The White Racial Frame in Sport Media: Framing of Donald Trump and LaVar Ball’s Public Feud Following the UCLA Basketball Player Arrests in China (original) (raw)
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Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 2009
This paper mobilizes the works of Stuart Hall, Colin King, and George Yancy as theoretical lenses for a discursive analysis of a significant sport event that occurred during a Detroit Pistons versus Indiana Pacers National Basketball Association (NBA) game in Auburn Hills, Michigan on December 19, 2004. This event began when Ron Artest, a member of the Indiana Pacers, shoved Detroit Pistons player Ben Wallace after a hard foul. The fight escalated when Artest was struck by a drink thrown from the stands. Artest jumped into the stands and began fighting Pistons fans, which prompted other teammates and fans to join in, resulting in a massive brawl between fans and players for which Artest was suspended for the remainder of the basketball season. Our analysis of this case provides interesting indicators of the ideology, discourses, and racial meanings shaping sports media in America. Some of the questions that are central to this analysis are the following: How is the coverage of black players fighting white fans framed in the context of a predominantly black sport and white spectatorship; how does this fit with the existing scholarly discourse regarding racial representation in sports and other media; what is the fan-player relationship in a sport that consists largely of white fans watching black players; furthermore, how does this relationship manifest itself in media coverage and player-fan discourse? Keywords: Articulation; Representation; Black Bodies; Race and Racism; Ron Artest
Angry Russell and Rhetoricity of Race RSQ 2021
Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 2021
Using racial rhetorical criticism, we apply and extend Flores’s theory of racial recognition to United States news and sports media usages of “Angry Russell” as a name for National Basketball Association (NBA) star Russell Westbrook. Focusing on media coverage of an 11 March 2019 incident in which a Utah Jazz fan allegedly yelled racist and homophobic taunts at Westbrook during an Oklahoma City Thunder game against the Utah Jazz, we map how the mediated attention to Westbrook’s “anger” and so-called threatening behavior is a form of spatiotemporal collapse that situates Black male bodies as menacing and violent sites of subordination to whiteness. We then interrogate how player statuses and the intimacy of NBA arenas themselves, like Vivint Smart Home Arena, operate as sites of spatiotemporal excess by signaling a recognition of race as unable to be contained within the racial categories established by whiteness.
According to research on sports media, reporters have both gender and racial biases. Women are marginalized in the media (Billings, Halone, & Denham, 2002), and athletes are stereotyped based on race (Banet-Weiser, 1999). These depictions affect the public's image of athletics and particular athletes. The purpose of this analysis is to determine if White male athletes are offered both more media attention and more salient coverage than Black male athletes (Billings, Halone, & Denham, 2002). Data obtained in the analysis show that, currently, coverage of athletes is not equal quantitatively or qualitatively. Disproportionate coverage involving black male athletes was found in news stories that involved instances of crime, domestic/sexual violence, moral failure, and/or the athlete's " natural " skills and abilities.