Originally Posted by striing:
“Aren't you overplaying this? Inverdale said something that was factually inaccurate, yes probably a slip but he is a very well paid leading journalist so shouldn't really be making slips. Journalists have to take responsibility for the way that women's sport is portrayed. Having said that Murray responded with a correct point about about Venus and Serena and also clarified that his was the first defence of a singles title. Nothing wrong in that.”
If it was just as you summarised, it would be fine. I'm talking about the gross mis-representation of what happened, with an opportunistic, and callous over-reaction on social media and across many online news sites by many who could easily have checked what happened and tempered their comments.
What Inverdale said had nothing to do with how women's sports are portrayed. It was everything to do with how singles and doubles are portrayed. Whatever Inverdale may have done to wind people up in the past, it's no excuse to make stuff up about him now. It's poor reporting, and reveals a less flattering side in people who relish the opportunity to judge someone else's short-comings.
The point was that Murray has done something no man or woman has done before. I'm sure Venus and Serena would happily acknowledge that fact too.
There is a lot of sexism in sports reporting, but click-bait mis-reporting is not the solution. They are the ones over-playing it, and IMO, it's counter-productive.
Beyond gender issues, I suggest people read "So you've been publicly shamed" by Jon Ronson which goes into much more detail about how destructive this sort of scenario is. A lot of people think their individual contribution is irrelevant, or even virtuous, but when added together, it becomes a monster.
I understand that people who know little about tennis will be easily fooled into thinking it was about total number of titles, but do any tennis fans who have been following the coverage of what Murray (or Nadal) might have achieved, actually think that Inverdale was trying to write women out of tennis history?