WATCH: CNN's Brooke Baldwin Unleashes The DUMBEST Rant About Male And Female Athletes
On Wednesday, CNN’s Brooke Baldwin unleashed one of the dumbest rants about male and female professional athletes to ever grace the airwaves, which is no small feat considering she works at CNN, where the competition for stupidity and absurdity is fierce.
Baldwin argued — nay, demanded — that professional female athletes make as much as their male counterparts, suggesting that any income disparity is tied to sexism.
We will discuss why this is so clearly delusional later, but here are her insane, self-righteous comments: "What do Serena Williams, Danica Patrick, Lindsey Vonn, Ronda Rousey and Maria Sharapova all have in common?" starts in Baldwin. "They’re all bad-ass women not on the list of the one hundred highest paid athletes in the world."
"In fact, not a single woman is on that list," she continues. "Not one, instead the men on this new list out this week made a record $3.8 billion, that is up 23 percent from the previous year."
The CNN host went on to cite, for example, Danica Patrick's $10.3 million salary to Lewis Hamilton's $51 million and Serena William's $18 million to Roger Federer's$77 million.
Baldwin then widened the net, zoning in on the widely-debunked sexist-driven gender pay gap for all other industries. "More importantly, in this conversation, the people who do not make the millions," she said, reading actress Amy Adams' recent comments about getting waitresses and teachers "equal pay." (This is a lie and has been debunked at Slate, Forbes, The Hill, Time, The Economist, The Daily Wire, and numerous other places.)
But back to Baldwin's weak sports commentary. This is intentionally misleading. Baldwin cannot be this stupid, so her narrative that male and female players are worth the same and thus should be paid the same has to be derived from malice. There really is no other explanation.
Let's take tennis, for example. Male and female players are compensated differently because of the money they bring in. As reported by Yahoo! Sports, male viewership at the Australian Open eclipsed female viewership by 25%, and, in general, "the men’s ATP World Tour events have generated significantly larger audiences and more revenue than the women’s WTA Tour. According to statistics compiled by BBC, the ATP drew 973 million viewers in 2015 compared to the WTA’s 395 million, both excluding Grand Slam events." Not to mention, because of such feminist pressures, women have been awarded the same prize money at all four Grand Slam tournaments since 2007, unfairly so, I would argue.
Soccer was another example Baldwin mentioned. "The women's soccer team filed a lawsuit a couple of years ago arguing discrimination over their salaries since their team actually brings in more than the men's team," she said.
Yeah, this is misleading, too. The women's team negotiated their own pay in a collective bargaining agreement and their players receive benefits that men do not. "U.S. maintains that the women's team set up the compensation structure, including a guaranteed salary rather than a pay-for-play model like the men, in the last collective bargaining agreement. The women earn an additional salary because the federation pays their salaries in the National Women's Soccer League," reported the Daily Mail, adding, "The women's national team players also receive other benefits, including health care paid for by the U.S. Olympic Committee, that the men don't receive, the federation maintains."
Again, it's hard to argue that Baldwin is stupid. So why push such debunked victimhood myths?
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