In the annual meeting of the Disney Company’s shareholders on Wednesday, Justin Danhof, the general counsel for the National Center for Public Policy Research, which owns Disney stock, asked company president Bob Iger what he intended to do to about a liberal bias in the company’s news outlets, including ESPN and ABC News:

It’s particularly strange to hear Danhof cite Rob Parker suggesting that Robert Griffin III was “a cornball brother” for being engaged to a white woman and possibly having Republican political beliefs as evidence of some sort of liberal bias on the part of ESPN. The idea that it’s liberal to believe that people should date and marry within their racial and ethnic groups as a form of solidarity has no particular basis in the existing discourse. And while it’s not unreasonable to debate why African-American or Latino voters tend to vote Democratic or Republican based on those parties’ histories and platforms, I don’t know that there are a lot of people on either side of the aisle who saw Parker’s condemnation of Griffin as a constructive contribution to that debate. But in any case, it wasn’t as if Disney endorsed Parker’s analysis of Griffin’s racial loyalties. ESPN suspended Parker for 30 days over the comments and ultimately chose not to renew his contract, citing his comments about Griffin as a factor.

The example of Brian Ross suggesting that the shooter at the Aurora, Colorado midnight screening of The Dark Knight is potentially a better example of bias, but it’s also a case study in how a broken reporting and vetting process can interact with political assumptions to put bad information on the air. The problem is less that Ross made that assumption—I don’t think there’s anything wrong about thinking through potential political affiliation and other motivations or influences as inspirations for reporting— but that he broadcast it without ensuring that it was factually accurate. If there were procedures in place that prevented Ross from attributing political motivations and organizational affiliations to the man who turned out to be James Holmes without solid reporting behind it, then the fact that he considered Holmes’ affiliations off-air wouldn’t have mattered. And it’s not as if it would be appropriate to have a rule that prevented, say, the on-air identification of Holmes as a Democrat or a member of an Occupy group, if that had turned out to be correct. The problem isn’t politics. It’s fact-checking. Iger’s acknowledgement that “we have at times either presented the news in a slightly inaccurate way through mistakes or in ways that we weren’t necessarily proud of,” is the right problem to identify. But it’s true that it would have been helpful if ABC News president Ben Sherwood had been more willing to publicly address the procedures or violations thereof that lead to Ross’ broadcast, which would have shifted the emphasis from political problems to reportorial ones.

Shifting that debate won’t satisfy everyone, of course. There are some conservatives who will always work backwards from outcomes, convinced that reporting that doesn’t reach conservative conclusions must be flawed because it didn’t arrive in a place that confirms their worldview or that makes them comfortable. But news organizations should stick to fixing processes that produce both inaccuracies and the perception of bias, rather than letting themselves be nudged into seeking outcomes that will take heat off of them.

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.

Playing off its popular “30 for 30″ series of sports documentaries, ESPN Films this week rolled out “Nine For IX,” a series of nine documentaries that will celebrate the legacy of Title IX by telling the stories of female athletes and examining many of the issues women in sports still face today. Its films will explore racial and sexual identities of women in sports, the exploitation of female athletes as sex objects, discrimination faced by female reporters in male lockerrooms, and other issues that aren’t necessarily unique to women athletes, like disability, homosexuality, and the glory and heartbreak that come just from playing sports.

As great as the Nine for IX series will be and as positive as it is that ESPN is shining a bright light on the issues that affect women in sports every day, though, the series somehow manages to reinforce that there is still a wall between the games women play and those played by men. All nine films in the Nine for IX series, which will air from July 2 to August 27 on ESPN, were directed by women. And obviously, all nine are about women. Compare that to the 30 for 30 series, now in its third season. Just four of its 51 films have featured a female director or co-director, and just three have told the stories of female athletes. None of the series’ 10 short features that has aired or is in production is about women, and only one was directed by a woman.

What Nine for IX makes evident is that both stories about women in sports and female directors are readily available. Venus Williams beating racial discrimination, Audrey Mestre overcoming disability, and the U.S. Women’s National Team’s 1999 World Cup victory aren’t just great women-in-sports stories, they are great sports stories. They aren’t just triumphs of great women, they are triumphs of great athletes. The Nine for IX series is aiming to produce the same sort of informative, humanizing, and provocative films 30 for 30 is known for, and it is using the same type of high-quality directors that have made 30 for 30 a success so far, which only makes it more baffling that stories about women in sports and films directed by women have been so absent from the series since it began in 2010.

It seems that ESPN has determined, perhaps unintentionally, that the best way to tell stories about women in sports and the best way to utilize female directors is to tie them to a transformative event that will broadly appeal to women. But while ESPN has taken many positive steps to boost women’s sports and the roles of women in sports, and while it is rightly celebrating the success of Title IX, it shouldn’t need a special anniversary to talk about women in sports and the challenges they still face. And it shouldn’t need a special event to turn the cameras over to female directors. That it does serves as yet another indication of how far women in the world of sports have to go, even four decades after Title IX became law.

It’s unsurprising that after running the gamut of defiance and contrition, Hank Williams, Jr. has responded to ESPN’s displeasure with his comparisons between the Commander and Chief and the Fuhrer by complaining that he’s a victim of censorship:

ESPN said on Thursday that it was its decision to end its long association with the singer, but Williams disputed that notion on his Web site: “After reading hundreds of e-mails, I have made my decision. By pulling my opening Oct. 3, you (ESPN) stepped on the toes of the First Amendment freedom of speech, so therefore me, my song and all my rowdy friends are out of here. It’s been a great run.”

Freedom of speech means you’re at liberty to express whatever nonsense you like, not that anyone, particularly a major corporation that relies heavily on black athletes and a non-partisan image to maintain its audience, is required to give you a platform for said nonsense. And given that Hank Williams Sr.’s major influence was an African-American bluesman, and that he helped build white audiences for gospel and blues-inflected music, his son might want to consider how his remarks fit into the family legacy. Class will get you a long way.