Comparison of the sportscasting on ESPN and CNN and sports reporting in The New York Times and USA Today revealed the very high degree of embedded favoritism toward men’s sports and men athletes, even at times when major women’s sporting events were peaking in newsworthiness. The quantity of gender bias was significantly greater on ESPN’s SportsCenter than on CNN’s Sports Tonight, perhaps because of the somewhat different audiences they target. In addition, the amount of gender bias—measured three different ways—in the respected The New York Times also far exceeded that of USA Today, a disheartening finding about America’s so-called newspaper of record. Week-by-week crossmedia comparisons demonstrated the much greater marginalization of women’s sports in the electronic media, suggesting that newspapers provide a somewhat more positive model for sports journalism.

Past research of American Olympic telecasts has suggested that gender, ethnic, and national biases may hide within prime-time network telecasts. Analysis of host and reporter commentary in the 2000 Sydney Olympics confirmed that men athletes, Whites, and Americans continued to be the most-mentioned and most-positively portrayed in the television coverage, yielding more than their fair share of coverage. Analysis of gendered coverage showed that men were characterized as being more athletic and more committed than women athletes, and, in addition, men received over half of all airtime and of all mentions of athletes. Analyses of ethnicity showed that White athletes were portrayed as succeeding because of commitment, whereas Black athletes succeeded because of innate athletic skills. Analyses of nationalism found that the most-mentioned athletes and half of all athletes mentioned were American participants. Such differential treatment has significant implications for the development of American viewers’ self-identity, particularly for children and teenagers.

This study explored public sports viewing in bars and restaurants by means of more than 200 hours of observation and informal interviewing at six sites. Grounded qualitative analysis revealed four schemas for contextualizing public sports viewing: participation in a membership community, opportunity for social interaction, access to otherwise unobtainable events, and diversionary activity. Situated between the at-home and the stadium sports experiences, public consumption of mediated sports combines the benefits of the control characterizing home television viewing and the sociability characterizing the group experience. Public consumption and production of sports transform the seeming limits of the mediated event and legitimate fan behavior to serve participatory and social needs.

Analysis of 53 prime-time hours of host and reporter commentary in the 2002 SaltLake City Olympics located the degree and types of gender, ethnic, and national biases hidden within the prime-time network telecasts. Not surprisingly, most of the clock time went to men, most of the top 20 most mentioned athletes were men, and most of the athlete mentions and descriptors were devoted to men. Ethnic findings showed that four fifths of all athletes mentioned and the top 20 most mentioned were White. Surprisingly, non-American athletes were mentioned more frequently than American athletes were, but American athletes were characterized as being more composed and courageous whereas non-American athletes were described as succeeding because of experience.

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Examination of idiosyncratic sports rituals engaged in by viewers of televised sports revealed complex patterns of negotiation and participation in the televised events. In addition to being well-recognized tools for defining group membership, personal rituals revealed the creation of multistranded connections between fans and teams or players, despite separation by an electronic wall. Personal rituals revealed a balancing of the need for suspense with a need for reassurance, and extended to superstitions and part-play/part-serious efforts to influence game outcome. Exploration of private sports-viewer rituals illuminates the ways individuals alter their experiences of televised sports in order to gain social and cultural empowerment.

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