“He was Framed!” Framing Criminal Behavior in Sports News

An experiment examined the effects of newspaper articles about an athlete involved in a crime on perceptions of athletes. News articles were varied by framing the athlete's activities in an accusatory versus defensive manner, and framing the athlete as physically versus mentally skilled. An accusatory frame resulted in more criminally culpable perceptions of the athlete. Frame did not influence perceptions of the athlete's race, and perceptions of the athlete as Black did not increase perceived culpability. Additional findings show that framing does influence more general perceptions of athletes. Discussion focuses on media framing, attitudes toward athletes, and college students' socially desirable responses concerning race.     

COMMENTARY: Sports Broadcasting: Is it a Job for Public Service Broadcasters?-A Welfare Economic Perspective

The current policy of European public service broadcasters (PSBs) of acquiring expensive sports rights does not correspond with welfare economic principles. The Listed Events regulation prevents sports events of major importance for society from migrating to pay-TV broadcasters. Handing over expensive sports programs to commercial rivals will release resources that can be used on other activities, including programs that have characteristics of externalities and merit goods. Such a policy has been adopted by Australian PSBs.     

“Feeling Much Smaller than You Know You Are”: The Fragmented Professional Identity of Female Sports Journalists

Interviews with women working as sports journalists showed that they must negotiate several tensions, including balancing their conflicting identities as woman and as professional journalist. Nevertheless, in the end, they also saw the two as compatible. They fell along a spectrum of resistance to traditional values in sports and journalism, providing evidence of cracks in hegemonic notions of what it means to be a woman covering sports.     

Sports,physical practice,and the female body, 1980–1989: women’s emancipation in Romania under communism

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the promotion and practice of physical exercise and sport in relation to social class and the shifting roles of women in communist-governed Romania during the 1980s. Since sport played a central role in communist ideology, especially as a means of maintaining a healthy and growing workforce, the government encouraged physical activity through gymnastics at work (in the form of “production gymnastics”), in public wellness centers, and at home. In this study, the authors trace societal shifts related to changing policies and laws through corresponding shifts in the representation of female bodies engaged in sport and exercise by the media. Content analysis of Romanian magazine and newspaper articles published during the 1980s reveals how group physical exercises, such as maintenance gymnastics, were promoted to working-class women and how images of women became increasingly feminized and sexualized, thereby reinforcing new norms of feminine beauty.     

Were Women Really Underrepresented in Media Coverage of Summer Olympic Games (1984–2008)? An Invitation to Open a Methodological Discussion Regarding Sex Equity in Sports Media

In previous literature, there is an important heterogeneity in how to proceed to determine whether media coverage of the Summer Olympics in relation to athletes' sex is equitable. Therefore, the aims of this study are to determine the most appropriate standards for this comparison and to use them to assess whether there are biases in the journalistic coverage of the Summer Games, using data from previous studies (n = 18). Results show that media coverage is far from being detrimental to women: They are either equitably represented (28.79%) or significantly overrepresented (46.97%). Indeed, all modalities combined, women are only underrepresented in 22.24% of cases. In most cases, these results significantly differ from those of previous research and stress the importance of and the need to take methodological precautions in this type of study.