By Kate Roth

Over the past few weeks, sports media has been flooded with story after story involving a domestic violence issue, with majority of subjects being players from the National Football League.

After the Ray Rice incident, the media seemed to put the Baltimore Ravens and the NFL on blast for how they were handling the situation.

With the increased pressure coming from the media, the NFL commissioner Roger Goodell felt he had to take action. In doing so, Goodell suspended Rice from the league all together and implemented a new policy to help deal with future offenses.

Upon hearing the news of the new suspensions for players involved in domestic violence incidents, the media may have felt that like they had a part in starting that implementation. What the media failed to realize is that while they were so zoned in on attacking the NFL incidents, there were other situations going on in other sports that needed to be addressed as well.

Take for instance the Hope Solo case. Solo, who has had domestic violence issues in the past, has now been accused of assaulting her sister and her 17 year-old nephew. Even with all the media buzz around domestic violence issues in sport, Solo remains active on the Untied States Women’s National Team as she awaits trial in November.

The media has given very little attention to this topic, causing it to fall off the radar. By neglecting to cover this story the media has failed to show the seriousness of the situation and has taken the pressure off of the USWNT to suspend Solo for any period of time.

If the media were to have given the same attention to Solo’s case as they did for the cases in the NFL, the USWNT may have felt enough pressure to address the seriousness of the situation and make an example out of Solo to prevent this from happening with future players.

I think that the media really dropped the ball by neglecting to cover this story and essentially contradicted themselves by giving all of their attention to the NFL issues and ignoring the same issues happening with an athlete in another sport, as if we should pretend that what she did was not as serious.

I hope that if another situation like this were to arise, the media would realize their mistakes and give their attention to all of the serious issues in sport, not just the ones involving the most popular leagues or players.