I think the president should invite Erin Andrews to the White House for a beer.
But if Mr. Obama wants to include the creepy peeping Tom who videotaped the ESPN reporter naked through a hole in her hotel room wall, plus all the clowns at Fox, CBS and the New York Post who televised the video or ran still pictures taken from it, he is going to need more than a picnic table on the White House lawn.
It seems to me that if the president of the United States is now refereeing community racial dust-ups, we ought to be able to count on him to step in when the national media and the world of sports demonstrate - 30 years after the courts granted women sports reporters equal status - that they haven't learned a thing.
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was taken from his own home in handcuffs. Ms. Andrews was videotaped while ironing, naked, in her hotel room. It is not hard for me to see who suffered the most harm:
Mr. Gates is hailed as a martyr to the cause of racial profiling and gets a trip to the White House for a beer with Mr. Obama and the white cop who arrested him. Ms. Andrews is written off as a bimbo who traded on her looks to land a job on sports television and is in seclusion.
A woman ran a seminal and nearly successful race for the Democratic nomination for president, and the Republican Party placed a woman on the national ticket for the first time. A woman is sitting in Walter Cronkite's chair. But give a woman a notebook or a microphone and ask her report on sports and it becomes a gross-out contest for the numskull players and their overgrown frat-boys fans.
Before there was a video of naked Erin Andrews on the Internet, there was film of a college player pretending to grind up against her backside during a game while she stood, unaware, on the sidelines, concentrating on the papers in her hand. The fans went crazy, of course, and the player took a bow.
Apparently, not much has changed since I was a rookie sports reporter in 1979.
The U.S. District Court in New York ordered the New York Yankees to grant a woman reporter from Sports Illustrated the same locker room access it granted male reporters, and Major League Baseball was forced to open its locker rooms to women reporters.
The Sun sent me to the Orioles locker room to report on the scene, and manager Earl Weaver refused to let me enter unless I had a note from my father.
