A Hit to the Head: Framing and News Coverage of the NFL’s Concussion Lawsuit in The New York Times and ESPN ____________________________________ A Thesis Presented to the Honors Tutorial College Ohio University ____________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from The Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Science in Journalism ____________________________________ By Kaitlin Coward May 2018 2 This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism __________________________ Dr. Aimee Edmondson Associate Professor, Journalism Thesis Adviser ___________________________ Dr. Bernhard Debatin Director of Studies, Journalism ___________________________ Cary Frith Interim Dean, Honors Tutorial College 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis would never have been possible without Dr. Aimee Edmondson and all the guidance she provided throughout the past year. She worked to guide me through my research, keep me calm when things got stressful and push me to make my writing the best it could be. I truly do not know how this project would have to come to be without her. Several other people have helped me along the process as well, including Dr. Bernhard Debatin, who initially approved the idea behind this. I also want to give a special shoutout to everyone in The Post newsroom for listening to me ramble about concussions and letting me talk people’s ears off about social responsibility theory and more. You all made it so I was consistently excited about my project and gave me the belief that I could actually do this. I also want to thank those of you who took the time to read through and copy edit my chapters. That meant more to me than you will ever know. I want to thank all of my friends who have supported me throughout this process, particularly my three other HTC roommates — Kelly, Catherine and Erica — whom I have been able to go to for pretty much anything. And lastly, of course, a big thank you and love you to my family who regularly asked how I was doing and pushed me to the finish line. Thank you. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Troy Aikman and the list of others ..……………………………………………… 5 Review of the scholarly literature ….…………………………………………………………… 9 A culture of crushing blows: how concussions became a problem in the NFL ……….……….. 19 Method …………………………………………………………………………………………. 26 The New York Times findings ………………………………………………………………….. 32 ESPN findings ………………………………………………………………………………….. 43 Discussion and analysis ………………………………………………………………………... 52 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………....................... 64 References...…………………………………………………………………………………….. 68 Appendix A: Timeline …………………………………………………………......................... 75 5 Introduction: Troy Aikman and the list of others Troy Aikman sat in a dark hospital room at Baylor University Medical Center in downtown Dallas, Texas, when his agent, Leigh Steinberg, walked in. Outside, the people of Dallas were celebrating their team making it to the Super Bowl. Inside, the Dallas Cowboys’ star quarterback asked his agent where he was. Aikman couldn’t remember. Nor could he recall playing earlier that day against the San Francisco 49ers in the 1994 NFC Championship Game that took his team to the Super Bowl. He still doesn’t. When Steinberg entered the room, he explained to Aikman that he had suffered a concussion during the game. With the Cowboys up 28-7, Aikman took a knee to the head on his way to the ground. But he can’t remember that. Steinberg continued to outline what happened throughout the rest of the game, telling Aikman who the Cowboys played, that they won, that Aikman would play in the Super Bowl. The two celebrated. But a few minutes later, Aikman asked the same questions. Steinberg responded with the same answers. They celebrated once more. And then about 10 minutes passed. Aikman was asking again. Looking back at that day, Steinberg said, “It terrified me to see how tender the bond was between sentient consciousness and potential dementia and confusion was. I finally wrote down on a piece of paper the 10 most commonly asked championship-night questions and answers so we could hold them in front of him and stare at them” (Kirk, Gilmore & Wiser, 2013). Though they were not all documented in National Football League paperwork, Aikman estimated that he had six to eight concussions total throughout his career (Deitsch, 2015). He cannot remember later playing the Super Bowl against the Buffalo Bills in 1994. It is hard to say what other damage he might have acquired before he retired in 2001 because of health problems, including concussions and back issues, though in 2013 he said he had not had symptoms since 6 and he would play professional football again if he could do it all over (Cash, 2013). Aikman is one of the more notable players to have had a serious head injury during a game. He elected not to join a class-action lawsuit filed by thousands of former professional football players and their families against the NFL, but his concussions mark just one of the many cases of such injuries within the league. Mike Webster. Dave Duerson. Junior Seau. Those are just a few of the players who fared worse because of concussions — all of them were eventually found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a neurodegenerative disease that is the result of repeated hits to the head. Though in 2002 Webster was considered to be “patient zero” of the NFL’s concussion crisis, the deaths of both Duerson and Seau years later made national headlines, too (Fainaru- Wada & Fainaru, 2014a). Duerson committed suicide in February 2011, leaving behind a note that instructed researchers to study his brain. That story opened a deeper conversation about the severity of the concussion problem in the NFL, which later sparked dozens of former players to sue the league. That spark later turned into a fire when a total of about 4,500 former players and their families filed a class-action lawsuit in 2012 against the league, claiming that it knew or should have known that playing professional football could lead to severe brain injuries. Between mid-2011 and mid-2017, news outlets increased their coverage of concussions to include information about the lawsuit. Reporters repeatedly framed the articles in terms of how former players were affected by head injuries, legal background on the case, the science of concussions and how the league should change in reaction to the lawsuit. Two outlets that had extensive coverage during that time were The New York Times and ESPN, and this thesis seeks to evaluate how those two outlets, with their widespread viewership and dedication to sports coverage, used certain frames to tell the story of the NFL’s concussion lawsuit. The author 7 selected those two media organizations to compare the newspaper of record with a sports outlet of notable popularity for fans. In each outlet, the author compared types of articles and frames of articles to identify patterns in coverage. Framing analysis helps evaluate how effectively each outlet reported on all sides of the concussion lawsuit and not just the sensational parts, which journalists sometimes focus on (Siebert, Peterson & Schramm, 1963). Additionally, it is important for each media organization to cover all angles to accurately inform readers about the relevant issues. Social responsibility theory suggests that readers have a right to know information, and as a result, publications have an obligation to provide readers with enough information to be educated on a specific topic. That theory states that giving the audience all it needs to know to understand a topic is crucial to journalism and the public’s understanding of society (Siebert et al., 1963). This thesis seeks to examine how each outlet covered all angles to see if the two provided socially responsible coverage to readers following the story of the NFL concussion lawsuit. This thesis begins with a literature review of the relevant works that touch on reporting of concussions in sport, framing analysis in health reporting and errors in science journalism. The thesis then includes a chapter that focuses on the historical background of the NFL concussion lawsuit. That includes the development of an NFL committee to study brain injury, how the NFL and researchers disagreed over the potential consequences of concussions, what players have been affected and how all of that built to culminate in the concussion lawsuit. In the next chapter, the author explains how she chose The New York Times and ESPN as the two outlets of study and how she selected the articles to study. In that methods chapter, she also details framing analysis and social responsibility theory in relation to reporting on the lawsuit. The author then uses a chapter apiece to evaluate The New York Times’ and ESPN’s reporting on the lawsuit with 8 analysis of the most frequently used types of articles and frames, metaphors and corrections. In the discussion section, the author compares how those two outlets differed in their coverage and how they can continue to improve coverage in the future. 9 Review of the scholarly literature The author read a wide range of scholarly articles about concussion science, framing in health journalism and reporting about concussions, and social responsibility theory. Each article included different components that tie into the complexities of the NFL concussion lawsuit and the reporting that came with it. Coverage of the suit consists of scientific, legal and emotional angles in addition to themes of violence and change. Not many scholarly articles have addressed coverage of the NFL concussion lawsuit specifically given that it just took place in recent years, but many have touched on similar topics that include one or multiple aspects of the suit and those angles. Ahmed and Hall, in their article titled “ ‘It was only a mild concussion’: Exploring the description of sports concussion in online news articles,” also focused on how reporters wrote about concussions.