Smiling assassins, brides-to-be and super mums: The importance of gender and celebrity in media framing of female athletes at the 2016 Olympic Games (original) (raw)
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2015
While the coverage of women’s sport in UK media rises to comparable levels to men’s sports during large sporting events like the Olympics, academics agree that “routine” women’s sports coverage is under-represented. According to the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation, “81% of people think that the female athletes at London 2012 make better role models for young girls than other celebrities.” This article examines the representation of women in sport and compares routine coverage of women’s sports in the UK national press across a week in February 2012, six months before the London Olympics, with coverage in a week in February 2013, six months after the Olympics, to see if there has been an Olympic “legacy” that increased coverage. It also examines coverage at the same time of year a decade earlier, to see how far, if at all, women’s sports coverage in newspapers has progressed. The results suggest that there has been minimal change in everyday coverage of women’s sports after the Olympics.
2013
This paper reports on findings from a research project conducted on behalf of the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) examining the portrayal of female athletes in the Australian news media. While the project as a whole includes analyses of both print and broadcast news media, I focus here on findings concerning the reporting on sportswomen in print newspapers. Using social semiotic tools for investigating ideational/representational and interpersonal/interactional meanings in language and images, qualitative analyses of both the headlines and photographs are reported on. The findings suggest that Australian sportswomen are now treated both verbally and visually as serious athletes who are very much in control of their emotions. However, the extent of this coverage remains greatly impoverished in comparison to that for male athletes.
Textual & Visual Media, 2016
According to their centrality as transmitters of information and values in democratic societies, the quality media should carry out a responsible treatment of all areas of the news arena, including sports. However, a major ethical drawback in the field of sports journalism has been the long-standing underrepresentation and biased portrayal of female athletes. This article has examined to what extent six prestigious newspapers (The Guardian/ The Observer, The Daily Telegraph/ The Sunday Telegraph, The New York Times, The Washington Post, El País and La Vanguardia) complied with the deontological principle of justice in their portrayal of sportswomen during the London 2012 Olympics. The content analysis of 4,507 pieces revealed that the newspapers sampled delivered the message of non-discrimination and considered sportswomen's triumphs as salient content. Despite this, certain forms of overt and covert stereotypes (sexism and mentions of physical attributes, emotionality, infantilizing and out-of-context reporting) permeated the coverage.
Women and Olympic Games: Media Coverage
TEME, 2018
Despite the fact that women have succeeded in their effort to have equal participation in the Summer Olympics, the public image of them is still predominantly stereotyped, which this study proves. The subject of analysis in this paper are narrative articles and photographs about male athletes and female athletes in sports sections, especially in the Olympic specials and the front pages of the best-selling daily newspaper in Serbia, Blic, during the Olympic Games, from July 27th to August 13th 2012. Hypotheses that the authors want to prove deal with the assumption that male athletes are often more represented in media than female athletes, and that the articles about women are often stereotyped. Some of the most frequent stereotypes are those which describe women as feminine, beautiful or sexual objects, as well as like someone's mother, wife or girlfriend, also, as infantile, emotional or irritable, or maybe those are just some irrelevant articles that do not talk about sport a...
Female Athletes, Framing of Sports, Microaggressions, Olympic News Coverage, Sexism in Athletics
According to research on the use of microaggressions on female athletes in the United States, women are expected to fit a traditional feminine mold even when participating in physical competition (Ho & Kaskan, 2017). The purpose of this study is to determine how often and in what context microaggressions were used in reporting on female Olympic athletes during the 2012 and 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Data obtained in the analysis show that, currently, many instances of sexism, racism, second class citizenship and restrictive gender roles are present in coverage of these elite female athletes. Microaggressions were found in articles covering masculine and feminine sports, black and white athletes and features stories outside of results from the Games. Implications as well as future research directions are discussed