Let me get this straight: a woman in sports media describes as “so, so gross” the reaction of men in sports media laughing at a fake AI-generated video of the Texas football coach Steve Sarkisian slapping the sports broadcaster Holly Rowe.
And, yet — checks notes — the same woman in sports media expressed no such outrage when, during the 2024 Olympics in Paris, the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who would confirm having the male chromosome in an interview with L’Equipe, struck a female opponent for real with two of the hardest punches she said she has ever absorbed.
The woman in sports media expressed no sympathy for that vanquished welterweight opponent, the Italian Angela Carini, who ended the charade after 46 seconds by withdrawing and then would be coerced into apologizing for her poor sportsmanship after refusing the obligatory post-bout handshake.
Angela Carini was forced to compete in a boxing match against Imane Khelif at the Olympics.
She quit 46 seconds in after getting punched in the face. Imane was declared the winner.
Khelif failed gender eligibility tests at the 2023 World Championships.
Poor girl. She trained… pic.twitter.com/FzstBTtUOs
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) August 1, 2024
To be clear, Khelif would confess to having the male chromosome in 2026, long after securing the gold medal in Paris. But the fact that Khelif and another boxer had been disqualified from the 2023 World Championships, governed by the International Boxing Association, for having demonstrated in an unspecified test that they possessed “competitive advantages over other female competitors,” ought to have registered a red flag, not a green light.
It should have awakened the entire sports media’s skepticism, not their collective sympathy toward Khelif, who has not competed in a World Boxing-sanctioned event since it announced in 2025 the implementation of mandatory sex testing.
When I speak of the hypocrisy of the media ecosystem that considers me a turncoat, this is what I am talking about: women in sports media being offended by puerile men at a press conference, but championing, if only through their deafening silence or what is left unsaid in their reporting, the pummeling of women athletes — and those who support them — by competitors who have no business invading their sacred sporting space.
“Josh Jacobs was criticized less for, on video, knocking down his girlfriend, according to the complaint… than Arch Manning.”
“What are we doing?” asks @ClayTravis in response to the backlash over Manning laughing at an AI-generated video of Holly Rowe. pic.twitter.com/ge4WYLKiEw
— Sport & State (@SportNState) September 15, 2026
To be clear: my values haven’t changed since the days I shared press rooms with women in sports media who welcome the inclusion in women’s sports of biological males or those, like Khelif, who have a sexual genetic disorder in which a gene carried only on Y chromosomes triggers orthodox male sexual development.
The lens through which the media ecosystem reports on sports is what has changed. It has narrowed to the point where common sense is demonized and misplaced empathy is exalted; where trivial transgressions, like Arch Manning laughing at a stupid AI-generated video and the adults in the room laughing alongside him, are treated like a sign of the Apocalypse while something closer to a doomsday scenario — 50 years of gains made by women athletes under Title IX being corroded as the gatekeepers take their virtuous bows — is cheered. (Manning apologized for his comment and directly to Holly Rowe in an Instagram post.)
“I saw the AI Edit of (Sark) slapping Holly Rowe.”
I asked Arch Manning if he’d seen any edits on TikTok or Twitter after the game, and his answer is gold. pic.twitter.com/70FnNCVEHb
— Evan Vieth (@EvanVieth) September 14, 2026
The pearl-clutching over the witless AI-generated video follows on the high heels of the hand-wringing over the witless ad for the Calloway driver created by Good Good Golf, which featured a man shoving to the ground a woman who was reaching for his golf club. People saw their careers wiped clean by the wave of outrage that followed.
The trivializing of violence against women was just too terrible to ignore. Until Sunday came around and the focus returned to the field of play, to the tennis player Alexander Zverev, twice accused of domestic violence by former partners, and his victory in the U.S. Open men’s singles final, and the Minnesota Vikings’ victory over the Green Bay Packers, whose roster includes the running back Josh Jacobs, who didn’t play after pleading no contest last week to misdemeanor charges of battery and criminal damage to property involving an ex-girlfriend.
The media ecosystem can’t trumpet the trivial and trivialize the profound without all of us ultimately paying a terrible price.
Follow Karen Crouse on X @KayceeUnplugged
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