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This article explores how local pressures intersect to produce differing broadcasts in 2 cultural contexts. This is achieved via a cross-cultural analysis of a decade of televised rugby union matches between France and New Zealand and interviews with leading commentators in both countries. The authors argue that although the overarching commercial imperative to capture audiences might be the same in both countries, and despite global tendencies toward homogenized presentation of sports events, there are local differences in expectations about which kinds of audiences should be captured, and these lead to different practices and emphases in the live broadcasts. The authors suggest that in each country, broadcasts are the result of a complex set of pressures that interact to produce broadcasts with “local” flavor and characteristics.

DePauw’s (1997) theoretical construct of sport and how we view the body focuses on three socially constructed ideals of physicality, masculinity, and sexuality. Those who do not fit into these ideals are marginalized when it comes to sport participation and media coverage. In this study the authors examined photographs from 12 print newspapers in five countries during the 2008 Paralympic Games in Beijing to determine how Paralympic athletes were treated. They examined the number of photographs and the content of each to determine whether athletes with disabilities are portrayed as tokens who are marginalized or treated as elite athletes. The findings support DePauw’s construct and point to gender and disability differences and hierarchy in print-media photographs.

Numerous studies examining the portrayals of gender, race, and nationality in sports commentary have been conducted through the years; however, comparative analyses of commentaries from different countries have been rare. This study examined commentary from 3 different countries (the U.S., Chinese Taipei, and South Korea) during a Major League Baseball (MLB) World Series. An entertainment theory schema was adopted and the 3 countries were categorized based on dispositional relativity (affiliation) with MLB. Findings indicate that South Korean broadcasts, which had the lowest affiliation with MLB, were biased toward the Boston Red Sox and presented the most evaluative commentaries; U.S. commentaries were generally positive and contained the largest portion of informative comments; and Chinese commentaries were unbiased and also provided a large number of informative comments. This implies that sports games using the same visual images can be framed differently by commentators based on the disposition (affiliation) level of audiences.

In most countries, live broadcasts of sports events generate enormous numbers of viewers and reach impressive market shares. In this article, the author examines the structures of major football (soccer) broadcasts on German television and makes conclusions on the quality of sports journalism. A longitudinal analysis is made of the broadcasts of the last 9 German matches in World and European Cup championships of the past 16 years on German television. A closer look at different parts reveals an increasing loss of meaning for live coverage, as well as rising preliminary and postreporting within the broadcasts. A finer cross-section examination of the football finals in 2006 and 2010 shows a lack of journalistic programming in the live broadcasts, with an increasing loss of meaning for sports journalism