This case study assessed the differences in time on camera dedicated to men and women athletes at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. An analysis of the entirety of the programming on the the American broadcast television company NBC, including the prime-time broadcasts, the daytime programming, and the additional nightly content, yielded nearly 185 hr of coded Olympic content. When excluding mixed-sex events, in the 61.5 hr of prime-time coverage, women received 60.05% of the time on camera. During the non-prime-time coverage, which spanned 123 hr, men received the majority of clock time, accounting for 51.6% of coverage. In addition, differences by sport were uncovered, with the major differences occurring in alpine skiing, which saw more women’s coverage regardless of broadcast. In contrast, women received more coverage in freestyle skiing and snowboarding during the prime-time broadcast, but men were more emphasized in these competitions during the non-prime-time content. Utilizing agenda setting as the theoretical framework for this case study, ramifications for these broadcast trends and differences are discussed.
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The Continued Olympic Agenda Shift: A Case Study of the Time on Camera for Men and Women During the 2022 Beijing Olympics on NBC
Zachary W. Arth, James R. Angelini, Patrick C. Gentile, and Andrew W. Hard
Volume 16 (2023): Issue 1 (Mar 2023)
Looks, Liveliness, and Laughter: Visual Representations in Commercial Sports for Children
Jesper Karlsson, Åsa Bäckström, Magnus Kilger, and Karin Redelius
In contemporary society, visual information is influential, not least when businesses are communicating with potential customers. It represents and influences how people understand phenomena. In sports, much attention is directed toward how media represent elite sports and sport stars. Less attention is directed toward children’s sports. The aim of this article is to explore and analyze visual representations of children on sport businesses’ websites. The sample contained 697 images of sporting children, on which an interpretative content and discourse analysis was conducted. The study shows that the ideal customer emerging on these sites is a White, physically active, able, and slim boy or girl. Consumer culture seems to reproduce and preserve existing normative frameworks rather than producing alternative norms and ideas in children’s sport. Moreover, dilemmatic images of children both as competent and as innocent develop, displaying a childhood that should be both joyful and active but also safeguarded.
Critiquing the Social Media Scholarship in Sport Studies: A Sport Entrepreneurship Analysis
Vanessa Ratten
Social media is endemic to the sport industry and ensures its global competitiveness. The aim of this article is to critique social media scholarship in sport studies by taking a sport entrepreneurship perspective. This approach is useful in expanding and building on the existing social media research by focusing on the innovation apparent in the sport industry. An overview of current literature on social media and sport entrepreneurship is discussed. This article concludes with a number of different research trajectories that are needed to advance the practice and scholarship of sport social media studies and sport entrepreneurship.
Hyperprofessionalized and Commodified: A Case Study Examination of FBS Bowl Games and the Utilization of Football Players as Programmatic Promotional Material
Chris Corr, Richard M. Southall, Crystal Southall, and Richard J. Hart
Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) football games are presented in a hypercommercialized manner by television broadcast networks through the targeted use of in-game graphics and corporatized content. While commercialized FBS football broadcast components have been analyzed within the frameworks of a hypercommercialized National Collegiate Athletic Association and media institutional logics, an analysis of commentator language has yet to be examined within the larger institutional field of FBS football broadcasts. Utilizing agenda setting and media framing as frameworks, this case study examined the manner in which commentators frame FBS football players as professionals in a hypercommercialized institutional setting. From a sample of 18 FBS bowl games during the 2019–20 season, discourse and thematic analysis reveal that commentators frame FBS football players in the context of their future professional opportunities (i.e., National Football League). The framing of FBS football players as professionals aligns with extant literature examining the broader institutional field of broadcast media and logics pervasive in the National Collegiate Athletic Association as an organization. The commodification of FBS football players as integral components to strategic programmatic content promoting future broadcast programming is discussed.