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For my chosen article, the 2 authors are Susan Tyler Eastman and Andrew C. Billings. Susan Tyler Eastman is a writer, media consultant and an educator, currently a professor emerita in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington since 2003. She co-wrote a textbook series Media Programming: Strategies and Practices with Douglas A. Ferguson addressing television and media programming strategies and practices; and published the 9th edition in 2012.
Andrew C. Billings is a professor and Director of the Alabama Program in Sports Communication, and Ronald Reagan Chair of Broadcasting in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media. His eleven books, 130 over journal articles and book chapters makes him one of the most published sports media scholars in the world. One of his recent book publication in 2014, The Fantasy Sport Industry: Games within Games , provides an overview of the history of fantasy sports and the close connection to innovations in sports media. This book also addresses cross-cultural comparisons between fantasy sports players from US, UK, Europe and many more.
The authors found that it was essential to address the issue of womens sports coverage. Their argument was that womens sports were receiving less attention and coverage than mens sports in media. Previous studies that the authors mentioned shows that there is a significant disparity of media attention between genders in sports (Daddario, 1994, 1997; Eastman & Billings, 1999; Tuggle & Owens, 1999). The authors recognise that, historically, the discourse bias in favour of men were due to announcers having more experience with men athletes and sports as compared to women athletes and women sports. The perception of announcers also played a part, where announcers felt that their audience preferred mens sports instead of womens sports. Through analysis of this research, the authors found that sports coverages in ESPNs SportsCenter and CNNs Sports Tonight shows a large difference in gender attention, where out of 177.5 hours of footage, 95% of SportsCenter and 93% of Sports Tonights coverage were mainly towards mens sport. As mentioned above, the weekly proportion of gender-related coverage on ESPNs SportsCenter also show a large disparity between gender, where women-related coverage averaged 4% in 11 weeks (compared to men-related sport at 95%). This was also consistent with CNNs Sports Tonight. In addition, newspapers had similar results when women received 11% for 641 photographs and 11% of 951 articles in The New York Times (men received 86% and 85% respectively. Women athletes and sports only had 9% of column inches overall in The New York Times. Despite USA Today being a newspaper that targets more female readers than The New York Times, the former did better for womens sports to a very small extent. 336 out of 1,759 photographs taken were of women. Additionally, only 14% of 2,491 articles were related to womens sport.
The methodology of this paper compares both electronic and print sports reports over a 5 month period, from May to September of 1998. For the electronic media, SportsCenter on ESPN and CNNs Sports Tonight were used as these were the most popular and widely available sportscasts. Footage was recorded three times a day (5.30-6.30pm, 10.00-11.00pm, and 1.00-2.00am) across 5 months. CNNs Sports Tonight and Sports Saturday/ Sports Sunday were recorded nightly from 10.00 to 10.30pm on weekdays and from 6.30 to 7.30pm and 10.00 to 11.00pm on Saturdays and Sundays for 5 key weeks during July 1 to 7 and August 22 to September 13. This is to provide a proper comparison between ESPNs newscast in the fall/ summer period. Whereas for print media, sports pages from the two major national newspaper, The New York Times and USA Today, were used. The 11 weeks period of The New York Times and USA Today sports pages were collected and analysed every day. The comprehensiveness of the samples that were collected ensured that their methodology was unbiased. Choosing popular networks and major newspaper were logical as information and messages that were conveyed through these mediums were received by majority of audiences that have an interest in sports.
One interesting point about their measurements was the number and percentage of photographs and articles comparison among genders and others in USA Today. Due to the large amount of attention biased towards mens sports and athletes, the result of newspaper coverage shows that men have 5 times the amount of space that women have in USA Today, while men have 10 times the amount of space that women have in The New York Times. An interesting finding in USA Today shows that women had relatively more number photographs than articles, while men had lesser photographs than articles. This result shows that there is a bias to use women athletes photographs to attract more attention with lesser information provided about womens sport. This also suggest that the purpose of using women athletes photographs is for their glamour and sex appeal while belittling the seriousness of the activity.
Overall, the methodological approach was reliable as the authors applied existing measures in their study. For instance, the authors used the Holstis (1969) method (2M / N1 + N2) on intercoder reliability technique and achieved a 99% level of agreement when using the same coding scheme to evaluate sportscast coverage and description portion of their research. Additionally, the authors analysis of descriptors of athletes were done using the grounded theory by Glaser and Strauss (1967), sorting men and women separately. This inductive reasoning method of sorting, grouping, regrouping and intuitively regrouping until all similar items were associated. Methods used were reliable and consistent with previous studies. Methods were also valid as the authors understood that there are ambiguity in electronic media. For example, the authors noted that descriptors like dribbling past were neutral or factual items and were not part of the study. In fact, two-thirds of the descriptors were neutral.
Arguments were unbalanced because all the results indicated that mens sport were favoured more than womens sport. In the introduction of this paper, none of the paper that were cited had positive reference to mens sports. Similarly, none of the results or conclusions of this research were in favour of mens sport in media. The tone of this research definitely revealed the authors intention of proving the gender bias in society, even though it is an apparent phenomenon.
One of the measures that had an omission was the crossmedia comparisons where electronic media were compared against print media dedicated to womens sport. One of the hypothesis was that newspaper will give a significantly larger proportion of their space to women athlete and womens events than the electronic newscasts allot their time. There is an omission of the results between CNNs Sports Tonight and The New York Times crossmedia comparison because these 2 media did not show a significant difference and did not support the hypothesis of newspaper giving more space to women athlete and event than the electronic newscasts allotting time. By omitting this result, they were able to confirm the position of their hypothesis.
Another problem with this article is that it seems too convenient that the results were able to support all 6 hypotheses, without any explicit mention of limitations. Being nit-picky, the sentence before the list of hypotheses stated that there were 7 hypotheses, but in fact, 6 hypotheses were listed and 6 hypotheses were concluded. Without any supporting evidence, through speculation, there is a possibility that 1 hypothesis was omitted in order to achieve proper justification for all 6 hypotheses.
This research definitely contributed to existing literature. An example is Eastman and Billings (1999) and Tuggle (1997) found that men had 60% while women had 40% of 1996 Summer Olympics coverage. However, this research has addressed that the disparity between gender is far wider in percentage of media coverage aspect, being 95% men and 5% women. Furthermore, it was evident that even though there were major womens sporting events, overall percentage of coverage for women during that period was still significantly lower than men. The authors also found that ESPNs commentators were more likely to focus on mens failures than CNNs commentators. This result further confirms Eastman and Billings (1999) findings in the commentary of the last three Olympics.
This research paper helps us to understand the sociological aspect of the reality in sports media. It is definitely evident that sports itself has a bias towards the male. The small details like the difference in allocation of space in newspapers went unnoticed. These are important details as it can influence the attention of readers. Gender differences in sports are obvious but it is also important that we understand the history and social perceptions that has led us to develop this thinking. The few main reasons are that women sports display less masculinity compared to men sport and historically, women playing sports started much later than men. This study has definitely aided and expanded my understanding of sports media through a sociological lens.
Tennis events like Wimbledon Open has had disparity in prize money between male and female players, up until 2007. This is also due to the social role theory by Eagly and Wood (2012) where social roles are distributed among gender due to the physical sex differences. Gender role beliefs were developed as people observe the male and female behaviour and deduced that different sex possess corresponding disposition. This study also found that male players had descriptors for failure where attributed to their lack of athletic skills while descriptors of womens failure were attributed to the lack of commitment. It is also so common that men athletes have nicknames and are sometimes referred to as superbeings (e.g. Superman). However, it is intriguing that the findings from this study show that women are not usually given such nicknames comparing to superbeings. Another new perspective gained through this study was when the results found that women were compared to men, but men never compared to women. The example given in the article was that in tennis, Serena Williams was referred to Pete Sampras but no men was compared to a women player.
Unfortunately, this research seems to find that their study has no limitations. It is not identified explicitly. In fact, it seems as though all 6 hypotheses were supported by their results. They did, however, identified that possible future researches to address the lack of clock time for womens sports and the tone of comments in electronic media.
Historically, sports were reserved for males for them to show off their masculinity. There is a deep rooted belief in gender role is still observed and has been embedded in our perception since our adolescent phase that males are preferred to be masculine while females are preferred to be feminine. This can be identified by the social role theory (Eagly & Wood, 2012) whereby traditions of roles described by Parsons and Bales (1955) shows that males specialised in task-oriented behaviour and women in socioemotional behaviour upon the division of labour. Nonetheless, the samples of this study were from 1998. In a more recent study, Shifflett, Murphy, Ghiasvand, Carlton and Cuevas (2018) found that although male athletes still have a higher amount of coverage than female athletes, female athletes representation had a relative increase of 2% to 4% in overall media coverage. They also found that female athletes in ESPNs videos on biomechanical analysis received recognition of 2 out of 3 male gender-coded athletic traits (power, speed and strength). This shows that sports media is slowly moving away from the traditional approach of delivering messages that women possess lesser athletic traits, which will aid in reducing the misconception of female athletes athletic ability. Changing the perception of humans is not a fast process. The difference of 20 years has only a maximum of 4% growth for female athletes in media coverage. Slowly but surely, the general public is beginning to be more receptive towards differences of others. As mentioned earlier, the Wimbledon Open has started giving out equal prize money to both genders since 2007. We can look forward to more equality among genders media coverage.
The authors identified that further studies that can be done. Specifically, other than measuring the clock time for womens sports, researchers may also measure the tone made by commentators in electronic media. There is a possibility to conduct a qualitative analysis among different gender of athletes perception in different sports. As most sports are originated by men athletes, there might be a significant difference in women dominated sports like gymnastics and netball. Another method of qualitative analysis is to conduct a research among athletes in different countries or continent (e.g. Asia, Europe, USA) participating in the same sport. In Singapore alone, women athletes in sports like tenpin bowling, track and field, and table tennis receive more attention and coverage as compared to their male athletes. Thus, this qualitative analysis may be able to provide a different view on gender bias in sports when conducted among different countries.
Reference
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- Daddario, G. (1997). Gendered Sports Programming: 1992 Summer Olympic Coverage and the Feminine Narrative Form. Sociology of Sport Journal, 14(2), 103120. doi: 10.1123/ssj.14.2.103
- Eagly, A. H., & Wood, W. H. (2012). Social Role Theory. Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology, 458476. doi: 10.4135/9781446249222.n49
- Eastman, S. T., & Billings, A. C. (1999). Gender Parity in the Olympics. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 23(2), 140170. doi: 10.1177/0193723599232003
- Eastman, S. T. & Billings, A. C. (2000). Sportscasting and sports reporting: The power of gender bias. Journal of Sports and Social Issues, 24(2), 192-213.
- Glaser, B., & Strauss, A. (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Mill Valley, CA: Sociology Press.
- Holsti, O. R. (1969). Content analysis for the social sciences and humanities. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
- Parsons, T., & Bales, R. F. (1955). Family, socialization and interaction process. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press.
- Shifflett, B., Murphy, D., Ghiasvand, F., Carlton, M., & Cuevas, M. (2016). Gender Bias in Sports-Media Analytics. Journal of Sports Media, 11(2), 111128. doi: 10.1353/jsm.2016.0014
- Tuggle, C. A., & Owen, A. (1999). A Descriptive Analysis of NBCs Coverage of the Centennial Olympics. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 23(2), 171182. doi: 10.1177/0193723599232004
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