More than Mean
Startled when they came across some of the violent harassment that women sports reporters receive daily, Brad Burke and Gareth Hughes, the hosts of the podcast “Just Not Sports,” decided to try to decrease the vitriol by exposing people to it. They made a short video with an unusual format designed to increase its impact by shocking viewers, in part by first shocking some of the people in the video itself. Sports journalists Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro agreed to take part. Burke described the set-up during an interview with the DSP:
I got a bunch of sports fans, and all I told them was we’re going to do a “mean tweets thing” where you read tweets to two Chicago sports reporters. I think they just thought it was going to be funny. I gave them an iPad so they could only see one tweet at a time. The first few were just lighthearted and then it takes a turn. It drops an F bomb and the C word and then it was like the air just got sucked out of the room. They became aware that this wasn’t going to be fun.
The 2016 video shows men facing either Spain or DiCaro. They had been given scripts consisting of vicious tweets that had been sent to the women by other people, starting with mild insults and becoming progressively more violent. The men begin to read as instructed, and as they reach messages like “You need to be hit in the head with a hockey puck and killed,” and “I hope you get raped again,” they hesitate, squirm in their seats, apologize to the women, and ask if they must continue reading. Someone off-camera replies, “just read the tweets, man.” The 4-minute video concludes with the words, “We wouldn’t say it to their faces. So let’s not type it.”
Burke and Hughes deliberately used a counterspeech technique we call “amplification,” which is the opposite of the most common response to hateful or offensive content - to try to delete or suppress it. Instead, they made terrible content more visible and audible to more people.
Their effort hit quite a nerve and was, itself, amplified. Prominent women reporters such as Erin Andrews shared the video with the hashtag #morethanmean, along with their own stories of online abuse. High-profile male athletes and sports media figures including NBA star Jalen Rose, journalist Josh Elliot, and Mike Golic and Mike Greenberg from ESPN’s “Mike and Mike in the Morning,” all said the video had opened their eyes to the problem of attacks on women sportswriters. It was viewed over 7 million times on YouTube, generated 511 million media impressions in a week, and was mentioned over 36,000 times on Twitter (now X).
Burke and Hughes were inspired to do something about the awful comments women reporters receive, when they read many of those comments themselves in the first few months of research for their podcast, in which they interview sports figures about their non-sports interests. To discover what those interests were, they followed people closely on social media to see what topics they were posting about.
“I had been doing the show for about 6 months, and when you’re just following social media so intensely, you start to realize what women have to deal with. So, a guy would say ‘what a terrible game,’ and someone would say ‘you’re an idiot.’ But when a girl, a woman, says it, they say ‘you’re a c word.’”
“I said to my wife, ‘I bet no one would say these things out loud.’ Sure the crazy trolls are crazy, but most people wouldn’t say it out loud.” “I initially envisioned multiple women participating, but Julie and Sarah were the only two who agreed to participate - and they’re both based in Chicago.”
Asked what they were trying to achieve with the video, Burke said, “We were never going to reach the hardest of hard-core trolls. The guy who threatens to rape Julie DiCaro isn’t someone worth talking to. I wanted to reach the guy who scrolls past this stuff who doesn’t think about it or the sports fan who reads it and piles on - like the last guy in the tackle. They don’t realize it’s a human interaction for the people taking part in the exchange. I heard from a lot of people who say ‘I see this stuff, and I don’t think to do anything.’ If you’re just online seeing Sarah Spain ribbing some guy then you might think she’s in on it, but we need them to know that this is more than mean.”
