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February 9th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Until Tuesday, ESPN had a special section on its website for viewers to complain specifically about announcers who happen to be female.
“Commentator — dislike female commentators,” read one option in a drop-down menu that enables viewers to provide feedback about coverage topics including blacked-out games, camera angels and audio/video issues, according to a screenshot posted by Twitter user Megan Soisson on Tuesday. Here is the tweet:
[More from Mashable: NBA’s Perkins Calls Out LeBron James for Dunk Tweet]
wait this is a serious complaint of @espn viewers? twitter.com/msois/status/1…
— Megan Soisson (@msois) February 7, 2012
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Soisson is a junior at the University of Pennsylvania and sports editor of its student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian. She was looking into why a major upcoming basketball game against Harvard University would not be televised on the network, and was directed to a contact page off the main ESPN website, which is where she found the complaint option.
“I was really shocked about it and upset because I’m a female sportswriter, so it’s like one of my dreams to be a sideline reporter — and to see there was a specific area to comment against female reporters was upsetting,” Soisson told Mashable in an interview.
She then tweeted the picture to to a few female broadcast professionals, including ESPN’s Hannah Storm (pictured at left in photo at top right) and Sage Steele.
“Sage are you aware of this? Found it yesterday,” she wrote to Steele. To Storm she wrote, “did you know this existed? Found it yest.”
The Jezebel blog soon picked up on the story, writing it up in a short post on Tuesday night. On Wednesday Soisson received this response in an email from ESPN:
“We very much appreciate you raising this issue with us. We have corrected the problem and will have a statement for you shortly.”
That was soon followed by a slightly longer statement directly to Soisson:
We apologize for the mistake on the viewer response form template. We’ve been an industry leader for more than 30 years and are extremely proud of the leadership role we continue to play in providing high-profile opportunities and assignments for female commentators — from SportsCenter anchors to play-by-play announcers, analysts, reporters and more. We appreciate that this matter was brought to our attention and it was addressed and deleted immediately.
The sports media blog Fang’s Bites apparently received a copy of that statement later upon request, but it is still not readily accessible online.
Soisson said that later on Wednesday, an ESPN vice president wrote her a longer personal apology in which he explained that the comment field for complaints about female reporters was a a relic from some 10 years ago, when the the network first began assigning female play-by-play announcers to cover college football games.
“He says in his email that there’s no defense and it was a horrible decision, so I really do appreciate the response,” Soisson said. “But I was hoping they would be a little bit more public about acknowledging it.”
Mashable has contacted ESPN for more comment, but so far not gotten any additional information. We’ll update the story if and when we do.
What do you think about this comment field for complaints about female announcers? Honest mistake, or something that never should have been there in the first place? Let us know in the comments.
Image courtesy of Delaware Online.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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