10. “It’s Dude Time!” A Quarter Century of Excluding Women’s Sports in Televised News and Highlight Shows

This study analyzed the frequency with which the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympic broadcasts featured men and women athletes. To understand these portrayals, all 557 hr and 15 min of National Broadcasting Company’s (NBC) 2018 Winter Olympic telecasts were recorded. This recorded content included the 62 hr and 30 min of NBC’s primetime program and, for the first time, all of the remaining non-NBC primetime coverage on NBC’s other networks. Women athletes received the majority of the clock time on the NBC primetime broadcast; however, men received significantly more clock time on the remaining Olympic telecasts. Additionally, for both sets of broadcasts, differences were found between the amount of coverage for men and women athletes by sport. Through the lens of agenda-setting theory, potential reasons and ramifications for the different trends of coverage by broadcast are discussed.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

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(Broad)casting a Wider Net: Clocking Men and Women in the Primetime and Non-Primetime Coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics

Arth

Hou

Rush

et al. 2018

“…Despite considerable gains in terms of female participation in sport, “media coverage and marketing of female athletes and women’s sport does not reflect this progress” (Fink, 2015, p. 332). For example, research has long documented differences in coverage of female athletes (Billings & Angelini, 2007; Cooky, Messner, & Hextrum, 2013; Cooky, Messner, & Musto, 2015). For example, the most recent contribution in a longitudinal series of studies chronicling coverage of women’s sports in television news found that only 3.2% of coverage was dedicated to female athletes (Cooky et al, 2015).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Elevator Eyes” in Sports Broadcasting: Visual Objectification of Male and Female Sports Reporters

Cummins

Ortiz

Rankine

2018

Despite considerable research exploring female objectification in sports, researchers have not explored differences in how they are actually watched by audiences in terms of distribution of visual attention. Such differences can provide objective evidence of objectification by demonstrating a gender bias in terms of visual attention to female reporters’ bodies. This experiment ( N = 66) employs eye tracking to measure how much attention viewers allocated to male and female reporters’ bodies versus their faces, as well as differences in perceived credibility as a function of reporter gender. Results revealed a greater ratio of time on female reporters’ bodies to their faces relative to male reporters. This effect was most evident among viewers with reduced interest in sports. Furthermore, visual attention to reporters’ bodies—a passive measure of objectification—was largely unrelated to perceived credibility. Implications of these findings are discussed with respect to female objectification in sports and how this might inform program production personnel.

“…If one were to examine the most common themes of the journal Communication & Sport since its inception in 2013, the role of gender in sports media is, arguably, the most prevalent. The angles in which women’s sports specifically have been studied are myriad, ranging from the discovery of minimal clock-time exposure (Cooky, Messner, & Musto, 2015; J. S. Turner, 2014) to overt objectification (Cummins, Ortiz, & Rankine, 2018) and sexualization (Kane, LaVoi, & Fink, 2013) to heteronormativity (Lenskyj, 2013) to generalized differentiation (Romney & Johnson, 2019) and discrimination (Whiteside & Roessner, 2018).…”

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confidence: 99%

Equity Achieved? A Longitudinal Examination of Biological Sex Representation in the NBC Olympic Telecast (2000–2018)

Billings

Angelini

2019

This report focuses on (a) how National Broadcasting Company’s (NBC) primetime Olympic telecasts have presented athletes competing as male and female, specifically in relation to the 2018 Pyeonchang Winter Olympic coverage and (b) how the Pyeongchang coverage fits into a longitudinal analysis of the past two decades of NBC’s coverage. Results show that women athletes received the majority of clock-time and name mentions during the 2018 coverage of the games, continuing a trend toward increased focus on women’s sports and athletics over the two-decade composite. The fact that American women are also winning a higher proportion of the medals at the Olympics is argued to be the most primary driver of this change over time. Implications and ramifications of the findings are also extrapolated.