‘A splendid effort!’ Print media reporting of England’s women’s performance in the 2009 Cricket World Cup

Abstract

The representation of female athletes by the British print media has been an area for close scrutiny since the mid-1990s. This article examines the representation of England's Women's performance at the 2009 Cricket World Cup. Using a qualitative content analysis of 29 articles from seven newspapers over the duration of the tournament, results show that the main themes emerging were: description of play, performance, celebration, media coverage and women's sport. These results are discussed in the context of changing trends since the 1990s. Concurring with previous authors we acknowledge that trends have changed in terms of what is reported but not in terms of how much is reported.

Spending the Primary Physical Education and Sport Premium: a West Midlands case study

“…Details of the spending of each primary school on their Physical Education and Sport Premium funding were 'cut and pasted' into an MS Word document and was prepared for analysis. Inductive open coding was used by analysing each line of text and allocating content to particular themes (Biscomb and Griggs 2013;Griggs and Gibbons 2014). A total number of 23 different themes emerged from coding the entirety of the data.…”

An analysis of British Newspaper Coverage of the Teenage Swimming Gold Medallists at the London 2012 Olympics

“…In their longitudinal analysis of representations of women in sports media between 1984 and 1994, Biscomb, Matheson, and Flatten (1997) found that there was a shift in the style of reporting with men being subject to greater references to appearance and interest in their personal lives which had previously been a feature of female reporting and more equality in the amount of column inches awarded to sportsmen and women (although this is still unequally skewed towards men). In a more recent study of print media reporting of England's women's performance in the 2009 World Cup Cricket, Biscomb and Griggs (2013) report that there is evidence of further positive changes in how women's sport is being reported.…”

Re-establishing the ‘outsiders’: English press coverage of the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup

“…Despite increasing participation and in view of the various challenges which have been made against patriarchal ideologies, media coverage of female sport continues to be problematically represented in comparison with male athletes (Biscomb and Griggs, 2012;Godoy-Pressland, 2014;Jakubowska et al, 2016;Ravel and Gareau, 2016;Woodward, 2016). Indeed, the effects of language and representation have occupied a prominent place in analyses of sport, gender and media.…”

“…Each article underwent a process of qualitative thematic analysis. As highlighted in previous media analyses (Biscomb and Griggs, 2012;Black 2016a;2016b;Jakubowska et al, 2016;Vincent et al, 2010), the thematic approach offered a way of exploring how newspaper representations of women's sport were constructed and framed.…”