This Tweet Nails The Media’s Problem With Female Olympians

So far in the weird and wacky news cycle of the Rio Olympics, we've learned that the husbands of female Olympians deserve billing over their wives and, most recently, that a silver medal is worth more than a broken world record — at least, when a man's winning that silver medal. Yesterday, law professor Nancy Leong tweeted a photo of headline from an unidentified newspaper. (AOL reports it's from the Colorado-based paper, The Greeley Tribune.) In large, attention-grabbing font, the headline declares: "Phelps ties for silver in 100 fly." A sub-headline continues below that in a much smaller font: "Ledecky sets world record in women's 800m freestyle." Along with the photo, Prof. Leong wrote, "This headline is a metaphor for basically the entire world." To be fair, both of these statements are true, and it may have been that the newspaper only had the space for one Olympics story that day. Sure, Phelps may be the more famous swimmer at this point — he's an Ancient Greek living in our time, after all. But Ledecky is surely on her way to becoming a household name as well. Take this win as an example: Ledecky broke a world record that she herself set back in 2012.

At the very least, it would have been satisfying to see Ledecky's victory reported in the headline. Ideally, we wouldn't have to be on the lookout for what news gets reported in what lettering in the first place, but it's become abundantly clear that the women in Rio are routinely being shorted in terms of coverage. Check out Prof. Leong's original tweet below.