My
inspiration for this post was sparked by a source that requires me to
admit a slightly embarrassing fact: I will often watch Good Morning
America with my morning cup of coffee. I’m not sure if I watch it
because my morning grogginess can only comprehend mindless TV first
thing in the morning, or if I just crave that jolt of frustration that
GMA provides through feeding viewers with unhealthy messages,
continually perpetuating our society’s destructive norms. Either way, I
was tuned in Thursday morning when to my delight a story came on about a
female track runner who is training for the Olympics. Having run track
in college and maintaining an enthusiasm for running, I was pleased to
see some media coverage for a sport that is rarely in the news. I was
excited to learn that this athlete ran sprints, as did I, and I became
intrigued to see what kind of workout regimen she was on, how she came
to be so successful, and what details of her running career the story
would reveal. However, I quickly learned that the aspects I was looking
forward to learning about were apparently deemed uninteresting and
irrelevant by media standards, because the story included none of them
and instead highlighted one feature: her virginity.
I was so disappointed to see the entire segment was dedicated solely to the sexual status of an incredibly impressive female athlete, Lolo Jones. Did the story mention how she was homeless growing up, and lived in the basement of a church? No, but it did inform us that keeping a boyfriend has been hard. Did the story cover that when she graduated college she still worked part time in a bagel shop because she wanted to pursue her dreams of running track professionally? No, but we learned that she uses twitter to find dates. How about the fact that since clipping the 9th hurdle in the 2008 Olympics and having spine surgery she has fought her way back to breaking records and being the 2012 Olympic gold medal hopeful for the 100 hurdles? Negative. When I googled her name to search for actual information, it took digging deep past all of the articles focused on her virginity or her recent HBO interview claiming that maintaining her abstinence has been “harder than training for the Olympics,” to find actual facts on her athletic accomplishments.
Part of me was so bothered by this segment because of the way the media constructed the perception of Jones as just a sexy girl who is unusual to society, because clearly being a virgin at her age is worthy of “breaking news.” Another part of me was disappointed in her, for flaunting around this useless information to gain publicity, sacrificing her image as a bad-ass female track star for the media’s nickname “Virgin Runner.” This caused me to wonder, how much of the media’s portrayal of Jones is reality? We as an audience view the images shown to us and use the information given to create what we believe to be our own interpretation. But what proportion of this interpretation is anywhere near truthful of who that person really is?
Then I had an epiphany: What if I really don’t hate Tim Tebow?
All this time that I have disliked the way he parades his religion around past the point of respect to making it a mockery, when perhaps the root to my dislike has purely been the constructed image the media has created. It’s obvious ESPN has a major crush on the guy since he is in nearly every other segment, and I get angry at Tebow for it. But why?
Athletes choose to do interviews, and they can choose what information to divulge, but after that, the media has the power to blow up any aspect of an athlete that they deem interesting. Then they will concentrate on that single aspect over and over again until it’s so ingrained in our heads it’s the only thing we associate with the athlete.
Lolo Jones... Virgin
Tim Tebow... Religion.
I was so disappointed to see the entire segment was dedicated solely to the sexual status of an incredibly impressive female athlete, Lolo Jones. Did the story mention how she was homeless growing up, and lived in the basement of a church? No, but it did inform us that keeping a boyfriend has been hard. Did the story cover that when she graduated college she still worked part time in a bagel shop because she wanted to pursue her dreams of running track professionally? No, but we learned that she uses twitter to find dates. How about the fact that since clipping the 9th hurdle in the 2008 Olympics and having spine surgery she has fought her way back to breaking records and being the 2012 Olympic gold medal hopeful for the 100 hurdles? Negative. When I googled her name to search for actual information, it took digging deep past all of the articles focused on her virginity or her recent HBO interview claiming that maintaining her abstinence has been “harder than training for the Olympics,” to find actual facts on her athletic accomplishments.
Part of me was so bothered by this segment because of the way the media constructed the perception of Jones as just a sexy girl who is unusual to society, because clearly being a virgin at her age is worthy of “breaking news.” Another part of me was disappointed in her, for flaunting around this useless information to gain publicity, sacrificing her image as a bad-ass female track star for the media’s nickname “Virgin Runner.” This caused me to wonder, how much of the media’s portrayal of Jones is reality? We as an audience view the images shown to us and use the information given to create what we believe to be our own interpretation. But what proportion of this interpretation is anywhere near truthful of who that person really is?
Then I had an epiphany: What if I really don’t hate Tim Tebow?
All this time that I have disliked the way he parades his religion around past the point of respect to making it a mockery, when perhaps the root to my dislike has purely been the constructed image the media has created. It’s obvious ESPN has a major crush on the guy since he is in nearly every other segment, and I get angry at Tebow for it. But why?
Athletes choose to do interviews, and they can choose what information to divulge, but after that, the media has the power to blow up any aspect of an athlete that they deem interesting. Then they will concentrate on that single aspect over and over again until it’s so ingrained in our heads it’s the only thing we associate with the athlete.
Lolo Jones... Virgin
Tim Tebow... Religion.
I guess at least those of us keen to media’s fabrication can be more wary to making snap judgements, and be a little kinder to those in the spotlight.
Nicole Rothert
KIN 577
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