The Visibility of Female Athletes: A Comparison of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games Coverage in French, British, and Spanish Newspapers

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Delorme ◽  
Amy Pressland

The media coverage of sport events in relation to athletes’ sex has been extensively analyzed in the scientific literature. Apart from sports mega-events such as the Olympic Games, the findings of these studies seem consistent in that female participants are systematically underrepresented in sports media coverage. However, much of the research in this area relates to North America. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine sex equity in the coverage of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics by French, British and Spanish newspapers to provide new insights in this research field from a different cultural perspective. A content analysis was carried out and mixed results were found. French coverage shows significant discrimination of female athletes on most of the variables analyzed. Conversely, British coverage shows significant discrimination of male athletes on most of the variables studied. Finally, Spanish coverage is fair. These mixed results show the value of conducting such studies in geographical areas outside North America.

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merryn Sherwood

Australia’s major sporting codes proudly promote the fact that almost 40 per cent of their fans are women, however, this gender balance is not reflected in the composition of the media workforce covering sport. Further, there is very little mainstream media coverage of women’s sport and female athletes in Australia. However, the advent of digital media and lower barriers of access into the media market have led to a proliferation of women creating independent sports media; that is, media produced outside newsrooms by individuals who are not professional journalists. These products, which mostly comprise websites and podcasts, focus on sport generally and women’s sport and female athletes more specifically. These products have regularly secured accreditation to cover events and interview talent, an indication they have been accepted into the sports media landscape, and have started to develop significant audiences. This study conducted in-depth qualitative interviews to explore who these women are, why they create digital sports media products and whether they believe they are practising journalism.


2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ari Kim ◽  
Moonhoon Choi ◽  
Kyriaki Kaplanidou

Residents’ support for hosting the Olympic Games is crucial for a bid to succeed in the Olympic host-city selection process. Because of the vital role of the media in framing public perceptions of Olympic bids, the purpose of this study was to examine media coverage of hosting the Olympic Games during the Olympic host-city bid process. A quantitative content analysis was conducted on newspaper articles about Pyeongchang, Korea. Pyeongchang was a candidate city for 3 consecutive bids for the Winter Olympic Games, and it finally won its latest bid to host the 2018 Games. Six hundred Korean newspaper articles were collected for analysis. The results indicated that positive, nationwide discussions of hosting the Olympic Games were presented during the successful bid. Infrastructure legacy was mentioned frequently and dominantly for both successful and unsuccessful bid periods, whereas the presence of sport-development and sociocultural-legacy themes increased in the latest, successful, bid. In addition, extensive coverage related to celebrity endorsement was found during the successful bid.


2004 ◽  
Vol 110 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Payne

There is a common assumption among sport and media analysts that female athletes worldwide simply do not enjoy adequate media coverage. This article aims to challenge this notion by highlighting an important aspect of women's sport reporting often overlooked in other analyses of sportswomen in the media — Olympic press coverage. In contrast to everyday press representations of women's sport, the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000 provided several positive examples of reports written by Australian journalists about female athletes. Incorporating quantitative and qualitative approaches, this paper assesses both the allocation and content of articles printed about female Olympians during the Sydney Olympics by four major Australian newspapers.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Organista ◽  
Martyna Halter-Bogołębska

Organista Natalia, Halter–Bogołębska Martyna, Sport in the new media. Media coverages of selected sport disciplines during the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Culture – Society – Education no 2(16) 2019, Poznań 2019, pp. 203–224, Adam Mickiewicz University Press. ISSN 2300–0422. DOI 10.14746/kse.2019.16.13. This study concerns the online sports media coverage, a topic that has not been previously analyzed in Poland. In recent decades many studies (in Anglo–Saxon countries in particular) indicated the major underrepresentation of women’s sport and different framing of sportswomen andsportsmen. Those studies showed that the media plays important role in upholding gender stereotypes in sport and hindering empowerment of sportswomen. This study analyzes media coverage of three sports disciplines (gymnastics,swimming and weightlifting) during Rio Olympics on five websites. Findings revealed underrepresentation of women’s sport and setting the trend to write about women’s sport in disciplines consider as appropriated for women. The qualitative analysis did not indicate gender–specific descriptors in materials about sportspeople.


2017 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 39-48
Author(s):  
Natalia Organista ◽  
Zuzanna Mazur

During the last Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, the Polish female representatives won sig-nificantly more medals compared to men. This fact made the authors examine whether female athletes received proportionate media coverage compared to men. In the course ofresearch, articles from the two largest Polish dailies were analysed (“Gazeta Wyborcza” and “Fakt Gazeta Codzienna”). With the use of content analysis, 197 articles were analysed in order to check whether any quantitative and qualitative differences can be observed in describing women's and men's sport. The results show underrepresentation of press coverage regarding women's sport. The results of qualitative analysis also point to a number of differences when portraying women's and men's sport.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Rugg

This article critically examines the media coverage surrounding National Football League (NFL) player James Harrison in 2010 and 2011. In 2009, medical research linking hits to the head and the Alzheimer’s-like condition known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy prompted the league to institute rule changes to limit violent tackles. Harrison was repeatedly punished by the league office and criticized by sports media outlets for his violent tackles and recalcitrant attitude. Guiding both the discipline and media coverage of Harrison are narratives rooted in a neoliberal logic situating the existence of and responsibility for football violence within the individual decisions of football players. Intensifying these narratives is the NFL and its media partners’ invocation of discourses of Black criminality to construct the most damaging moments of football violence as unsanctioned acts that operate “outside the game.” This invocation serves to place the authority over the judgment and legitimation of football violence within the White corporate morality of the league’s offices and its media partners, allowing them to preserve the sport’s central place in producing and maintaining dominant American masculinities through football violence while casting off the responsibility for the consequences of that violence to the footballing bodies that administer and receive it.


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
pp. 647-668 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merryn Sherwood ◽  
Angela Osborne ◽  
Matthew Nicholson ◽  
Emma Sherry

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.


Author(s):  
Pedro Acuña

Football and media have become associated to such an extent that it would be difficult to discuss the history of sports in Chile without acknowledging its relationship with the media. Since the early 1900s, the media coverage of football—arguably the most significant mass spectacle in Chile—has become a unique place to evoke political sympathy and national pride. Before the gradual introduction of television in the 1960s, print journalism and radio were the technological tools that defined the ways in which Chileans experienced football. As narrative devices, sports media represented football for much larger audiences than those sitting in the stadium. In the 1940s, football chronicles may have been read aloud, and photographs of famous footballers were usually posted in public places for semiliterate workers too poor to buy sports magazines. Similarly, the pitch of a radio announcer’s voice and the quick summations he gave to different plays generated their own visual spectacle and moral evaluations for listeners. Although sports magazines and radio broadcasts were mostly consumed in urban areas, they created new ways of experiencing football that enabled participation from larger parts of the nation. The importance of these sources lies in their central role of making football a much more understandable sport to mass audiences, many of whom were illiterate. Most importantly, sports media became a public terrain for making claims about Chilean citizenship, including affirmations of appropriate masculinity, racial belonging, and class relations.


2019 ◽  
pp. 216747951988654
Author(s):  
Jung Woo Lee

In this article, I examined South Korean, North Korean, and British newspaper coverage of the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympics in order to identify the diplomatic gestures and conduct presented during these ceremonial events. This study looks at three diplomatically important components of the opening and closing ceremonies: artistic performance, a parade of nations, and the presence of world leaders. The media coverage of these components reveals that (1) the dissemination of a message of peace and unity, (2) the representation of unified Korean identity and Korean cultural heritage, and (3) the communication and negotiation between the high-level state officials are the three most visible acts of diplomacy at these celebrational occasions of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics. In effect, the combination of cultural diplomacy, sport diplomacy, and interstate diplomacy is actively at work during these ritualistic events. Therefore, the Olympic ceremonies present a global podium where dynamic and dramatic games of diplomacy take place.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document