In the decade 2005–2015, National Rugby League players were implicated in a variety of off-field instances of violence against women. These incidents have been covered heavily by the Australian media and have facilitated commentary on violence and sport, rugby league culture, and whether rugby league players have a propensity for violence. From a total corpus of 933 articles, we critically engage with 190 news reports of domestic violence and focus on the way players and others contribute to media commentary about the incidence of domestic violence allegedly perpetrated by their teammates. Our guiding research question is: What is the character of public commentary expressed by rugby league players about incidents of domestic violence involving teammates? We identify four modes of reflexive commentary involving teammate representation that occur in the reporting of rugby league players accused of domestic violence offences. We argue that these four modes of representation articulate greater or lesser degrees of support or criticism between teammates about domestic violence and, even when critical, these discourses work to rearticulate the normative diminished reflexivity afforded men to publicly comment on and about other men.
Although it is assumed that athletes need to consider the member-to-member interactions that take place within a team before drawing an accurate perception about the team’s level of cohesion, little research to date has addressed this assumption. The purpose of this study was to examine the intrateam communication and cohesion relationship to determine which types of communication would be associated with perceived task and social cohesiveness in a sample of youth athletes. Youth soccer players (N = 139, k = 13) completed measures of intrateam communication and task and social cohesion halfway through a competitive season. Separate multilevel analyses were run predicting task and social cohesion. For task cohesion, acceptance, positive conflict, and negative conflict communication emerged as significant predictors, p < .001, accounting for 40% of the total variance. For social cohesion, distinctiveness, positive conflict, and negative conflict communication were significant predictors, p < .001, accounting for 27% of the total variance. Findings provide initial evidence establishing a link between intrateam communication and cohesion in the youth sport context but more importantly suggest both similarities and differences with respect to the specific types of intrateam communication that are associated with task and social cohesion.
Spectator sport fan behavior is vast and represents one of the society’s most universal leisure activities. While event attendance and media consumption has received a great deal of attention from researchers, there is growing understanding that sport fans interact with their favorite teams in numerous other ways. Little is known, however, of what constitutes the fanatical behavior of sport spectators. Thus, there is an opportunity to understand the impassioned actions of the sport fan population to provide marketers and media providers with a better understanding of how sport fans interact with team brands beyond direct consumption. The current study aimed to discover and develop an instrument to measure spectator sport team fanaticism. Two focus groups were utilized to uncover and generate items. Three samples and an expert review were then conducted to validate the instrument. The following four unique dimensions were uncovered and preliminarily validated: instigation, superstition, committed interaction, and vicarious impact.
The well-known novelist and creative writer David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) belongs to a select group of "occasional sportswriters" whose writings about sport have influenced cultural discourse about tennis and animated future sports writing. Wallace uses three rhetorical tactics—providing knowledge to the reader as confidant, making meaning out of the athletic cliché, and translating the form of professional tennis into prose—that establish his cultural authority on tennis while positioning the athlete as a transcendent spiritual practitioner. This characterization redefines dominant understandings of the athlete’s relationship to religion and the spectator’s relationship to the athlete, while discarding the possibility of recognizing the athlete as citizen.
In this editorial essay, Communication and Sport Editor-in-Chief Lawrence Wenner reflects on the trajectory and role of the journal since its inception in 2012 and first publication in 2013. Considered are how the contours of Communication and Sport as a scholarly project were defined in important ways by an inaugural double issue in 2013 that featured key figures in the development of communication and sport as an articulated and important area of inquiry and have been given further shape by key studies, special issues and research forums published in the journal’s first three years. The latter part of the essay considers the maturation and rising interest in the journal over its first four years of publication and how this drove the move, in year five, to publish six issues a year beginning in 2017.
In June 2012, Title IX celebrated its 40th anniversary to much fanfare nationwide, particularly in sporting circles. The event generated widespread news coverage, and journalists thus played a key role in situating the story of not only the law’s beginnings but its place in contemporary gender politics. This study examines the public memory of Title IX, as told in mainstream media outlets in the weeks surrounding the law’s anniversary. Using the concept of intersectionality as an analytical lens, we argue that the logic of Title IX at 40 gives rise to a narrative of progress that universalizes the experiences of girls and women and situates discrimination as an historic relic while also celebrating and rewarding apoliticism.
Women remain underrepresented in sport media despite increased opportunities in other facets of sport and journalism. Further, women who have held positions in sport media are often perceived as being less credible than men in the field. In an effort to understand why these perceptions exist, the present study examined the influence of gender-role stereotyping and sexism on perceived sportscaster credibility. Using a posttest-only quasi-experimental design, 544 participants watched a video of a basketball debate between a male and female sportscaster, in addition to assessing the credibility of these sportscasters. Participant attitudes toward the sportscaster, gender-role stereotyping, and sexism as well as media consumption intentions were also measured. Results indicated that participants’ endorsement of gender stereotypes and level of sexism had a negative effect on the perceived credibility of the female sportscaster. Credibility was also found to have a significant relationship with attitudes toward the sportscaster, which in turn was related to media consumption intentions.
This study examined the experiences of Northeast Ohio residents when LeBron James announced he was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2010 and then returned in 2014, through the lens of parasocial relationships (PSRs). One hundred thirty-seven people who either grew up in or currently resided in the Northeast Ohio reported about their experiences when LeBron James announced he was leaving Cleveland to play in Miami in 2010, as well as their experiences when he announced his return to Cleveland in 2014. Results indicated the more intense a PSR with James was, the more invested in him individuals were. Additionally, experiencing a parasocial breakup was positively related to having feelings of grief after James left. The results of this study extend previous research on PSRs to a new realm and help explain why some sports fans might react negatively when finding out their favorite player is no longer playing with their favorite team.
The lack of appropriate measurement to assess athlete-coach interaction and athletes’ psychological states has historically plagued sport studies research (i.e., an encompassing term for sport psychology, management, sociology, and communication) and may partially explain the lack of empirical research regarding athlete-coach interaction within the emerging field of sport communication. Without valid and reliable tools to assess athlete-coach interactions, understanding the antecedents and outcomes of these relationships, which is a central aim of sport communication research, cannot be accomplished. This article develops and demonstrates validity for a measure of the coach confirmation instrument (CCI) via two studies. In Study 1, an exploratory factor analysis and parallel analysis produced a 15-item, two-factor measure (challenge and acceptance). In Study 2, a confirmatory factor analysis confirmed this two-factor structure had an acceptable-to-good fit using a variety of fit indices. Additionally, preliminary degrees of validity for the CCI were demonstrated through Pearson correlations with athletes’ feeling of being confirmed, coach satisfaction, and perceptions of coach verbal aggression. Collectively, these studies indicate the CCI is a structurally stable measure, which demonstrates good reliability and initial degrees of face, concurrent, convergent, discriminant, and content validity.
The word puto introduced semantic controversy into the 2014 World Cup. The word has been equated by some to a homophobic slur among the ranks of fag and faggot. American media and equality activists petitioned the use of the word in Entertainment and Sports Programming Network and Univision broadcasts. Mexican soccer fans who used the word in a chant during matches argue that the word has no homophobic context in its use and is instead geared at distracting the opposing team. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) opened up an investigation into the use of the word by Mexican soccer fans and concluded that it was not a violation of their code of conduct and permitted its use; however, debate around the word still exists. Even though the debate was covered thoroughly by American media, stories failed to express the views and perspectives of those in support of the chant. The current study employed a textual analysis of tweets defending the chat that included the hashtag #FIFAputos. Employing the theoretical lens of McCormack’s homosexually themed language, the findings add nuance to the cultural, temporal, and spatial context of semantic meaning. Four themes also organically evolved from the analysis.
Football player safety, specifically concussions, has been a growing area of debate in U.S. mainstream media. Whereas many of these discussions are centered on the health effects experienced by former players, active National Football League (NFL) players often discursively minimize concussions. However, in March 2015, 24-year-old, San Francisco 49ers player Chris Borland voluntarily retired, specifically citing concerns about the health risks associated with concussions sustained while playing football. A textual analysis of 112 digital media and 187 print media articles revealed 10 frames that were used to discuss Borland’s decision. Analysis revealed that the most prominent frame used in media outlets was centered on the health risks and consequences of playing football, while other frames discussed parental choice and social mobility associated with football. The results suggest that decisions by NFL players with respect to concussions can be framed in the context of larger social and cultural issues. As this occurs, conversations around safety, masculinity, and football move beyond the microlevel of participation, capturing macrolevel elements, such as parental consent, socioeconomic status, and health prioritization that factor into football participation.
Not only are college student-athletes expected to excel on the field and in the classroom, but, as reflections of their university, they must abide by codes of conduct that govern their emotions and communicative behaviors. Interviews of Division I athletes at an academically and athletically elite U.S. university uncovered that similar to employees in the retail and hospitality industries, who are paid to express particular emotions, student-athletes also had to perform emotional labor in order to meet institutional demands. Unlike paid workers, however, student-athletes are considered amateurs and do not receive a salary, and their behaviors are scrutinized most of the day, particularly if they are high-profile players. Despite the powerlessness, frustration, and nervousness student-athletes felt, they were expected to express mental toughness and gratitude. Participants coped with emotional labor demands by turning backstage and relying on teammates for social support. In addition to extending emotional labor research to a new context, this study offers several practical applications, underscoring the need for university athletics departments to prepare and assist student-athletes with the performance and negotiation of emotional labor.
This article aims to develop a better understanding of how sport fans perceive events’ social media presence. An online qualitative survey was conducted with sport fans (n = 105) of four professional tennis events (Australian Open, Roland Garros, Wimbledon, and U.S. Open). Findings suggest that fans perceive the events’ usage of social media to be about three aspects: interaction, insight, and brand anthropomorphism. In addition, fan responses suggest that while Facebook is the most popular site for general social media usage, these fans consider Twitter to be their most preferred platform to follow the events. Finally, fan responses illustrate three barriers that brands need to overcome in order to successfully develop and execute their social media strategy: competition with other media, a lack of year-round incentives, and technological capabilities of the platforms, which ultimately influenced fans’ motives and use.
Substantial research indicates that women’s sports and female athletes gain only a small fraction of sports media coverage worldwide. Research that has examined why this is the case suggested this can be attributed to three particular factors that govern sports newswork: the male-dominated sports newsroom, ingrained assumptions about readership, and the systematic, repetitive nature of sports news. This study sought to explore women’s sports coverage using a different perspective, exploring cases where women’s sports gained coverage. It identified Australian newspapers that published more articles on women’s sports, relative to their competitors, and conducted interviews with both journalists and editors at these newspapers. It found that small, subtle changes to the three newswork elements that had previously relegated the coverage of women’s sports now facilitated it. This research provides evidence that, at least in some newspapers in Australia, sports newswork has developed to include the coverage of women’s sports.
The fantasy sport industry has grown rapidly in the past decade, now boasting 56 million participants in North America alone. More recently, the ascent of fantasy sport appears directly attributable to the rise of new websites offering daily/weekly fantasy games. This study surveys 438 fantasy participants—some who play traditional fantasy sports and others who participate in daily fantasy sports along with traditional forms of fantasy offerings. Results reveal that motivations for play do not differ between traditional and daily participants, yet the two sets of respondents differed in terms of media consumption, economic commitment, and perceptions of games being skill versus chance based. Ramifications are offered not only based on the differences in financial investment but also regarding the seeming downturn in motivations for traditional fantasy sport participation.
The continuing revelations of performance-enhancing drug (PED) use by high-profile athletes have forced many to question the collective portrayal of elite athletes. Professional cyclists must confront a suspicious public that often labels them as "dopers" and deviant. Drawing from interviews with professional cyclists, this article describes the interactional processes by which professional cyclists confront and manage stigma in everyday settings. Riders employed management techniques of distancing, educating, and normalization in attempts to repair a spoiled identity. Riders concurrently attempted to promote a positive new image of the sport, coalescing around the term Clean Cycling. In doing so, Clean Cycling functioned much like a commercial "brand" wherein riders position themselves as ambassadors of the Clean Cycling brand, building positive brand recognition among the public, while linking the brand to their own identity. Although not contesting the label of PED use as deviant, riders resisted the application of the "doper" label to themselves while attempting to redefine the procycling occupation as positive and worthwhile.
Social support is an important resource that coaches provide to athletes. However, the specific messages that coaches utilize to support athletes have remained overlooked. This study examines the memorable messages (i.e., enduring and influential messages) of informational, esteem, and emotional support that former high school athletes recall receiving from their head coaches. To accomplish this purpose, messages were inductively derived from 102 former high school athletes via open-ended questionnaires. These data were subjected to open and axial coding. Results indicate that athletes recall informational support messages that tell them how to play, be successful, and relate to others; esteem support messages that emphasize their abilities to succeed, encourage intangible qualities, and reinforce relationships with others; and emotional support messages that improve their well-being, praise them, help improve their performances, and deal with their poor performances. This study ultimately reinforces the use of message-based approaches for understanding athlete–coach interactions as well as highlights the specific types of prosocial messages that coaches can utilize to support athletes and improve their coaching effectiveness.
The scandalous events surrounding the 65th Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Congress in Zurich in mid-2015 produced an enormous quantity of media coverage. While few have a deep level of knowledge of FIFA’s history or governance, this global story worked effectively as narrativized media characterization by often constructing a comic view of FIFA President Joseph S. Blatter. Although entertaining, this coverage mainly served to highlight the substantial failure of most of the news media, and especially of sports journalism, to deal seriously with the institutional politics of sport. This article analyses the media’s roles and responsibilities regarding sport as a key sociocultural institution and the media’s relationships with sports organizations, sportspeople, governments, commercial corporations, sport fans, and the wider citizenry. It considers the potential of sports communication and journalism education to change the dynamics of reporting everyday issues and eruptive scandals in sport. Ethical conduct in sport organizations and, particularly, in the hosting of mega sports events like the FIFA World Cup, should, it is argued, be addressed consistently by an inquiring and sceptical media. Above all, the media must beware of succumbing to the temptations of complacency and complicity in the games with which they are engaged.
This study compares how U.S. daily newspaper sports journalists covered the coming out of National Basketball Association (NBA) veteran Jason Collins and college football All-American Michael Sam by utilizing a two-dimensional framing measurement scheme. A content analysis of 248 articles published in the first 30 days after each athlete’s announcement found that individual and present frames dominated for both and that Sam’s announcement was covered more extensively. Although sports journalism is often criticized for lacking a critical perspective, the results show evidence that a significant amount of the coverage went beyond the basics of each athlete’s announcement and addressed some of the pertinent issues facing gay athletes in the National Football League and NBA.
Action sport participants have always been actively involved in the consumption and production of niche cultural media. However, the proliferation of new media technologies is playing an evermore important role in the ongoing progression of skills among athletes and committed recreational participants, and building a sense of community among enthusiasts and audiences across local, national, and global contexts. More than repeating previous patterns, such media technologies are contributing to new relationships between corporations, action sporting bodies, and communities. This article sets out a research agenda for understanding new media developments in action sports. In the first part of this article, I detail how new digital media are being used by corporations, athletes, and everyday participants, and in so doing, are transforming the networks and connections within and across action sport communities. In the second, I describe how new media technologies such as GoPros™, camera drones, and GPS tracking devices are changing action sport experiences and the relationship between "human" and "nonhuman" sporting bodies. As well as revealing emerging issues, this article also poses a series of critical questions and challenges to researchers interested in contributing to new understandings of the latest media technologies in action sport cultures.
Drawing on the literature on American nationalism and the social identity perspective, this study examines the effects of mediasport on nationalized attitudes, using both rhetorical and experimental approaches. First, a rhetorical analysis examined the nationalistic themes featured in the game promotional ad of the United States versus Ghana soccer match in World Cup 2014, linking these themes to the republicanism/liberalism paradox in American political thought. Using the social identity perspective, we predicted the effects of these themes on U.S. participants’ nationalized attitudes and tested our hypotheses using an experiment. Experimental findings indicate that exposure to nationalistic rhetoric indirectly increases uncritical patriotism, critical patriotism, and support of militarism attitudes via self-enhancement gratifications. Additionally, exposure to nationalistic rhetoric also indirectly influences uncritical patriotism via social uncertainty reduction gratifications. Our study demonstrates the utility of a mixed-method approach and points out directions for future research on the (re)construction of social identities through mediasport.
This study analyzes the response by the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) after its top officials were arrested for corruption early in 2015. FIFA’s response included President Sepp Blatter’s brief address to FIFA Congress. In the days that followed, Mr. Blatter also gave a television interview and appeared in other media events where he attempted to repair the organization’s image. The analysis focuses on the effectiveness of FIFA’s attempt at image repair. First, it uses Benoit’s image repair theory (IRT) to analyze FIFA’s rhetoric. Second, it conducts a thematic analysis of content from 215 publications in eight newspapers selected from four continents during three crises stages. The results indicate that FIFA failed in its attempt to repair its image following the corruption crisis.
This study examines the amount of coverage given to women’s sports by local television sports broadcasters on Twitter. A total of 19,649 tweets from 201 local sports broadcasters throughout the United States were examined using content analytic methods during a constructed 2-week period. Results demonstrated that while a majority of the local sports broadcasters did tweet about women’s sports, these tweets represented only about 5% of the overall number of messages. Further examination demonstrates that female sports broadcasters tweeted about women’s sports less frequently than male sports broadcasters did. Additionally, broadcasters in smaller cities were more likely to report about women’s sports than those in larger cities. While results are consistent with previous research on gender representation on nationally televised highlight shows, these findings are significant because they demonstrate that there is a relationship between gender of broadcaster and market size in relation to the number of tweets about women’s sports. Additionally, data are from Twitter, in which there are no time constraints that would seemingly limit the amount of women’s sports that could be mentioned by a sportscaster.
This study examines international newspaper coverage of the 2013 European Basketball Championship for men. Generalist broadsheet newspapers in 13 countries on five continents were examined over the course of 1 year (from August 2012 until September 2013) to understand the amount and content of coverage dedicated to this major event. Results show that the host country, Slovenia, dedicated the most extensive coverage to the EuroBasket, followed by Croatia, a neighboring country. Media interest in other countries was very limited and focused almost exclusively on competitive aspects of the tournament (as opposed to organizational, tourist, or cultural angles). Of the newspapers examined, only five covered the event in the months leading up to it and only four reported the final outcome of the tournament. Generalist broadsheets thus displayed limited interest in the competition, contradicting organizers’ assertions and popular belief of widespread promotional and economic benefits deriving from the event. Newspapers from countries that fielded teams at the event overwhelmingly focused on their performances. As setters of the public agenda, mainstream broadsheets exhibit very limited interest in the myriad major sports events organized worldwide. Hosting such events are not by default the promotional and economic boon organizers argue and the public believes.
This research applied muted group theory to investigate female and male athletes’ experiences with not reporting concussions sustained during athletic competition. Using snowball-sampling techniques, a total of 365 women and 247 men completed an online open-ended questionnaire about their reasons for not reporting a concussion. Results indicated that male athletes were more likely to continue to play through and not report a concussion than female athletes. Participants also indicated that they did not report concussions due to (a) perceived lack of resources, (b) perceived lack of severity, (c) conformance to sport cultural norms, which was comprised of two subthemes: adherence to the pain principle and team allegiance. The results suggest that efforts to address concussion management in sport need to focus on the communicative and structural elements that privilege hegemonic masculinity and playing through pain, as they contribute to muting athletes in advocating for their health.
The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of social media in Chinese sports journalism. After distributing an online survey using a snowball sampling technique, a total of 133 Chinese sports journalists working in print media participated in this study. The results indicated that news gathering was reported as a primary motivation to use social media. Weibo and WeChat, two localized social networking tools, were the most commonly used tools among participants. Nearly half of participating sports journalists admitted that monitoring information on social media increased their pressure level and created workloads. The majority of sports journalists believed social media had weakened their gatekeeping role due to the increase in citizen journalists and the increase in channels and sources that users obtain news and information. The study also found that the relationship between journalists and athletes has also been altered with the advent of social media.
This article asks the following question: When we compare the contemporary political challenges associated with sexual identity to the civil rights history embodied in Jackie Robinson, what shape do the politics of sexuality take? This article argues that through Jackie Robinson, Michael Sam mobilizes the political rhetoric of respectability, the notion that inclusion is the meaning of social struggle and that it is achieved in enacting the rhetorical and behavioral norms modeled in straight White men. Respectability works to domesticate the imagery associated with gay sexuality, to figure the citizen as a model of comportment which relies for its appeal on the civil rights movement as queer sexuality’s map through politics. Moreover, Sam’s circulation through public discourse is marked by a carefully managed stage presence, a phenomenon which, I believe, disavows critiques of neoliberal capitalism by attaching Sam’s sexuality to meanings that might generate economic value. Although the allusion to Robinson presupposes a discursive frame in which Sam’s race and sexuality are merely incidental to each other, taking it seriously is worthwhile not only by examining the rhetorical work the comparison performs but also by tugging at the hidden stitches that hold it together.
A second screen is defined as a second electronic device used by audience members while watching a television program. While second screen use during sport programming is on the rise, current understanding of second screen use and engagement is lacking. Thus, in an attempt to extend Niche Theory, the current study employs a structural equation model to further understanding of second screen use. Further, to better understand the outcome of second screen use, the current study examines the relationship between team identification, engagement, and self-efficacy with second screen use. Results suggest that engagement and self-efficacy both have a direct influence on attitude, whereas team identification and self-efficacy have a positive impact on engagement. Each of the hypothesized relationships is tested individually as well as in a theoretically constructed model of engagement and use.
This article offers a discussion on the application of semiotics to sport and communication studies. It considers the theoretical orientations of semiotics and the key analytical foci to which semiotic research pays attention. Initially, this article reviews a linguistic theory of structuralism and poststructuralism. It also contemplates three paired concepts within the semiotic discipline that are particularly relevant to sport communication research. These include (1) the notion of denotation and connotation, (2) metaphoric and metonymic signs, and (3) syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. This article also considers Derrida’s notions of différance and deconstruction. In addition, this article presents a case study of analysing the content of the Procter and Gamble Company’s marketing communication campaign associated with the Olympics in order to show how the conceptual tools of semiotics can be used for sport and communication studies. This case study indicates that the Olympic sponsor’s commercial messages naturalise the gender order underpinned by the notion of hegemonic masculinity. This work concludes that while semiotics is, by no means, a research tool without limitations, it can be a useful interpretative method for analysing meaning-making processes in sport communication and for identifying underlying ideological assumptions embedded in sport as a cultural text.
Based on the idea that the political success of the anti-doping movement might be reflected in an increasing moralization of media discourses, the article traces long-term trends in the German doping discourse. Thus, a unique text corpus covering the period between 1950 and 2009 is analyzed using a corpus linguistic (CL) approach. It is shown that attention for doping has heavily increased and that doping has been marked as persistent and widespread problem subject to permanent efforts of mitigation. However, there is little evidence for more alarmist moralizations. While quantitative CL techniques proved useful for tracing long-term changes in language use, assessing the role of media within the political economy of the moral regulation of doping requires a more ambitious mix of quantitative and qualitative methods. Nevertheless, the use of CL by scholar of sport communication is recommended, as CL methods are able to process large amounts of digitized data and are quite flexible in theoretical terms.
Lovemarks are brands and products that have high levels of love and respect and evoke a loyalty beyond reason response from consumers. These are products and brands that consumers are devoted and emotionally connected to with disregard for competitors, price change, or controversy. In the world of sport, loyalty beyond reason is common and seemingly required with many fan bases. In addition, athletes of all skill level are loyal to sporting goods and brands. The purpose of this exploratory research was to examine the relationship between Lovemarks and the world of sport. Outcomes of this research aim to assist sport managers and communication specialists in (a) breaking through advertising clutter, (b) recognizing and utilizing fan emotion for good, and (c) segmenting advertising and marketing campaigns into attainable subgroups. Utilizing a content analysis to analyze 668 open-ended nominations of sport-related products, brands, teams, venues, and people to Lovemarks.com, researchers uncovered themes and top-coded categories of love and respect. Practical and theoretical application and implications are discussed.
Since 1972, when the U.S. Congress passed Title IX, girls’ and women’s participation in sport exponentially increased. Yet, major gender inequities remain, including in media coverage. Feminist sports media scholars have pointed to journalists’ resistance toward Title IX as one explanation for these inequities. To further examine the relationship between Title IX and coverage of women’s sport, this study draws upon oral history interviews with 14 sports journalists who worked at newspapers in one major media market in the United States before and after the implementation of Title IX. In their memories, journalists incorporated two dominant cultural narratives: conflict narratives, which position gains in women’s sports against losses in men’s sports, and celebratory narratives, which uncritically embrace Title IX as a catalyst for girls and women in sport. Although all agreed that Title IX had a positive impact upon women’s sports, few believed Title IX actually changed coverage. This study points to the limitations of applying Title IX’s gender equity framework to sports journalism and calls for a reassessment in advocacy efforts toward gender justice.
The fight against doping has been one of the most profound challenges in the world of (media-) sports. However, communication research has not addressed the mediated attribution of responsibility for this problem. Drawing on the distinction between episodic and thematic framing, this study analyzes the attribution of responsibility in three quality German national newspapers. We find that responsibility for causing performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) use is equally attributed to the individual and systemic levels, while responsibility for finding solutions is directed at the systemic level. Individual responsibility attributions occur more frequently in articles with an episodic news frame. Given the often proclaimed ambiguous role of the media with regard to PED use, the study attaches particular importance to the self-attribution of responsibility by the media. Our findings show that the media neglect to discuss their own role and do not see themselves as responsible for the problem of doping. This study demonstrates that the investigation of mediated responsibility attribution provides a fruitful new approach to the research on media and PED use in sports.
Intersectional accounts of how women sports fans from diverse cultural backgrounds are represented remain largely unconsidered in fandom literature. This article examines an Australian advertisement for the 2015 Cricket World Cup, which features as its main protagonists female cricket fans supporting a variety of countries. It makes use of a transnational feminist cultural studies paradigm to frame a discussion of how commercial sports media narratives situate these fans as "ordinary." In considering how the multicultural female sports fan is configured as ordinary in the Australian sporting context, I demonstrate the ways in which narratives of gender and nation are mobilized to situate multicultural women as marginal to both the Australian nation and cricket, despite the prominence given to ethnically diverse women in the advertisement. This manoeuvre, I argue, responds to the cultural and economic transformations of cricket globally, simultaneously denying and universalizing difference as a mechanism to assuage the anxieties generated by the decentering of Western power in international cricket.
This study examines sportsmanship and ethics on the digital playing field of Strava—a mobile fitness application (app) that records bicycle rides and uploads the data to an online network of other users. Specifically, the study utilizes a social shaping and construction of technology theoretical framework to investigate and discuss how users of Strava communicatively negotiate what it means to be an ethical user of the technology. Drawing on interviews and participant observations of 47 users of the cycling-focused fitness app, the study presents how users perceive and understand online and off-line actions in terms of ethical conduct. Findings indicate that users view actions as indeterminate or disreputable. While disreputable actions are considered outright cheating, indeterminate actions remain in a gray area that is ethically questionable. The study details how the communicative features of Strava allow users to enact sportsmanship through kudos (e.g., congratulatory comments) and refereeing (e.g., flagging user data). This article concludes by offering examples of how relevant social groups are beginning to shape the sports technology.
The Vuelta a España is one of the three cycling Grand Tours, a long-established (first staged in 1935) and global sports mega event. Nonetheless, in the mid-noughties, it went through a financial and identity crisis, which culminated with the French company, Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), the organizer of the Tour de France, taking over the Spanish race in 2008. This research, an in-depth case study based on semistructured interviews and analysis of all the relevant corporate documentation and online activity, aims at shedding light on how the new ASO management has refloated the race through a reinforcement of its globalization and mediatization, on the lines of the managerial policies already in place for the Tour de France since the early 80s. This article also proposes a small theoretical refinement of the "mega sporting event" concept, moving from a binary, yes–not typology, to a four-level scale including micro (local), meso (provincial/subnational), macro (national or regional), and mega (global) sporting events. In this sense, this article concludes that the communication strategies set up by the new ASO management have pushed the Vuelta beyond the macro and towards the mega level.
Cricketer Phillip Hughes died after being struck by a ball in a match, triggering a rare example of commemorative journalism of an Australian athlete in his prime. This case study explores the perceptions of print and online cricket journalists who covered the story, providing an analysis of how their emotions influenced their reporting of an event they were professionally and personally involved in. Employing this approach differs from the dominant focus of examining content in commemorative journalism scholarship. The circumstances of the Hughes story created an unfamiliar environment for cricket journalists, who had to deal with their own emotions while being messengers to audiences in Australia, and across the world. The impact of social media also altered the direction of aspects of the coverage through the Twitter hashtag #putoutyourbats. To examine elements of this commemorative journalism example, in-depth interviews were conducted with 11 Australian cricket journalists. The results reflect the respondents’ difficulties in covering the story, their usage of emotion in their work, and their perceptions of social media’s influence.
Social media have been said to rival traditional media in the realm of sports. Actual evidence for a change in consumption patterns, though, remains scarce. This study investigates college students’ use of multiple distribution systems in the context of sports. More specifically, the relative importance of Twitter in relation to television is assessed. In addition, variables potentially predicting a greater reliance on Twitter are analyzed. Results indicate that television remains the primary distribution system for sports and that the importance of Twitter might have been overstated. The use of social media does not diminish the consumption of traditional sports broadcasts but is positively correlated. Finally, results of a regression analysis find that a subset of individuals is more likely to rely on Twitter depending on their tendency to engage in parasocial interactions, their Twitter use patterns, and their perceived expertise in sports.
Social identification–based theories (fan identification and nationalism) were used to delineate whether degrees of sports fandom and/or national identity are significant predictors for television consumption of the 2014 Fédération Internationale de Football Association World Cup. A national survey of 490 respondents was conducted at three different time periods (10 weeks before the start of the World Cup, the start of the World Cup, and immediately following Team USA’s first World Cup match) to determine whether planned media consumption of the World Cup shifted based on levels of fan identification and nationalized qualities. Using structural equation modeling, increased nationalized qualities across two of the factors (nationalism and internationalism) increased World Cup fan identification, resulting in predicting higher planned television consumption of this international megasporting event. Nationalized identity alone had no significant result on predicting television consumption of international sport. Ramifications for theory, as well as conclusions related to deciphering the complex formulation of national identity and sports fandom, are offered.
Despite its ubiquitous presence in mediated sports, the influence of in-stadium crowd response on media audiences has escaped inquiry. Considerable evidence from both within and beyond the context of sports suggests that a co-spectator’s behavior can generate "intra-audience effects" that enhance perceptions of and response to game events. To test this in the context of broadcast sports, an experiment was conducted whereby participants provided moment-to-moment evaluations of radio broadcasts of soccer where mediated spectator response was systematically altered. Results demonstrate mediated intra-audience effects that yielded both inflated perceptions of the exiting nature of play and increased sense of spatial immersion in the mediated environment. The effect was most pronounced when game events were not intrinsically exciting.
In the last few decades, our exposure to sport has increased dramatically through advancements in television, Internet, and mobile technologies. This rise in exposure and accessibility has increased biological knowledge among sport "fans," a concept I use broadly, and complicated our relationship with sport. Using Rose’s notion of biological citizenship, which draws on Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics and biopower, I introduce "biological fandom" as a way to think about the intensification of bioknowledge in and around sport. As a problem space where various relationships of power intersect, biofandom creates new forms of knowledge, surveillance, and ethical problems. In this article, I sketch the relations of power that create biological fandom. First, I focus on aspects of the media that are concerned with quantifying the bodies of athletes and new biomedical treatments in sports medicine. Second, within this larger media context, I proceed to explore what I see as a particularly concentrated manifestation of biofandom, fantasy sports. Using examples from fantasy sports media, I argue that biological fandom perpetuates neoliberal norms that encourage self-work and individualism among "biofans," while also fetishizing the individual athlete and creating undifferentiated athletic masses.
In sports, there is an extensive interest in identifying and selecting talented children in order to develop elite adult athletes. The process of selecting and screening talents involves not only physical and technical skills but also efforts to find adequate personality traits. Therefore, different types of performance appraisal interviews (PAIs) are becoming increasingly common within the field. Departing from fieldwork in two selection camps for Swedish youth national teams in soccer and hockey, we will take a closer look at the PAIs employed during these camps. This article takes on a narrative approach, emphasizing PAI as a narrative genre and a framework for a specific form of interaction. Our findings show how eligibility is performed in interaction through following three practices: (i) showcasing gratitude without tipping into flattery, (ii) using temporality as a way of displaying developmental potential, and (iii) adopting the role of the self-reflecting subject. This genre of interviews not only produces certain practices but also preferred subject positions and narratives. The PAI is thus a narrative genre where the players are encouraged to perform talent in order to appear selectable.
The social media application Snapchat has ascended rapidly, quickly becoming the third most utilized platform of millennials with a valuation as high as US$19 billion. A national survey of 125 respondents revealed that people using Snapchat to follow sports devote roughly the same amount of time to the platform as Facebook and more time than Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest. Despite finding other platforms better for sport information seeking, relaxation, and interaction, respondents still reported using Snapchat as a main platform for facilitating sport fandom. Both sport fandom and identification bolstered likelihood of using Snapchat for sport-related interactions. Implications for communication and sport scholars and industry professionals are offered.
Using the concept of mediatization, in this article, we analyze the relationship between sport and media from a sport-centered perspective. Examining the autobiographies of 14 German and English soccer players, we investigate how athletes use media outlets, what they perceive as the media’s influence and its logic, and—crucially—how this usage and these perceptions affect their own media-related behavior. Our findings demonstrate the important role of the media for the sports systems from the athlete’s point of view and demonstrate the research potential of mediatization as a fruitful concept in studies on sport communication. On the one hand, the sport stars reflect in their autobiographies that their status and income depend on media coverage; and on the other hand, they complain about the omnipresence of the media, especially offside the pitch and feel unfairly treated by the tabloid press, both in England and in Germany.
Despite increasing female participation in English football (aka soccer), the sport remains rooted in the values and discursive practices of orthodox masculinity. This is exemplified by the English Football Association (FA), which has been criticized for its ineffective responses to addressing the inclusion and progression of women as players and workers within the organization. Female membership in male-dominated organizations is not readily achieved, given the dominance of masculinist discourses and the risks of overtly challenging these. In this study, we explored the discursive management of gendered and/or footballing identities from interviews with participants in an English regional FA’s women-only football coach education program. All of the participants described the peripheral positioning of women in English football. Analysis identified evidence of both collaboration with and resistance to the dominant masculinist discourses in the accounts of their experiences in football, while also reproducing the most valued footballing identities and knowledge as male. We connect this to the complexities of negotiating and managing gendered identities for women in male-dominated organizations. All of the participants described the value and benefits of women-only coach education and the majority noted they would prefer women-only coach education in future.
This article explores the transforming effects of digital media in sports organizations. The approach to this is an analytical focus on a wide range of sports, which are examined from an institutional and organizational approach to mediatization theory. On the basis of an empirical study of governing sports organizations (national sports federations), it is demonstrated that digital media are a major concern across organizations and that a new wave of mediatization is taking place in sports. Still, many organizations struggle with this and currently find themselves in a state of flux, trying to involve employees, volunteers, and external partners with communication competencies in their activities in various ways, on many levels, and for many varying purposes. Consequently, one of the significant effects of digital media is a dispersion of communication involving more people and concurrent increase in internal complexity in many organizations. Mediatization is therefore a process that is very much in operation at many levels and at various speeds, but it also takes organizations in diverse directions. Using Thornton and Ocasio’s interinstitutional approach and concept of institutional logics, it is argued and demonstrated that this is because these sports organizations have other relevant and powerful institutional partners or organizations that need to be considered in the process as well.
In this article, I examine the ways sport fans construct and circulate discourses of race and masculinity in cyberspace. I do this through an examination of a set of Internet memes that juxtapose the bodies of National Hockey League players with National Basketball Association players in one single image. I argue these memes celebrate White masculinity, while at the same time constructing African American athletes as individualistic, selfish, and unwilling to sacrifice their bodies for the greater good of the team. More so, I argue that these memes construct a form of racial ideology that is representative of White backlash politics.
The National Basketball Association (NBA) has a conflicted history navigating issues of race and Black identity. When audiotapes were released with Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling making racist comments, fans and players threatened to boycott playoff games. Within 4 days, the new NBA Commissioner Adam Silver banned Sterling for life. While Silver was lauded for his decision, coverage ignored the underlying structural issues that uphold inequality in the NBA. This article reviews recent communication and sport scholarship examining race and the NBA. By examining Silver’s decision using Kenneth Burke’s Terms of Order (1961), this article argues that the NBA continues to ignore how racism operates in the league.
Swimmer Dara Torres’s comeback to her sport at 41 years of age was a prominent story from the 2008 Beijing Olympics. While her record making swims made her comeback an athletic success, the importance of her comeback extends beyond her athletic accomplishments. Media representations of Torres during her comeback construct her body and the lifestyle that produced it as inspirational—or fitspirational. Although the term circulates widely in U.S. popular culture, and despite its importance in reframing what a woman’s ideal body is and how it is achieved, fitspiration has not received much attention from scholars. In this article, we use the constructed narrative of Torres’s 2008 comeback to demonstrate how notions of individualism, self-monitoring practices, personal responsibility, and empowerment in conjunction with long-standing ideological portrayals of women athletes erase social inequalities and perpetuate heteronormative ideals. The constructed narrative produces her as a fitspirational figure whom American women should emulate. Furthermore, this process transforms Torres from an elite athlete to a mom who used sport to regain her fitness. Her status as an elite athlete is marginalized and her body becomes attainable through the representation of her age and motherhood as barriers that can be overcome through self-monitored consumptive practices.
Sports journalists have long enjoyed close—many would say too close—relationships with their sources. As suggested by a neoinstitutionalist, understanding of organizational relationships, routines, and professional expectations become accepted over time by journalists and sports organizations alike. However, new competition from online media, as well as new opportunities for teams to bypass the media, have threatened the legitimacy of journalists and their work practices. A survey of 437 reporters and communications personnel found key differences in the ways those in the professions perceived access, suggesting that traditional work patterns are evolving in ways that could delegitimate journalists inside and outside sports.
This study examined points of attachment (POA), or how sports fans experience multiple types of identification beyond team allegiance (e.g., identification with players, coaches, levels of sport, the sport itself, and university/region) at different levels of fandom. More specifically, high school, collegiate (i.e., National Collegiate Athletic Association), and professional (i.e., National Football League) football fans (N = 698) were asked to respond to items that have been associated with six POA in previous studies, as well as items that tested a new point of attachment to conference/division of a fan’s favorite team. A confirmatory factor analysis indicated that this revised seven-factor, 21-item points of attachment index demonstrated adequate overall fit. Our findings also indicated that multiple POA differed significantly among high school, collegiate, and professional football fans. Theoretical implications, future research, and limitations are also discussed.
Sport scholars have produced prolific research examining the nexus of sport, communication, and race, but this research typically centers on media content and not on fans’ engagement with that content. As sports blogs grow in popularity, it is important to understand their role in facilitating fan communication about important social issues like race. This article examines how sporting ideologies interact with the unique context of interactive blogging spaces to influence fan discourse about race, ethnicity, and sport. By examining blog content and fan discussions on seven interactive baseball blogs, I show that social expectations of sports blogs typically discouraged racial discourse, thus upholding the racial status quo. When discussions about race occurred, they proceeded differently depending on the blogging environment. Fans were hostile when discussing race in blogging environments that didn’t encourage social solidarity. If blogging environments were structured to generate community solidarity, fans were more likely to politely dismiss race or to joke about the topic, though they did show some potential for substantial, meaningful conversations about race. This research underscores the importance of understanding how unique interactive contexts of new media spaces and broader cultural meanings work together to shape fan communication about sport.
Many studies offer clear evidence that exposure to glamorized and sexualized media images results in distorted body image perceptions in girls and young women. Researchers have examined the link between sports media exposure and the negative effect on body perceptions of young girls and women, though a gap exists in the examination of the relationship between media images and positive impact. Grounded in the theories of self-objectification and social comparison, this study tested the relationships between self-objectification and body esteem and sports media exposure. Using a between-participants experimental design, this study examined how three different images of elite female athletes—performance, glamorized, and overly sexualized—impacted collegiate-level female athlete’s tendency to self-objectify and their levels of body esteem. Results suggest that less self-objectification occurs and greater body satisfaction is achieved when images of performance athletes are viewed, suggesting a need for more of these images in mainstream media.
The Olympic Games are not only the world’s biggest media event but now also the world’s largest hypermedia (online, mobile, and social media) event, too. This presents a ripe context for the proliferation of new communication technologies and creative practices, a phenomenon that has yet to receive systematic scholarly treatment. By tracing the contours of one ray from the Olympic hypermedia spectrum, the #NBCFail movement during the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, this article argues that the evolution and proliferation of the media and the voices telling the Olympic story has resulted in an extension and renegotiation of the Olympic narrative through various acts of global communicative creativity. Studying these acts not only allows us to better understand the Olympic movement as an emergent hypermedia event but also to (re)theorize creativity in an era of ubiquitous digital communication.
There has been growing attention on health and safety issues in sport, most notably football. Consequently, it is important that communication scholars attend to this topic. This research explored print media framing in response to two injury situations involving National Football League quarterbacks—Jay Cutler and Robert Griffin III. An analysis of 177 newspaper articles revealed 11 frames that were used to discuss these injuries. The most prominent frame for Cutler was support while shifting the blame was most prominent for Griffin. The results suggest that sports journalists framing of injuries could potentially be a catalyst to shift football cultural norms towards valuing players who put their health first. The results also reveal that organizations may shoulder most of the blame for players’ injuries, which suggests a short-term setback may be more beneficial in the long-term interest of the organization.
This article addresses the rise of social media in professional sport and the varying ways in which sport organizations have interacted with consumers in the social media environment. We examine one particularly interesting case: The innovative social media marketing practices of the Los Angeles Kings hockey organization, most especially through its twitter account @LAKings. Through the use of digital ethnography, we analyze and interpret official statements produced within the context of the Kings marketing and consumer strategies. We argue that the Los Angeles Kings’ social media strategy illustrates the potential collaborative efforts of an organization and its consumers in a social media space. This "coexistence" between brand and consumer provides the organization an opportunity to encourage relationship development and brand community.
The traditional view of football fans, especially in a country such as Australia, has often been an unflattering one, with fans cast as being young, male, and with a beer in one hand. This article performed a demographic analysis of television viewership within Australia’s two largest football codes, the Australian Football League and the National Rugby League, to explore the demographics of this audience more closely. This was coupled with an advertising content analysis of corresponding football telecasts to consider the degree of synchronicity between audience and advertising. The article concludes both codes have an older, male-orientated audience skew. However, given that approximately 40% of the audience is female, both codes can lay claim to a more even-gender share of viewership than might be expected, given the highly masculine and physical nature of both sports. Notably, in-game advertising largely reflects its audience, with the majority of the advertisers selling products that appeal to both men and women. Commercial breaks within the broadcasts of both codes were also found to be strongly concentrated towards a small number of leading advertisers.
This study represents an analysis of eight games from National Broadcasting Company’s broadcast of the 2010 Olympic ice hockey coverage. Since ice hockey is a sport considered to be "masculine," the study is ground in hegemonic masculinity. The visual production techniques were analyzed using Zettl’s applied media aesthetics approach to analyze camera shots, angles, motion, and replays. Results show the women’s games to be more visually exciting through the use of camera shots, angles, and slow-motion replay effects. These findings, a departure from previous research, still reinforce notions of hegemonic masculinity, portraying women’s ice hockey as the "inferior" event.
This article examines how the confluence of sports and masculinity articulates with modern capitalism in shaping subjectivities crucial to performing in the hypercompetitive corporate world. We explore how Tough Mudder, as part of a larger matrix of power relations, provides a site that allows participants to gain rhetorical proof of their "fitness" within that world. Furthermore, our purpose is to demonstrate how the logic of neoliberal capitalism is reflected within Tough Mudder challenges that culminate in an embodied performance of discipline toward that logic. We also argue that these challenges act as "functional sites" that are specifically produced and mobilized for the training of individuals’ minds and bodies to align them with the values of a dominant political and economic order.
Sport teams by definition can be considered a type of organization; yet, the incorporation of an organizational perspective has not been utilized to examine athletes’ interactions. The current study utilizes leader–member exchange theory as theoretical lens to examine the influence that athlete–coach communication has on relationships and communication with coaches and teammates. A sample of 158 former high school athletes produced results that indicate that athletes with in-group relationships with coaches report more satisfaction and symmetrical communication with coaches, and more task cohesion, social cohesion, and cooperative communication with teammates. These results highlight the importance of athlete–coach communication for influencing perceptions of relationships and communication with coaches and teammates.
In 2012, South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius became the first double amputee to compete in both the Olympic and the Paralympic Games. Using the theoretical notions of framing and hegemony, this study used a thematic analysis to analyze the discourse surrounding Pistorius’s competitions. Using the National Broadcasting Company’s (NBC) broadcasts of the Olympics and Paralympics, as well as the Channel 4 broadcast of the Paralympics, several prominent themes emerged from the analysis. NBC’s broadcasts featured stereotypical portrayals of disabled athletes, including the notion of the "supercrip," while Channel 4’s broadcast heralded Pistorius for being a legend and sided with Pistorius when controversy erupted after a race. The differences in the broadcast commentaries as well as theoretical implications are discussed.
Across the world, organizational personnel in various industries are integrating natural environment issues into existing organizational practices. In the intercollegiate sports world, environmental efforts are undertaken as part of a strategic effort involving collaborative processes across university units. The purpose of this study is to develop a more comprehensive and detailed understanding of collaborative processes and practices between personnel in athletics departments and sustainability offices at universities and colleges in the United States. In-depth interviews were conducted with athletics and sustainability department personnel at colleges and universities in the United States. A total of 13 schools were included in the study with 17 participants agreeing to be interviewed. All interviewees were from the middle management level and higher in their respective organizations. Five central themes related to these relationships were found: relationship development, relationship communication, relationship decision-making development, collaborative efforts, and relationship challenges. The themes raise important issues about the diversity of relationships, the communicative and decision-making processes, and the involvement of stakeholders in environmental efforts as well as future research in this area.
The social media platform Pinterest has emerged as a popular virtual space to showcase content found online (Hempel, 2012). Encouraging users to "pin" and comment on content featuring sports-related activities, athletes, and merchandise, Pinterest presents an opportunity for sports organizations looking to connect and build communities with fans. This study employed the relationship-marketing conceptual framework (Grönroos, 2004) to examine how four North American professional sports leagues used Pinterest over a 1-year time period to communicate as well as encourage engagement and interaction with fans. The longitudinal content analysis and chi-square analyses of 24,156 pins revealed the sports teams used Pinterest to promote the fan group experience, provide team and game information, and sell team-related merchandise. Theoretical and practical implications will be discussed, including recommendations for sports organizations seeking to engage their fans and communicate online.
Despite the ubiquitous presence of information graphics in sport telecasts, little research has explored how at-home spectators allocate attention to them or individual differences in selective attention. This study demonstrates two viewer characteristics that impact attention to information graphics in two excerpts from the 2012 World Series. Eye-tracking data reveal that although viewers universally attend to these graphics upon onset, those with greater interest in sports and sports statistics exhibited greater cognitive processing of these elements as indexed by gaze duration. Differences in selective attention provide a framework for studying attention in new sport media high in visual complexity.
In 2010, a television advertisement aired in the lead up to the 2010 World Blind Football Championships featuring the English Blind Football Team and a cat became the most controversial advert of the year. This article uses a case study approach to examine the public relations (PR) and communications activities that followed in the fallout from the advert’s broadcast. It shows how the sport organisation’s approach to PR can be characterised by a symbolic interaction approach to PR, developed post hoc, and concerned with creating a favourable impression of the organisation through the manipulation of messaging and argues that this method had questionable ameliorative impact. It further argues that for a niche sport, a more appropriate approach to PR is found in a relationship management approach to PR and communications, as this approach embeds PR at a strategic level and is an effective method for organisations seeking to take strategic control of the communications about their sport. The adoption of strategic relationship management principles to PR offers opportunities to engender a more sophisticated public understanding of disability in sport, increase its popularity, and ensure that elite athletes with a disability are able to attract sponsors and vital funds.
Unethical behavior within collegiate sports departments appears to be commonplace. Athletic programs at a number of high-profile universities have been sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association in the past decade. When athletic departments participate in corrupt behavior, the possibility of whistle-blowing exists. Although organizational scholars have developed theoretical models describing whistle-blowing processes, it is unclear whether these models accurately depict whistle-blower’s experiences in the collegiate sports industry. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to generate a model describing the experiences of whistle-blowers operating in the intercollegiate sports industry. Thirteen whistle-blowers were interviewed for this study; analysis of case studies revealed that whistle-blowing occurred over five stages and was significantly affected by the collegiate athletics context. Of particular consequence was the hypermasculine, highly competitive collegiate sports environment.
In February 2012, Jeremy Lin, the first American of Taiwanese and Chinese descent to play in the National Basketball Association (NBA), led the Knicks to seven straight victories while establishing an NBA scoring record. This study analyzes how U.S. mass media contextualized Lin’s meteoric rise in the NBA and explores assumptions grounded in the media coverage of Lin, including how race and masculinity are defined within a dominant ideological field and how notions of a hegemonic masculinity define the "other." This article looks at mass media as a site of complicity for the construction and maintenance of hegemonic masculinity by examining media representations and sports media columnists’ coverage of Jeremy Lin’s meteoric rise in the NBA from February 5 to March 15, 2012. Critical discourse analysis reveals that the majority of mainstream news media outlets did not overtly racialize Lin’s meteoric rise to stardom. However, the research uncovered several instances of racialized coverage and the incorporation of emasculation discourse to reinforce and police hegemonic notions of masculinity. Furthermore, the intense "media mania" referred to as "Linsanity" operated to preserve the dominant discourse of masculinity by confirming the "low expectations" inscribed in Asian male bodies, making Lin’s success "miraculous" and "warranting" intense media attention.
This study examined the Penn State sex abuse scandal by applying traditional crisis communication strategies, usually invoked by an organization, to the online communication of the university’s active stakeholders, sports fans. Previous findings suggest sports fans will act on behalf of an organization during a crisis. Yet, the tweets of Penn State fans showed that they turned on the university and placed their loyalty with Coach Joe Paterno. Furthermore, this study discovered that fans engaged in the ingratiation, reminder, and scapegoat strategies most befitting the typology offered by Coombs, empowering the active stakeholders in the process. Results of this case provide a warning for organizations that online fan-based crisis response may not always be enacted in their best interests.
Explorations of the intersections of disability and sport have painted a multilayered picture of crucial aspects of communication including issues of gender, health, politics, and organizational tensions. Media-focused scholarship has identified different ways that sport articulates, perpetuates, and can challenge ableist views of disabled bodies. This article explores sites for additional communication research building on work on disability and sport from outside the communication and media studies field. The scholarship on disability and sport is explored around three themes: disability sport and rehabilitation discourse; disability metaphors and stereotypes; and sport, public controversy, and disability law. Possibilities for communication-focused work around each of these themes are also explored, and a case is made for the continued emphasis on integration of feminist, queer, and critical race theory into the study of discourse around disability and sport.
The purpose of this article is to explain which American laws have been applied to four common types of collegiate student-athlete privacy invasions: education records, names or likenesses, surveillance, and forced disclosure of information. Examining cases specific to collegiate student athletes benefits sports journalism scholars by shedding light on how the collegiate sports landscape has been shaped by student-athlete privacy litigation. This knowledge can help scholars forecast news-gathering obstacles and, as a result, better understand the sports journalism environment.
espnW is ESPN, Inc.’s first initiative developed specifically for female fans and female athletes. To date, no comprehensive analysis of photographs or articles on the espnW website has been published. This study is a quantitative analysis of the first 6 months of photographs and feature articles of espnW to ascertain how the site covers athletes and sports. Results reveal that female athletes are covered photographically in unprecedented ways from mainstream media on espnW, both in frequency and in seriousness of coverage as measured by athletes in uniform, on the playing surface, and in action. Additionally, feature articles portray female athletes as serious competitors by highlighting athletic performance and psychological/emotional strengths instead of focusing on athletes’ physical appearance, family roles, or personal relationships. Although some depictions mirror past representations, where female athletes are represented more than male athletes in individual sports and more at the recreational level of sport, these factors pale in comparison to the number of factors that showcase female athletes as serious competitors.
The purpose of this study was to determine whether agenda setting was present on Twitter during the 2012 London Olympics. In order to analyze the presence of agenda setting, tweets from the @London2012 account and tweets containing #London2012 were analyzed. The @London2012 account served as the news outlet, while tweets containing #London2012 served as the unit of analysis to determine whether agenda setting was present. A content analysis of these tweets revealed significant differences between the two groups in terms of tweet focus, sports mentioned, and countries mentioned, suggesting no agenda setting presence on Twitter. Additionally, the primary affiliation of individuals utilizing #London2012 was laypeople, which aligned with previous Twitter-specific research. The implications of these and other findings will be discussed further.
Over the past several decades, media coverage of both professional and nonprofessional athletes has reached unprecedented levels. Previously unreported information about these individuals, including their behavior on and off the field, is now massively disseminated to the public for consumption. Although the extensive amount of media coverage often focuses on the athletes’ in-game performances, other information related to their individual characteristics and personal lives can be featured as well. Sports journalists can and do employ various frames that emphasize specific content in their stories; but the influence these frames have on subsequent audience evaluations pertaining to the athletes featured within them is unknown. This study will explore several important factors in the attitude formation process, including features of the media coverage itself, characteristics of the featured athletes, and characteristics of the processing audience. Implications for content producers in the media industry and directions for future research are discussed.
Since 1987 CBS has ended its television coverage of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament with "One Shining Moment," a sentimental highlight package that reflects on and celebrates the event. In 2010, CBS commissioned the popular vocalist Jennifer Hudson to sing "One Shining Moment’s" featured song, which had previously only been performed by men—most notably the R&B crooner Luther Vandross. Hudson’s performance elicited a flood of derision from critics and fans. In response, CBS reinstated Vandross’ version the following year. Building on Jonathan Gray’s theorization of media "paratexts"—the ancillary content that surrounds primary media texts—this essay considers how responses to Hudson’s 2010 performance and CBS's reaction to them secure the NCAA tournament as a male preserve while shoring up gendered anxieties about its commercialization. This instance of paratextual production, reception, and revision constructs "One Shining Moment" as a media ritual that can only be authentically conveyed and understood by men. It demonstrates sporting paratexts’ potential to reinforce and reconfigure sport’s cultural meanings and illuminates the impact that exchanges between audiences and industries can have on this contested process.
This research explored how Lance Armstrong utilized image repair strategies during 2012 and early 2013. This time frame represented a turbulent period in his career, as he faced a doping investigation by the U. S. government and later admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs during a nationally televised interview with Oprah Winfrey. Armstrong’s 859 tweets during this time period and his comments during the Oprah Winfrey interview were collected and subjected to a thematic analysis using Benoit’s image repair typology. Results indicated that via Twitter, Armstrong used attacking the accuser, bolstering, and stonewalling strategies but during the interview demonstrated contrition by employing mortification, shifting blame, simple denial, provocation, and victimization along with two newly identified strategies: conforming and retrospective regret. The results suggest that athletes who display multifaceted image repair strategies can embolden identification and attachment with followers and introduce competing media narratives surrounding their identity. However, these strategies may backfire when divergent messages are delivered in different media forums. Theoretical and practical implications will be discussed.
College sports coaches and administrators can use open letters to repair images and weather crises, especially during losing seasons. Our rhetorical analysis uses Benoit’s typology of image repair to reveal three primary strategies attempted during losing seasons: evading responsibility, reducing offensiveness, and corrective action. We take note of how open letters distributed via electronic media channels widen the audience of such letters, but also, complicate issues of timing and of targeted audience analysis. We offer five implications for scholars and practitioners, including the importance of audience analysis, the value of corrective action, the ineffectiveness of attacking accusers, and the unique value of transcendence in sport communication image repair rhetoric.
For the first time ever during the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, the mascots for each game were introduced together. The Paralympic mascot, Mandeville, and the Olympic mascot, Wenlock, are similar in appearance and construction. However, their adventures, established through online movies, highlight striking differences between the mascots and the athletes they represent. As mascots portray physical representations of the ideologies of sporting teams and events, producing two mascots for two different sets of athletic competition creates a unique situation through which to compare normative constructions. Through the online-mediated representations of Mandeville and Wenlock, the present study used rhetorical analysis to examine how the two mascots’ stories communicated specific messages to viewers about ability and disability. Within these films, those deemed as disabled are clearly otherized through injury, isolation, and displays of ability. The lens through which viewers learned about able-bodiedness and disability present a stereotypical representation of the body at best, but through the animated stories told about the two mascots, viewers’ perceptions about disabled athletes being injured, being feminine, or being incapable of managing specific tasks may have developed or been reinforced.
This study is interested in what sources of team identity formation are related to self-categorization as a sport team fan and the strength of that team identification, and what affective and psychological outcomes become salient in spectatorship scenarios. Participants were administered self-report instruments previously designed to measure team identity formation and psychological effects, then given cognitive tasks adapted from a previous study (Markus, 1977). Participants were required to return to the lab to watch highlights and lowlights of the attending football team’s season. These videos were recorded and coded for affective responses. Because previous evidence supports connections between identity formation, self-categorization/strength of identity, psychological effects, and affective responses, a generalized latent variable model was estimated. The model fit the data, exposing a mediated relationship. This study extends upon previous research by isolating specific aspects of team identity formation that differentially influence affective and communicative responses, especially when mediated by sport team identification. Findings also support the assertion that identity is related to the value and emotional attachment placed on a group membership.
This longitudinal content analysis of ESPN’s SportsCenter from 1999 to 2009 found that women’s sports continue to be almost wholly absent from the influential program. Women were also no more likely to be depicted as show hosts, reporters, or coaches in 2009 than 1999. Furthermore, coverage of women’s sports was noteworthy for a lack of journalistic depth when compared to men’s sports. This study also looked at coverage of athletes of color. Results revealed increasing evidence of the hypervisible Black male athlete in the relative absence of African Americans and other ethnic minorities in positions of power (from SportsCenter hosts to head coaches) across the two seasons. These results, when taken together, point to the perpetuation of normative hegemonic White masculinity in mediated sports.
This study investigates the unique association between female hockey fans, dominant conceptions of gender in sport, and the role of cultural intermediaries in the cultural production of media texts. In particular, it focuses on the National Hockey League’s "Inside the Warrior" advertising campaign created by marketing agency Conductor (for the relaunch of the League after the 2004–2005 lockout), that was, in part, envisioned for and marketed to target female audience. Using insights revealed through in-depth semistructured interviews with two cultural intermediaries, the critical analysis in this article focuses on how the cultural intermediaries from Conductor imagined and conceptualised female hockey fans as a target audience, engages in a comparative analysis between the creative strategies in the production of the "Inside the Warrior" campaign and characteristics of female narratives to attract a female audience, and discusses the accommodation of resistance to the stereotypical representations of gender in the "Inside the Warrior" campaign by the cultural intermediaries. These insights serve to highlight the hegemonic position of cultural intermediaries and the disjuncture between the encoding by producers and the interpretation by consumers and fans.
Postural yoga has become a very popular physical activity in the United States. In this process, yoga has also transformed into multiple different forms. In this article, I employ Foucault’s theoretical work to understand how yoga has become appropriated in the U.S. media by analyzing the covers of a popular yoga magazine, the Yoga Journal. My Foucauldian discourse analysis indicated that while the Yoga Journal covers have changed quite significantly over 35 years, the magazine appeared to offer a model for "holistic arts of living" for contemporary (middle class) Americans. These "arts" evolved into a simple life of love, joy, and inner strength in the middle of the modern distractions. However, on the Yoga Journal covers, postural yoga also developed into a practice of finding one’s "true self," creating a lithe yoga body, and becoming a conscious consumer. When read through the covers of a popular magazine, postural yoga Americanized, feminized, and commercialized into a Western fitness practice increasingly governed by the neoliberal rationale.
As technology advances, new forms of in-game advertising (IGA) executions continue to be developed. What was once simply a static advertisement has expanded to include verbal mentions of the brands placed within the games. While research has examined brand awareness of IGA, what has yet to be determined is the effectiveness of IGA which features these verbal cues. Therefore, this study examined the brand awareness levels of IGA which featured a visual brand placement (e.g., company logo placed within the game) versus those that have the visual placement accompanied by a verbal mention of the brand name. The results indicate that brand awareness levels were significantly higher for advertisements that contained both the visual and the verbal cues.
In this commentary, Karen Crouse, a sports reporter who is the full-time golf writer for the New York Times, reflects on key issues that underlie the Cooky, Messner, and Hextrum article "Women Play Sport, But Not on TV: A Longitudinal Study of Televised News Media." Crouse comments on the continued paucity of coverage for women’s sports, not only in traditional media but in today’s multimedia world. She observes, some 40 years after the passage of Title IX and significant advances in girls’ participation in high school sports, that women’s sports are infrequently covered by televised news media and, when coverage does occur, that women’s sports are devalued with female athletes often sexually objectified or trivialized. Using the example of Se Ri Pak in South Korea, Crouse suggests ways that sporting audiences can demand and facilitate change by seeing sport through the eyes of the increasing numbers of girls participating in sports who believe their achievements matter and are deserving of more parity in sports coverage.
Television viewers attend to sports programs primarily to gain emotional rewards. As not only wins but also defeats are inherently rooted in sport competitions, television viewers can be positively as well as negatively affected in their feelings when watching sports on television. Interestingly, some studies were able to show that the feelings evoked by watching sport television also influence viewers’ judgments, following feeling-as-information theory. The present study builds on these results by investigating the mood effect of viewing televised football Fédération Internationale de Football Association World Cup games on personal as well as economic estimations of viewers. A quasi-experimental design was employed, assessing the moods and estimations of viewers before and after a win and a defeat of the German national team. The results support feeling-as-information theory, as viewers reported enhanced mood and estimations after watching the victory. Results of previous studies are extended, as longer term effects are included and the mediating role of mood was explicitly tested and supported.
In this commentary reflecting on trends in covering women’s sports on television news reported in Cooky, Messner, and Hextrum’s article "Women Play Sport, But Not on TV: A Longitudinal Study of Televised News Media," Marie Hardin looks for change by exploring the gender composition of sports newsrooms and how changes in coverage of women’s sports may be integrally linked to an increase of women as sports news decision makers. She argues that for the coverage of women’s sports to increase and be framed in a more positive light, the sports newsroom must move beyond being a last bastion of hegemonic masculinity and that women, as decision makers, must reach a critical mass to meaningfully impact the culture and values of the sports journalism work environment. Hardin closes by considering the opportunity and obligation for university journalism programs to facilitate change in the reporting of women’s sports by advocating for better opportunities for women sports reporters and by educating journalism students about the importance of diversity in the sports workplace.
The main objective of this article is to analyse the sport place branding strategy of Qatar, a Persian Gulf country that is using the income from the commercialisation of its gas to create an economy, which can be successful in the future without depending on this natural source. Sport, above all football, has been a key sector in which the Qatari government believes in order to promote the image of its country worldwide. One of the most interesting examples used in this article is the relationship between the Qatar Foundation and FC Barcelona. Using a qualitative methodology, this article aims to understand the key pillars of this strategy and why sport mega-events have been so important when governments want to increase their reputation in the international sphere.
Among the purported virtues of sport, whether through participation or viewership, is its capacity to foster community. In the years since September 11, 2001, the institutions associated with the production of mediated sport have constituted community rhetorically through nationalistic and militaristic rituals and ceremonies. Such ceremonies played a prominent role in the public memorialization of 9/11 on its 10th anniversary in 2011. Although it is surely the case that some communal healing is possible through mediated sport and its ceremonies, this essay argues that the centrality of this theme constitutes an illusion of democracy. As a consequence, these mediated sport productions shaped a public memory of 9/11 that diminishes active citizenship and deflects attention away from the consequences of American actions since the terrorist attacks.
While the involvement of women in journalism and athletics has grown significantly in recent decades, comparatively few women are involved in professional sports reporting. Yet, less is known regarding whether this trend is unique among professional journalists, or whether it begins earlier while journalists are still learning their profession and writing for their university student newspapers. To investigate this topic, this study involved a survey of university student newspaper staff members (n = 267) and a content analysis of six top student newspapers across the United States. Results of this study suggest that female sports reporters are uncommon in campus newsrooms and that women participate in sports reporting much less frequently than they participate in other related activities including journalism in general, playing sports, or watching sports. Further, results show that university student journalists are unaware of the inequality of coverage of men’s and women’s sports that exists in campus media.
In this commentary on Cooky, Messner, and Hextrum’s (2013) article "Women Play Sport, but not on TV: A Longitudinal Study of Televised News Media," Mary Jo Kane assesses key findings in light of the changes that have taken place in women’s participation and achievement in sport as well as the central tendencies of sport journalists and broadcasters. Kane’s analysis explores the dynamic tensions at play in cultural sensibilities about interest in women’s sports. Kane presents evidence that rising interest in women’s sports runs counter to the mainstream media logic that "nobody is interested" in women’s sporting achievements. In a closing assessment, Kane calls for the need for audience reception research to broaden the content analytic findings offered by Cooky, Messner, and Hextrum to better understand what draws fans to women’s sports.
One of the long-standing trends in research on gender in sports media is the lack of coverage of women’s sport and the lack of respectful, serious coverage of women’s sport. In this article, we critically interrogate the assumption that the media simply provide fans with what they "want to see" (i.e., men’s sports). Using quantitative and qualitative analysis, we examine 6 weeks of the televised news media coverage on the local news affiliates in Los Angeles (KABC, KNBC, and KCBS) and on a nationally broadcast sports news and highlight show, ESPN’s SportsCenter. Part of an ongoing longitudinal study, the findings demonstrate that the coverage of women’s sport is the lowest ever. We argue that the amount of coverage of women’s sports and the quality of that coverage illustrates the ways in which the news media build audiences for men’s sport while silencing and marginalizing women’s sport. Moreover, the overall lack of coverage of women’s sport, despite the tremendous increased participation of girls and women in sport at the high school, collegiate, and professional level, conveys a message to audiences that sport continues to be by, for, and about men.
This research study considered the desired job skills for future newspaper sports reporters and television sports reporters in the convergence journalism era. A national survey of newspaper sports editors and TV sports directors ranked their five most important skills using open-ended responses. Although the skills were not correlated at each level of importance, a significant and strong correlation was found in overall rankings. Both groups stressed fundamental skills such as writing, but specialization was also important, especially production skills for TV sports journalists. Also, participants wanted applicants with a wider variety of skills to meet the demands of a converged media environment and a shrinking workforce.
In this article, we analyze Canadian newspaper coverage of recent events in which backcountry adventurers have found themselves in need of assistance from rescue organizations. We interrogate discourses of risk and responsibility, exploring the ways in which the media constructs these backcountry enthusiasts as responsible to and for specific (e.g., family) and generalized (e.g., society) others. These discourses, we argue, produce and reproduce neoliberal notions of risk management, constructing citizens as responsible for managing their "risk profiles."
Forgiveness plays a prominent role in social interaction yet has received scant attention in the parasocial realm. This research addresses this gap by investigating people extending or declining forgiveness to Major League Baseball player Josh Hamilton after an alcohol relapse. A thematic analysis of 474 postings in a discussion forum on the Texas Rangers official website was conducted. Analysis revealed that fans forgave Hamilton through (a) support; (b) "addiction is hard" narratives; (c) human condition attributions; and (d) justification and that forgiveness was withheld due to perceptions of Hamilton’s character flaws. The results suggest that when athletes transgress and accept responsibility, it facilitates increased similarity with fans who then engage in supportive communication, including forgiveness. Nevertheless, transgressions also may preclude forgiveness as some fans are unwilling to chance recidivism. The study concludes with implications and directions for future research, which include a recommendation that professional athletes accept responsibility for their wrongdoings to cultivate fan support and hasten the image repair process.
This monograph analyzes how Nike and the athlete himself jointly commodified the public persona of LeBron James, with James cast in two normative narratives: (a) the Messiah and (b) hegemonic masculinity, stripping James of his Blackness and making him identifiable to a mainstream audience. The open-ended configuration of these narratives allows for "pivot points" in James’ life. Real-life developments fold into the construction of James, mitigating damage and shaping narratives in the process. New avenues of research in critical celebrity-branding analysis focus on areas such as the cross sections of endorsements and social media as well as the process of how mediated narratives normalize subjectivities.
As social media provide athletic departments and their constituents with an additional point of engagement with their fans, it is important to understand the social media audience. However, despite the growth of social media use among collegiate athletic departments, coaches, and teams, relatively little is known about the individuals who are utilizing various social media forums. This study was the first to attempt to understand why college sport fans engage in sport-focused social media use, with a theoretical grounding in uses and gratifications. Utilizing a survey of student fans from a large Division 1 institution, the results suggest that there is a relatively low level of social media participation among college sport fans in relation to official Twitter and Facebook feeds of the team, and a surprising prevalence of traditional media usage for informational purposes. Factor analysis reveals dimensions of gratification for social media use include content creation as an identifiable factor. These and other findings are discussed.
This article extends research on media framing and the concept of "frame-changing" by examining the sanctioning of professional mixed martial arts (MMA) events in Ontario, Canada. After initially indicating that sanctioning MMA was unimportant, the Ontario government shifted its policy and announced it would sanction professional MMA events. A content analysis was conducted on newsprint articles published between 2009 and 2010 that were related to the sanctioning of MMA events in Ontario. After removing syndicated reports, 18 newsprint articles derived from six major Canadian dailies served as the focus for this study. Using open and axial coding techniques, these articles identified that the media produced two frames for the discourse related to the sanctioning of MMA (i.e., legal/ethical and economic), which changed throughout the discourse. This study serves to examine how mainstream media frames the sport in jurisdictions yet to develop a MMA policy.
p>Soccer broadcasts have been explored in a number of interesting ways, uncovering racial difference, gendered stereotypes, domestic viewing experiences, nationalistic discourse, and national styles of production. What is lacking, however, is how the viewer comprehends space and time in the live broadcast. Such literatures neglect the hybrid nature of televised soccer as a combination of visual and verbal communication. Understanding and experiencing a televised soccer match is a formulation of visual principles and verbal understanding of temporality within the narrative of a live broadcast. These principles are materialized through the screen and develop an unconscious understanding of movement, spatiality, and temporality differing from a cinematic unconscious through the cutting and sequencing of footage and border moments—screen wipe, frames, cuts—which work in combination with commentary to establish a microgeography of the screen. Viewers of televised soccer, therefore, establish a comprehension of time and space which is distinctive and differs from reportage.
Scholars have produced a body of evidence demonstrating media portrayals of sportswomen emphasize femininity/heterosexuality versus athletic competence and argue that such coverage trivializes women’s sports. Little research attention has been given to how these portrayals are interpreted by various audiences, including female athletes. This study explores how elite female athletes respond to the ways they are represented within sport media. We employed reception research where viewers deconstruct the meaning of texts and how that meaning impacts their feelings toward a subject. We examined the subject of sportswomen’s dual identities to determine how they wished to be portrayed. Thirty-six team and individual sport athletes were shown images ranging from on-court competence to off-court soft pornography and asked to choose which image best represented themselves and their sport, as well as increased interest/respect for their sport. Results indicated that competence was the overwhelming choice for best "represents self/sport" and "increases respect." Forty-seven percent of respondents picked soft porn to best "increase interest." This latter finding reflected participants’ belief that "sex sells" women’s sports, particularly for male audiences. Results were analyzed using critical feminist theory to unpack sport media and its relationship to gender, privilege, and power.
The purpose of this study was to examine dissent expressed by athletes. Seventy-three former high school or college athletes from a variety of sports completed an online survey. Results indicated that athlete status and coaches’ openness to feedback associated with upward dissent expressed to coaches. And that for high school coaches a lack of openness to athlete feedback and less time spent in a starting role associated with lateral dissent expressed to teammates. Overall the findings suggest that dissent functions similarly within the coach–athlete/sport context as it does within the superior–subordinate/organizational context, particularly with regard to high school athletics.
This essay explores sports fandom through a Durkheimian theoretical framework that foregrounds the totemic link between civic collective and team symbol. Specifically, I analyze the myths, kinship, and rituals of Philadelphia Phillies fans during their historic 2008 World Series victory in the U.S.’ professional baseball league using a limited participant observation of beliefs and behaviors on display at public events and articulated through the sports media. I argue that the totem’s success offered a momentous opportunity for intense social unity and reaffirmed group ideals—at both the civic and kin level—and mirrored a quasi-religious functionality at a moment of declining integrative institutions. The "collective effervescence" and communitas generated during this period represented a celebration of identity and indexed solidarity. The rituals attendant to the actual sports event are, I argue, as essential as what happens on the field, for these rituals preserve the collective memory that upholds the totem and, in turn, the group.
This essay examines the relationship between new media and history by concentrating on the basketball video game, NBA 2K12, and its mediation of historic players and teams. The article employs Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation and its associated notions of immediacy and hypermediacy as part of a textual analysis of the game. By attending to how these processes of immediacy and hypermediacy are expressed through the game text, the essay makes claims about the way the game positions users in relation to history. The argument suggests that NBA 2K12 positions users to perceive history in terms of possibility space rather than stable archive and to potentially perceive simulated history as more interesting than represented history.
The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships promoted by professional athletes on Twitter utilizing the theoretical framework of parasocial interaction (PSI). Specifically, this study was a content analysis that examined professional athlete tweets in order to determine whether they predominately promoted social or parasocial relationships. The study also explored with whom athletes were engaging in social interaction as well as the topic of each tweet. The data revealed that professional athletes promoted both parasocial and social relationships equally. When they chose to be social, athletes were communicating with lay people and other professional and college athletes. Most athlete tweets were either general statements or insights into their personal lives. The implications of these and other findings will be discussed further.
This article relates the findings of a questionnaire investigating the motivations and attitudes of fan sports bloggers who take on the cultural labour of mainstream media by reporting and commentating on quotidian sports performances. Part of a larger, multimethod comparative case study, it investigates the attitudes of bloggers of a niche and nonniche sport toward the output of mainstream media. While these bloggers differed in terms of output and motivations, the questionnaire found they shared similar attitudes to mainstream sports media (MSSM) and the role of blogging as distinct styles of sports communication. The findings suggest that blogging can be seen as a way for fans to react to and critique the work of the mainstream media in communicating sports. It could also be well as a means to supplementing and augmenting the work of MSSM in ways that reflect the nature and the media discourses surrounding their particular sport. Finding that social elements were also a fundamental pleasure and motivation, further research into the particularities of social experience is indicated.
The media play a particularly important role in shaping audiences’ perceptions and actively create the frames of reference that public readers and viewers use to interpret and discuss particular ideas, events, and politics (Entman, 2007). A frames analysis of local and national print media was utilized to examine the framing of "legacies" around the 2010 Vancouver Winter Paralympic Games. The analysis shows that despite the rhetoric from the host committee and the Canadian Paralympic Committee about the increased media attention of these Paralympic Games, very little attention was given to legacy concepts despite an increasing discourse about its importance for all types of events. The framing of Paralympic legacy centered upon "othering" athletes with a disability through the supercrip narrative, highlighting potential opportunities for legacy and focusing on tangible economic developments. These issues do not represent a broadening of the scope of the legacy of the Paralympic Games and, in fact, the critical role of the media in reframing the discourse about disability and accessibility was largely absent from the media frames.
This study represents a content analysis of 10 beach volleyball games for the men’s and women’s team USA during the 2008 Summer Games. Play-by-play commentary and between-play commentary were analyzed for all 10 games, and all court shots and camera angles were coded. Using earlier work examining the existence or presence of gender inequities in mediated coverage of sport in general, the goal was to identify how or if coverage of beach volleyball might still reinforce gender inequities. Findings from the coded visual and verbal coverage suggest that gender difference was not evident in the manifest content of the 2008 Olympic Games. Additional findings and implications are discussed.