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Media inaction leaves MSU scandal coverage missing in action at some national news outlets, critics say.
"When terrible wrongdoing against athletes is exposed, the response depends more on the sport than the scandal," freelance writer Jessica Luther of Austin posts at BuzzFeed. She and others contrast non-local coverage of Larry Nassar's abuses with higher-profile reporting on the 2011 arrest and 2012 trial of Jerry Sandusky, an imprisoned former Penn State assistant football coach.
Nassar's "actions, and the lack of action by those who empowered him, represent one of the biggest scandals in sports history. But you might not realize that from the level of coverage the story has received," Columbia Journalism Review staffer Pete Vernon posts Monday.
"Cable news hardly gave the Larry Nassar sentencing hearing a second thought," writes Lindsay Gibbs at ThinkProgress, a progressive news site launched in 2005. "MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN spent less than 20 minutes combined last week covering Nassar’s abuse."
The disparity disturbs ex-patients harmed by the sports medicine osteopath belatedly fired by Michigan State in 2016 after years of complaints.
"I remember when the Penn State scandal was talked about at length for months and months and even years. This is nearly five times the size and no one knows about it," Morgan McCaul told HuffPost shortly before the start of survivor statements at a sentence hearing still under way.
BuzzFeed's article by Luther, co-host of a feminist sports podcast called "Burn It All Down," distills what looks like a double-standard. "Sports media barely covers women’s sports," she writes.
If you thought the endless coverage of Jerry Sandusky and Penn State was because people cared about the children Sandusky assaulted, you are mistaken. And don't for a minute think the sexual assault scandal at Baylor had such major repercussions because of concern about the victims.
In reality, the response to those scandals came about because they threw beloved sporting programs into crisis. When it happens somewhere less exalted than college football, it's a different story.
As evidence of this, consider that some of the most successful athletes of a generation have revealed sexual abuse at the hands of Larry Nassar, the doctor accused of assaulting more than 140 women over decades of involvement with USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University.
When you think of the response to the Sandusky scandal, you would assume the Nassar revelations would have been a major national news story since they first emerged in September, 2016. They haven’t been.
That lack of coverage and concern is because the Nassar case involves gymnastics, a sport that most people only care about for one week every four years. On top of that, it must be continually noted, all of the victims were girls and women. It's at this intersection where the kind of public pressure that led to firings and changes at Penn State and Baylor has gone to die. . . .
This story will fade after this hearing ends, with a possible small resurgence when Nassar faces sentencing one more time.
This new message at MSU's campus refers to President Lou Anna Simon.
(Photo tweeted by The State News)
In her ThinkProgress weerkend post. sportswriter Gibbs cites "a staggering lack of attention paid to a monumental story:"
To put it in perspective, Nassar has three times as many victims as former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky, and that news was covered nearly around-the-clock by cable outlets. . . .
The brave and bold victims of Nassar are telling us all we need to know. We just have to tune in and listen. And in order to do that, cable news needs to do its job and report it.
And at the New York-based journalism review, Vernon writes:
While the story may not be getting as much national attention as it warrants, local reporters have done excellent work covering the details. . . .
[And] The New York Times published [Aly] Raisman’s Friday statement in its entirety. Every word is worth reading.
Deadspin [also] deserves credit for a concerted effort to keep the focus on the story.
