As a feminist, I am used to critiques of both my work and my worldview. But it was still a jarring experience to log into one of my favorite women-centric blogs and see a headline calling my work “stupid.”
The piece receiving that public flogging at jezebel.com and other similar outlets was a qualitative study I conducted with Marie Hardin of Penn State that appeared in Communication, Culture and Critique. Drawing from focus-group conversations in which we asked women to discuss how they situate sports media in their everyday lives, we argued, generally, that sports media consumption habits be considered within the context of normative gender roles.
Part of the paper offered an explanation as to why the Olympics remain so popular with a female audience, and that relevant newspeg (aided by a well-timed press release by ICA), generated a wave of coverage. Numerous outlets picked up the story, and we saw our research appear everywhere from Yahoosports.com to Time Magazine. In a profession where we often strive to move beyond the echo chamber of the ivory tower, it was rewarding to see the piece ignite discussion on a popular level. In the course of the mass amount of reporting, however, the arguments and conclusions articulated in the paper transformed into a misleading assertion about the relationship between men and women.
More specifically, a major outlet published a story with a headline that read “Wives watch sports for husbands’ sake, study reports.” Given that the study included just 19 women, criticism inevitably stemmed from how we could possibly make such claims based on an astoundingly small sample size. In the subsequent interviews, I found myself working to both rectify the situation (nowhere did we make such a claim, for one), but more generally, explain the logic and epistemology underpinning qualitative and feminist research.
The process raised questions in my mind about how such research may gain widespread – and fair – mediated coverage. There is a kind of cultural capital associated with the discourse of statistics that may hinder the ability of qualitative and/or theoretically-based work to reach a widespread popular audience. Certainly our own teaching and other public scholarship programs can aid in extending such research beyond the confines of academic journals. However, visibility in the popular press may be especially helpful in challenging the kind of discursive frameworks that produce boundaries and the normative ways of thinking that many feminists, for one, find fundamentally problematic.
Secondly, the experience illuminated how existing news and blog routines contributed to the cycle of misinformation. In my correspondence with jezebel.com, the author told me they rely on “trusted” news outlets to do the vetting for them. This is a common critique of bloggers among journalists, who decry the lack of original reporting. On the other hand, many blogs have pinned their success to engaging members of the community. Gawker.com, for one, has been vocal about the value that its commenters bring to the blog itself. In this spirit, Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan contacted me for a lengthy interview and published one of the most in-depth pieces to come out of the whole episode. His post focused on the process of reporting on academic scholarship, the logic of qualitative research, and our work thinking about the production of identity – an admittedly abstract concept. In the piece, he linked my name and e-mail address in the post and I received numerous requests for the actual journal article.
In the end, Jezebel.com (part of the Gawker network of blogs) never modified or updated its original post. But by the same token, it serves as a reminder for the challenges scholars face in moving our work beyond academic circles, and the importance in doing so.
