The recent uproar over John McEnroe’s comments about Serena Williams demonstrates beyond
a shadow of a doubt that the media can't be trusted about ANYTHING concerning gender,
no matter how innocuous.
That’s coming up next on the Factual Feminist.
When John McEnroe pronounced Serena Williams the "best female player ever—no question,”
NPR reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro was dissatisfied.
“Some wouldn't qualify it," she said.
"Some would say she's the best player in the world.”
McEnroe, caught off-guard, said, “Oh, Uh, She’s not.”
He explained that men’s and women’s tennis are very different games, and that if Serena
played men’s tennis, she’d probably be ranked around 700th in the world.
Serena Williams herself has made similar comments.
In 2013, she told David Letterman: “If I were to play Andy Murray, I would lose 6-0,
6-0 in five to six minutes, maybe 10 minutes.
The men are a lot faster and they serve harder, and they hit harder.
It’s just a different game.”
Billie Jean King, a pioneering champion of women’s tennis, agrees,
and in response to McEnroe’s comments, she said Serena might end up doing a little better
than 700th, but agreed that neither Serena—nor any other woman—could really compete with
the men: “We never said we’re better than the guys in any way.
. . We don't have the androgen that guys have, we don't have testosterone, (men) have bigger
hearts . . . Physically there's no question."
Serena and Billy Jean are obviously right.
What McEnroe said was one of the least controversial things anyone can say about men and women.
And yet, many in the media were apoplectic.
The day after his NPR interview, McEnroe appeared on CBS.
Charlie Rose spoke nervously of the “elephant in the room,” and a purse-lipped Norah O’Donnell
asked “Would you like to apologize”?
CBS News tweeted the breaking story: “McEnroe refuses to apologize.”
Why should he apologize?
He stated a simple, undisputed, empirical fact.
Since nobody could point to a factual error in McEnroe’s remarks, several indignant
reporters came up with a new cause for shame –subjecting Serena Williams to an unflattering comparison!
Maxwell Strachan, a Huffington Post senior editor, asked why McEnroe “feels compelled
to try and belittle Williams’ legacy by comparing her to men’s tennis players?”
Alex Abad-Santos at Vox faulted McEnroe for deciding “to put his own strange stamp”
on Serena’s legacy.
“Williams’s litany of accomplishments,” he writes, “doesn’t need wins over male
tennis players to justify its greatness.”
This is sheer grasping-for-anything spin.
McEnroe didn't come up with the idea of comparing Serena to male tennis pros--the NPR reporter
did that.
He just answered a question that was posed to him repeatedly.
But that didn’t matter.
The point was simply to hype a gender grievance narrative.
The problem here is bigger than just a fabricated controversy during a slow media cycle.
There is a real elephant in the room here: the media’s inability to talk honestly about
any topic related to sex or gender.
If Charlie Rose, Norah O’Donnell, Vox, and NPR can’t handle a simple empirical fact
about men and women's tennis that is plainly true, how reliable can they be on complex, substantive
controversial issues such as the wage gap, the prevalence of campus rape, or
implicit bias?
We are drowning in agenda-driven misinformation on such topics.
The McEnroe/Williams’ controversy tells you why.
Let me know in the comments section if you agree or disagree.
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Thank you for watching The Factual Feminist.