The Impact of Gender Frame Sponsorship on the Frame Process in Sport

Media represent a dominant constructor of reality in today\u27s mediated culture, and frame research has examined this construction, particularly in sport, and concluded that media influence the continuance of hegemonic ideals that devalue women (Carragee & Roefs, 2004; Funkhauser, 1973; Lind & Salo, 2002). Framing\u27s alignment with agenda setting centers on the transfer of frames from agenda to agenda through frame sponsorship and incorporates an examination of power by considering who influences the media agenda (Carragee & Roefs, 2004). A sport gender frame sponsorship analysis revealed the continuance and dominance of negative gender frames in both public relations and media texts. It also identified an additional negative gender frame in sport, the hierarchy of topics, in both public relations material and media. Analysis also confirmed the inclusion of frame sponsorship in process models; however it noted a distinction between issue frame sponsorship and attribute frame sponsorship. Frames were found to transfer issues and attributes separately, just as agenda setting research. Sport public relations personnel were successful in placing their frames in media discourse, but the centrality of power in frame sponsorship raises ideological concerns. The study found damaging gender frames were sponsored and placed successfully in media discourse, perpetuating the devaluation of women athletes and women\u27s sport, but positive gender frames were also successfully sponsored. Thus frame sponsorship is an active component of the framing process and serves as a viable consideration in producing counter-hegemonic frames to challenge dominant ideology in sport

The power of the local in sports broadcasting: a cross-cultural analysis of rugby commentary

This article explores how local pressures intersect to produce differing broadcasts in 2 cultural contexts. This is achieved via a cross-cultural analysis of a decade of tele¬vised rugby union matches between France and New Zealand and interviews with leading commentators in both countries. The authors argue that although the over-arching commercial imperative to capture audiences might be the same in both coun¬tries, and despite global tendencies toward homogenized presentation of sports events, there are local differences in expectations about which kinds of audiences should be captured, and these lead to different practices and emphases in the live broadcasts. The authors suggest that in each country, broadcasts are the result of a complex set of pressures that interact to produce broadcasts with “local” flavor and characteristics

‘Legends’ in ‘lingerie’: Sexuality and athleticism in the 2013 Legends Football League US season

This paper explores the representation of female athletes within the Legends Football League (LFL; formerly ‘Lingerie Football League’) in 2013. Specifically, the study seeks to understand the vision of women’s sport, and female athletes, which the LFL propagates. Drawing on a combined content and semiotic analysis of the commentary and visuals featured in 26 LFL matches broadcast online in 2013, our data suggests that the LFL presents apparently conflicting images of sexualised, but ‘powerful’ female athletes. We discuss these data relative to competing interpretive approaches to female sexuality in sports media, and join other sports media scholars in advocating audience reception research as a necessary next step to grasping this emergent sport’s significance

Discursive manoeuvres and hegemonic recuperations in New Zealand documentary representations of domestic violence

This paper examines three television documentaries--entitled Not Just a Domestic (1994), Not Just a Domestic: The Update (1994), and Picking Up the Pieces (1996)--that together formed part of the New Zealand police ‘Family Violence’ media campaign. Through a Foucauldian, feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis, the paper examines how these texts assert and privilege particular understandings of domestic violence, its causes, effects and possible solutions. The analysis illustrates the way in which five discursive explanations of domestic violence--those of medical pathology, romantic expressive tension, liberal humanist instrumentalism, tabula rasa learning and socio-systematic discourse--are articulated and hierarchically organised within these documentaries, and considers the potential hegemonic effects of each text’s discursive negotiations. It is argued that the centrality of personal ‘case studies’ and the testimonies of both battered women and formerly violent men work to privilege individualistic rather than socio-political explanations of domestic violence. Additionally, the inclusion of extensive ‘survivor speech’ means that women are frequently asked to explain and rationalize their actions as ‘victims’ of domestic violence, while fewer demands are placed on male perpetrators to account for their violent behaviour. Consequently, the documentaries leave the issue of male abuse of power largely unchallenged, and in this way ultimately affirm patriarchal hegemonic interests

Two Screen Viewing and Social Relationships. Exploring the invisible backchannel of TV viewing

Use of social networks to create a real-time backchannel of\ud communication among viewers of television programs has been documented, and has been termed “two-screen viewing,” with one screen devoted to the program being watched, and a second screen (usually a laptop, tablet, or cell/mobile\ud phone) devoted to maintaining the backchannel. Prior research has examined twoscreen viewing through content analysis of social media posts. However, little has been done to explore the way in which two screen viewing qualitatively changes the viewing experience, or to understand how this behavior contributes to the construction or maintenance of social relationships. Couch (1992) noted that social interaction require a shared focus, a social objective, and congruent functional identities. The first screen program provides the shared focus. Using online interviews, this small pilot project seeks to discover whether social objectives and congruent functional identities are established through two-screen viewing. That is, the study explores how one might go about determining whether this communication actually contributes to social relationships or serves some other, asocial purpose. The present study is a small pilot project only. Preliminary\ud data suggest that there are two types of two-screen viewing defined by different degrees of visible and invisible online practice

Automated Journalism as a Source of and a Diagnostic Device for Bias in Reporting

In this article we consider automated journalism from the perspective of bias in news text. We describe how systems for automated journalism could be biased in terms of both the information content and the lexical choices in the text, and what mechanisms allow human biases to affect automated journalism even if the data the system operates on is considered neutral. Hence, we sketch out three distinct scenarios differentiated by the technical transparency of the systems and the level of cooperation of the system operator, affecting the choice of methods for investigating bias. We identify methods for diagnostics in each of the scenarios and note that one of the scenarios is largely identical to investigating bias in non-automatically produced texts. As a solution to this last scenario, we suggest the construction of a simple news generation system, which could enable a type of analysis-by-proxy. Instead of analyzing the system, to which the access is limited, one would generate an approximation of the system which can be accessed and analyzed freely. If successful, this method could also be applied to analysis of human-written texts. This would make automated journalism not only a target of bias diagnostics, but also a diagnostic device for identifying bias in human-written news.Peer reviewe

Was Anyone Out There Watching Last Night? : The Creation and Early History of New England Sport Network, 1980-1989

In the United States, regional sports networks broadcast games of home teams to audiences in specific communities, or geographical areas. Ownership of regional sports network by sports teams presents a unique type of vertical integration. Regional sports networks use distinctive programming to connect to local sports culture. This dissertation explores the historical significance of New England Sports Network (NESN), a team created, owned and operated regional sports network, which broadcasts Boston Red Sox baseball games and Boston Bruins hockey games throughout the New England region. Using elements of cultural studies, specifically political economy and textual analysis, this dissertation examines the impact of the ownership structure of NESN on NESN programming and how NESN uses programming to connect to local sports culture. This dissertation employs the theoretical frameworks of the sports/media complex and the base and superstructure model to support the argument that regional sports networks function not only on an economic level, but on a political economic and cultural level as well. Historically, NESN is the first successful team created, owned and operated regional sports network. NESN\u27s creation established a new form of sports media ownership where sports team owners could essentially form private media corporations to increase earnings and extend operations across industries. NESN utilizes specific visual and aural techniques to differentiate NESN programming from other national and regional sports broadcasters. NESN also uses the same techniques to connect to local sports culture and to the everyday lives of sports consumers. The televised sports text offers NESN a space where the network can function on both a political economic and cultural level. Additionally, NESN presents a real world example of how the sports/media complex has become a more intricate theoretical framework

On The Sidelines: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, and the American Female Sportscaster

abstract: The term “female sportscaster” elicits a broad range of feelings among the sports media consumer base. Many of the women who fall into the category of “female sportscaster” appear to be greatly admired while many others evoke considerable scorn, making the electronic sports media industry a seemingly dangerous and often vitriolic environment for women. The gendered mistreatment of women sportscasters is not unfamiliar to sports media scholars. Indeed, phenomena such as sex biases, double standards, and harassment have been documented, primarily through positivistic or quantitative research. What has not been investigated, however, is how these phenomena persist and evolve despite the extant research. This dissertation employs Michel Foucault’s power/knowledge paradigm to take a discursive analytic approach to understand how the “female sportscaster” subjectivity, or imagined idea, is constructed through statements, images, and practices. That is, this dissertation investigates the way society “talks about” the “female sportscaster” and how those discussions affect the experiences of women sportscasters. Using one-on-one interviews with 10 women sportscasters, focus groups with sports media consumers, netnography, and textual analysis under the umbrella of a feminist methodological approach, this dissertation finds that the American female subjectivity is constructed through postfeminist and neoliberal discourses. These discourses “empower” women sportscasters to be responsible for their own success but, in doing so, normalize the obstacles women in sportscasting endure. As a result of this normalization, the electronic sports media industry is seemingly justified in taking little to no meaningful action toward improving conditions for women sportscasters. Specific manifestations of these discourses are traced across phenomena such as double standards, bias in hiring and development, harassment, and the expectation of affective labor. Suggestions are made for improving conditions for women sportscasters.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Journalism and Mass Communication 201