January 22, 2018

Cable News Has Basically Ignored the Massive Sexual Abuse Scandal Rocking US Gymnastics

“You even had the audacity to abuse me in my own bed, in my own room at the Olympics,” one former gymnast testified last week.

Olympic gold medalist Aly Raisman gives her victim impact statement at Larry Nassar hearing. Dale G. Young/Detroit News/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Since last Tuesday, nearly 100 women have confronted Larry Nassar, formerly a team doctor for USA Gymnastics and a doctor at Michigan State University’s sports medicine clinic who has pled guilty to multiple counts of sexual assault and child pornography, one by one recounting harrowing stories of abuse. The number of those giving statements is expected to rise to 144 by the time Nassar is sentenced later this week. They include former patients, college athletes, and gymnasts, as well as several high-profile Olympians, including three members of the gold-medal-winning London 2012 US gymnastics team—Aly Raisman, McKayala Maroney, and Jordyn Wieber. Many of the women are also condemning USA Gymnastics and MSU for their poor handling of the allegations against Nassar.

And yet, the three major cable news channels dedicated just shy of 20 minutes of combined air time to the Nassar hearings, according to an analysis by Media Matters. 

To be fair, it was a week dominated by the threat of a government shutdown, but, as Media Matters puts it, this is “one of the largest-scale sexual abuse stories in recent history,” coming “at a time when the #metoo movement is flourishing in some other industries.” Even so, it didn’t really break through on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. CNN dedicated just about 12 minutes of coverage to the court proceedings last week, much of it on Friday, when New Day co-anchor Alisyn Camerota spoke to Jamie Dantzscher, a former Olympic gymnast who told the former doctor in court: “You even had the audacity to abuse me in my own bed, in my own room at the Olympics.” Before then, the network had spent just four minutes on Nassar coverage.  

What’s more, it wasn’t just coverage of the Nassar hearing that failed to gain air time. Even as scores of protesters flocked the streets over the weekend to rally a year after the Women’s March, Media Matters found that the Sunday talk shows spent little time covering the demonstrations. Apart from a mention from a conservative panelist on CBS’ Face the Nation and acknowledgments from hosts at ABC’s This Week and NBC’s Meet the Press, the most significant discussion came during a 20-second exchange between panelists on Meet the Press, according to Media Matters. 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate