn’t specify what consequences ISPs should impose on consumers and leaves it up to each ISP.

The Stop Online Piracy Act may have died last year, but it seems inevitable that internet service providers, as well as search firms like Google, would get into the business of trying to crack down on illicit downloads. Media consolidation means that cable and internet companies like Comcast have as part of their business model creating and distributing original content. An organization like Google seems to be gradually discovering that there’s more money to be had in distributing, if not yet creating, original content instead of merely showing other people where they can find other distributors. In other words, the interests of the people who make content and the interests of the people who help people get to that content are converging.

Whether this is a preferable turn of events for SOPA opponents is up to them. I certainly hope it becomes clearer which providers are levying which consequences as the system goes into place. And from both a business and consumer behavior perspective, it would be great for notices to include information about where consumers could get the same content licitly, though that would pose a formidable technical challenge, and it might feel too invasive to consumers for ISPs to be monitoring their activity at that granular a level. There may always be some consumers who have no interest in paying for certain content, or supporting it by sitting through ads, an attitude I think shows very little awareness of what it takes for that content to keep getting produced, and ISP warnings probably won’t do much to deter those folks. But helping consumers who do understand that nothing comes for free find ways to give their money or their eyeballs to the people who produce and distribute that content—or to let them know when they’ll be able to do so if something isn’t available legally yet—could help change practices. Then, government could be in the position of advocating for well-intentioned consumers, while still letting internet and content companies develop their business models in an organic way.