DOCSLIB.ORG

Investigating Sports Commentator Bias Within a Large Corpus of American Football Broadcasts

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Investigating Sports Commentator Bias Within a Large Corpus of American Football Broadcasts Investigating Sports Commentator Bias within a Large Corpus of American Football Broadcasts Jack MerulloF♠ Luke YehF♠ Abram Handler♠ Alvin Grissom II| Brendan O’Connor♠ Mohit Iyyer♠ University of Massachusetts Amherst♠ Ursinus College| fjmerullo,lyeh,ahandler,miyyer,[email protected] [email protected] Abstract Player Race Mention text Baker white “Mayfield the ultimate com- Sports broadcasters inject drama into play- Mayfield petitor he’s tough he’s scrappy” by-play commentary by building team and player narratives through subjective analyses Jesse white “this is a guy . does nothing and anecdotes. Prior studies based on small James but work brings his lunch pail” datasets and manual coding show that such Manny nonwhite “good specs for that defensive theatrics evince commentator bias in sports Lawson end freakish athletic ability” broadcasts. To examine this phenomenon, we B.J. nonwhite “that otherworldly athleticism assemble FOOTBALL, which contains 1,455 Daniels he has saw it with Michael broadcast transcripts from American football Vick” games across six decades that are automat- ically annotated with 250K player mentions Table 1: Example mentions from FOOTBALL that high- and linked with racial metadata. We identify light racial bias in commentator sentiment patterns. major confounding factors for researchers ex- amining racial bias in FOOTBALL, and perform about each player’s race and position. Our re- a computational analysis that supports conclu- sulting FOOTBALL dataset contains over 1,400 sions from prior social science studies. games spanning six decades, automatically an- 1 Introduction notated with ∼250K player mentions (Table1). Analysis of FOOTBALL identifies two confounding Sports broadcasts are major events in contempo- factors for research on racial bias: (1) the racial rary popular culture: televised American football composition of many positions is very skewed (henceforth “football”) games regularly draw tens (e.g., only ∼5% of running backs are white), and of millions of viewers (Palotta, 2019). Such broad- (2) many mentions of players describe only their casts feature live sports commentators who weave actions on the field (not player attributes). We the game’s mechanical details into a broader, more experiment with an additive log-linear model for subjective narrative. Previous work suggests that teasing apart these confounds. We also confirm this form of storytelling exhibits racial bias: non- prior social science studies on racial bias in nam- white players are less frequently praised for good ing patterns and sentiment. Finally, we publicly plays (Rainville and McCormick, 1977), while release FOOTBALL,2 the first large-scale sports white players are more often credited with “in- commentary corpus annotated with player race, to telligence” (Bruce, 2004; Billings, 2004). How- spur further research into characterizing racial bias ever, such prior scholarship forms conclusions in mass media. from small datasets1 and subjective manual cod- ing of race-specific language. 2 Collecting the FOOTBALL dataset We revisit this prior work using large-scale We collect transcripts of 1,455 full game broad- computational analysis. From YouTube, we col- casts from the U.S. NFL and National Collegiate lect broadcast football transcripts and identify Athletic Association (NCAA) recorded between mentions of players, which we link to metadata 1960 and 2019. Next, we identify and link men- FAuthors contributed equally. tions of players within these transcripts to infor- 1 Rainville and McCormick(1977), for example, study only 16 games. 2 http://github.com/jmerullo/football 6355 Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, pages 6355–6361, Hong Kong, China, November 3–7, 2019. c 2019 Association for Computational Linguistics mation about their race (white or nonwhite) and bias in sports broadcasts which informs our work position (e.g., quarterback). In total, FOOTBALL (Rainville and McCormick, 1977; Rada, 1996; contains 267,778 mentions of 4,668 unique play- Billings, 2004; Rada and Wulfemeyer, 2005) typ- ers, 65.7% of whom are nonwhite.3 We now de- ically assume hard distinctions between racial scribe each stage of our data collection process. groups, which measurably affect commentary. In this work, we do not reify these racial categories; 2.1 Processing broadcast transcripts we use them as commonly understood within the We collect broadcast transcripts by downloading context of the society in which they arise. YouTube videos posted by nonprofessional, indi- To conduct a large-scale re-examination of this vidual users identified by querying YouTube for prior work, we must identify whether each player football archival channels.4 YouTube automati- in FOOTBALL is perceived as white or nonwhite.7 cally captions many videos, allowing us to scrape Unfortunately, publicly available rosters or player caption transcripts from 601 NFL games and 854 pages do not contain this information, so we re- NCAA games. We next identify the teams play- sort to crowdsourcing. We present crowd workers ing and game’s year by searching for exact string on the Figure Eight platform with 2,720 images matches in the video title and manually labeling of professional player headshots from the Asso- any videos with underspecified titles. ciated Press paired with player names. We ask After downloading videos, we tokenize tran- them to “read the player’s name and examine their scripts using spaCy.5 As part-of-speech tags pre- photo” to judge whether the player is white or dicted by spaCy are unreliable on our transcript nonwhite. We collect five judgements per player text, we tag FOOTBALL using the ARK TweetNLP from crowd workers in the US, whose high inter- POS tagger (Owoputi et al., 2013), which is more annotator agreement (all five workers agree on the robust to noisy and fragmented text, including TV race for 93% of players) suggests that their percep- subtitles (Jørgensen et al., 2016). Additionally, we tions are very consistent. Because headshots were use phrasemachine (Handler et al., 2016) to only available for a subset of players, the authors identify all corpus noun phrases. Finally, we iden- labeled the race of an additional 1,948 players by tify player mentions in the transcript text using ex- performing a Google Image search for the player’s act string matches of first, last, and full names to name8 and manually examining the resulting im- roster information from online archives; these ros- ages. Players whose race could not be determined ters also contain the player’s position.6 Although from the search results were excluded from the we initially had concerns about the reliability of dataset. transcriptions of player names, we noticed mini- 3 Analyzing FOOTBALL mal errors on more common names. Qualitatively, we noticed that even uncommon names were often We now demonstrate confounds in the data and correctly transcribed and capitalized. We leave a revisit several established results from racial bias more systematic study for future work. studies in sports broadcasting. For all experi- ments, we seek to analyze the statistics of con- 2.2 Identifying player race textual terms that describe or have an important Racial identity in the United States is a creation association with a mentioned player. Thus, we of complex, fluid social and historical processes preprocess the transcripts by collecting contex- (Omi and Winant, 2014), rather than a reflec- tual terms in windows of five tokens around each tion of innate differences between fixed groups. player mention, following the approach of Ananya Nevertheless, popular perceptions of race in the et al.(2019) for gendered mention analysis. 9 United States and the prior scholarship on racial We emphasize that different term extraction strategies are possible, corresponding to different 3See Appendix for more detailed statistics. 4We specifically query for full 7While we use the general term “nonwhite” in this paper, NFLjNCAAjcollege football games the majority of nonwhite football players are black: in 2013, 1960sj1970sj1980sj1990sj2000, and the full list 67.3% of the NFL was black and most of the remaining play- of channels is listed in in the Appendix. ers (31%) were white (Lapchick, 2014). 5https://spacy.io/ (2.1.3), Honnibal and Montani(2017) 8We appended “NFL” to every query to improve precision 6Roster sources listed in Appendix. We tag first and last of results. name mentions only if they can be disambiguated to a single 9If multiple player mentions fall within the same window, player in the rosters from opposing teams. we exclude each term to avoid ambiguity. 6356 many players’ actions (“passes the ball down- field”) depend on the position they play, which is often skewed by race (Figure1). Furthermore, the racial composition of mentions across different decades can differ dramatically—Figure2 shows these changes for quarterback mentions—which makes the problem even more complex. Modeling biased descriptions of players thus requires dis- entangling attributes describing shifting, position- dependent player actions on field (e.g., “Paulsen the tight end with a fast catch”) from attributes referring to intrinsic characteristics of individual Figure 1: Almost all of the eight most frequently- players (“Paulsen is just so, so fast”). mentioned positions in FOOTBALL are heavily skewed To demonstrate this challenge, we distinguish in favor of one race. between per-position effects and racial
Load more

Recommended publications
  • 1D. Khalyk , 2 K.N. Myssayeva ESPORT in JOURNALISM
    ISSN 1563-0242, еISSN 2617-7978 Хабаршы. Журналистика сериясы. №4 (54) 2019 https://bulletin-journalism.kaznu.kz IRSTI 19.31 https://doi.org/10.26577/HJ-2019-4-j9 1D. Khalyk , 2 K.N. Myssayeva 12-year student of Master degree, Al-Farabi Kazakh national university, Kazakhstan, Almaty, e-mail: [email protected] 2PhD, Associate professors, Al-Farabi Kazakh national university, Kazakhstan, Almaty, e-mail: [email protected] ESPORT IN JOURNALISM: COMMENTATOR OF ESPORT AS A MODERN PROFESSION Abstract. The Internet, as a global arrange, gives for all intents and purposes boundless openings at no cost communication, trade of thoughts and other information. Due to this phenomenon, it became possible to develop a new type of sports - e-sports. Esports is a trend that is growing rapidly, but it is considered a less studied sphere and there is no need to talk about the knowledge of e-sports journalism. There’s a require for assist inquire about on the proficient exercises of e-sports commentators, their social noteworthiness and their part within th e advancement of critical esteem demeanors of youth. The importance of this issue distinguished by the reality of the deep and far reaching infiltration of e-sports within the youth environment and the need for understanding in the scientific literature. This article analyzes the phenomenon of the genesis of the modern profession – eSports commen- tator and its specificity: job affiliation, characteristic features, features of appearance and commenting. Also, eSports commentator is regarded as a modern trend. In addition, there is the emergence of eSports journalism also described.
    [Show full text]
  • Grappling with Race: a Textual Analysis of Race Within the Wwe
    GRAPPLING WITH RACE: A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF RACE WITHIN THE WWE BY MARQUIS J. JONES A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS Communication April 2019 Winston-Salem, North Carolina Approved By: Ronald L. Von Burg, PhD, Advisor Jarrod Atchison, PhD, Chair Eric K. Watts, PhD ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first like to thank my thesis advisor, Dr. Ron Von Burg of the Communication Graduate School at Wake Forest University. Dr. Von Burg’s office was always open whenever I needed guidance in the completion of this thesis. He consistently allowed this paper to be my own work, but steered me in the right direction whenever he thought I needed. I would also like to thank Dr. Jarrod Atchison and Dr. Eric Watts for serving as committed members of my Graduate Thesis Committee. I truly appreciate the time and energy that was devoted into helping me complete my thesis. Finally, I must express my very profound gratitude to my parents, Marcus and Erika Jones, for providing me with unfailing support and continuous encouragement throughout my years of sturdy and through the process of research and writing this thesis. This accomplishment would not have been possible without them. Thank you. I love you both very much. Thank you again, Marquis Jones iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………..iv Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION………………………………………………Pg. 1 Chapter 2: HISTORY OF WWE……………………………………………Pg. 15 Chapter 3: RACIALIZATION IN WWE…………………………………..Pg. 25 Chapter 4: CONCLUSION………………………………………………......Pg.
    [Show full text]
  • Content Analysis of In-Game Commentary of the National Football League’S Concussion Problem
    Wilfrid Laurier University Scholars Commons @ Laurier Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive) 2016 No More Mind Games: Content Analysis of In-Game Commentary of the National Football League’s Concussion Problem Jeffrey Parker Wilfrid Laurier University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/etd Part of the American Popular Culture Commons, Broadcast and Video Studies Commons, Criminology Commons, Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons, Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons, Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication Commons, Health Policy Commons, Mass Communication Commons, Other Film and Media Studies Commons, Public Relations and Advertising Commons, Social Influence and oliticalP Communication Commons, Sociology of Culture Commons, Sports Studies Commons, and the Television Commons Recommended Citation Parker, Jeffrey, "No More Mind Games: Content Analysis of In-Game Commentary of the National Football League’s Concussion Problem" (2016). Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive). 1800. https://scholars.wlu.ca/etd/1800 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive) by an authorized administrator of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact [email protected]. No More Mind Games: Content Analysis of In-Game Commentary of the National Football League’s Concussion Problem by Jeffrey Parker B.A. (Honours), Wilfrid Laurier University, 2013 THESIS Submitted to the Department of Criminology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Master of Arts in Criminology Wilfrid Laurier University © Jeffrey Parker 2015 ii Abstract American (gridiron) football played at the professional level in the National Football League (NFL) is an inherently physical spectator sport, in which players frequently engage in significant contact to the head and upper body.
    [Show full text]
  • Gender in Televised Sports: News and Highlight Shows, 1989-2009
    GENDER IN TELEVISED SPORTS NEWS AND HIGHLIGHTS SHOWS, 1989‐2009 CO‐INVESTIGATORS Michael A. Messner, Ph.D. University of Southern California Cheryl Cooky, Ph.D. Purdue University RESEARCH ASSISTANT Robin Hextrum University of Southern California With an Introduction by Diana Nyad Center for Feminist Research, University of Southern California June, 2010 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION by Diana Nyad…………………………………………………………………….………..3 II. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS…………………………………………………………………………………………4 III. DESCRIPTION OF STUDY…………………………………………………………………………………………6 IV. DESCRIPTION OF FINDINGS……………………………………………………………………………………8 1. Sports news: Coverage of women’s sports plummets 2. ESPN SportsCenter: A decline in coverage of women’s sports 3. Ticker Time: Women’s sports on the margins 4. Men’s “Big Three” sports are the central focus 5. Unequal coverage of women’s and men’s pro and college basketball 6. Shifting portrayals of women 7. Commentators: Racially diverse; Sex‐segregated V. ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF FINDINGS…………………………………………………….22 VI. REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………………………..…………………28 VII. APPENDIX: SELECTED WOMEN’S SPORTING EVENTS DURING THE STUDY…………..30 VIII. BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE OF THE STUDY………………………………….…………….….33 IX. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………………………………….34 X. ABOUT THE CO‐INVESTIGATORS………………………………………………………………..….…….35 2 I. INTRODUCTION By Diana Nyad For two decades, the GENDER IN TELEVISED SPORTS report has tracked the progress— as well as the lack of progress—in the coverage of women’s sports on television news and highlights shows. One of the positive outcomes derived from past editions of this valuable study has been a notable improvement in the often‐derogatory ways that sports commentators used to routinely speak of women athletes. The good news in this report is that there is far less insulting and overtly sexist treatment of women athletes than there was twenty or even ten years ago.
    [Show full text]
  • NOT JUST a GAME Featuring Dave Zirin
    MEDIA EDUCATION FOUNDATION STUDY GUIDE NOT JUST A GAME Featuring Dave Zirin Study Guide Written by SCOTT MORRIS please visit www.mediaed.org/wp/notjustagame for updated materials & resources 2 CONTENTS Note to Educators ………………………………………………………………………………………3 Program Overview ……………………………………………………………………………………...4 Pre-viewing Questions …………………………………………………………………………………4 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………………...5 Key Points …………………………………………………………………………………………5 Questions for Discussion & Writing …………………………………………………………….5 Assignments ………………………………………………………………………………………6 In the Arena ……………………………………………………………………………………………..7 Key Points …………………………………………………………………………………………7 Questions for Discussion & Writing …………………………………………………………….8 Assignments ………………………………………………………………………………………9 Like a Girl ………………………………………………………………………………………………10 Key Points ……………………………………………………………………………………….10 Questions for Discussion & Writing …………………………………………………………...12 Assignments …………………………………………………………………………………….13 Breaking the Color Barrier ……………………………………………………………………………15 Key Points ……………………………………………………………………………………….15 Questions for Discussion & Writing …………………………………………………………...15 Assignments …………………………………………………………………………………….16 The Courage of Athletes ……………………………………………………………………………..18 Key Points ……………………………………………………………………………………….18 Questions for Discussion & Writing …………………………………………………………...19 Assignments …………………………………………………………………………………….20 3 NOTE TO EDUCATORS This study guide is designed to help you and your students engage and manage the information presented in this video.
    [Show full text]
  • CED Digest, Vol. 7
    ************************************************************************ ************************************************************************ CED Digest Vol. 7 No. 1 1/5/2002 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 20 Years Ago In CED History: January 6, 1982: * Archbishop Jozef Glemp, the Roman Catholic primate of Poland, tells a congregation in Warsaw's St. John's Cathedral that those who signed oaths renouncing Solidarity were coerced by the government and the oaths have no validity. January 7, 1982: * Presidential counselor Edwin Meese III reads a statement that reverses President Reagan's pre-election stand against the registration of 18-year-old males for a possible future military draft. * The Winter 1982 Consumer Electronics Show begins in Las Vegas, Nevada. While a year earlier the RCA VideoDisc system had been one of the most prominent introductions, at the 1982 show the VHD VideoDisc holds the spotlight with a large display space sporting the slogan "There's More to See on VHD." Other notable video-related introductions include the Technicolor CVC mini-cassette VCR system, the first tubeless consumer video camera, and the first Pioneer LaserDisc player with CX noise reduction. A picture of the VHD booth at the Winter 1982 CES can be seen at this URL: http://www.cedmagic.com/history/vhd-1982-ces.jpg January 8, 1982: * Spokesmen for the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) and the U.S. Department of Justice announce the settlement of a seven-year-old antitrust case which will result in AT&T divesting itself of 22 telephone companies, effectively breaking up the monopoly. * Future CED title in widespread theatrical release: Four Friends. January 9, 1982: * A frigid blast of artic air arrives in the United States bringing with it a week of record low temperatures.
    [Show full text]
  • TUBC 2015 Case
    0! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! “GROWING E-SPORT IN SOUTH EAST ASIA” ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 1 | TUBC 2015 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !Supawat Likittanawong prepared this case with assistance of Pakapol Thangtongchin under the supervision of the case company. The case was prepared solely as a basis for ! discussion. Cases are written in the past tense; this is not meant to imply that all practices, !organizations, people, places or facts mentioned in the case no longer occur, exist or apply. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or !illustration of effective or ineffective handling of a business situation. ! The case was written under the permission granted by the case company. © 2015 by BBA !International Program, Thammasat Business School, Thammasat University. This publication may not be digitized, photocopied or otherwise reproduced, posted,or ! transmitted without the permission of BBA International Program, Thammasat Business !School, Thammasat University. TUBC 2015 | 2 ! ! ! ! “At Garena, we focus on bringing joy and convenience to people across Asia through the power of our technology platform. We aspire to make the world an ever more connected community through innovative products and services.” -! Forrest Li, Garena’s Founder, Chairman and Group CEO ! 3 | TUBC 2015 ! 1.! INTRODUCTION It was July 2015 and Nok was waiting for the rest of her team in the main meeting room at Garena’s office in downtown Bangkok. A week ago, Nok attended the top team meeting at Garena’s headquarter in Singapore where the topic of growing eSports in Southeast Asia (SEA) was the center of discussion. Being a leader in online gaming in the region, Garena is at the forefront of the industry development.
    [Show full text]
  • Michael Phelps
    1 Fact Sheet Table of Contents Open Water Schedule Team History pp. 1-3 Tuesday July 21 Wednesday July 22 Saturday July 25 contains fact sheet, schedule, 5KM 9 a.m. (W) 10KM 9 a.m. (W) 25KM 9 a.m. (M) Team USA notes, warm-down info 11 a.m. (M) 2 p.m. (M) 9:10 a.m. (W) and selection procedures\ TV Schedule p. 4 Roster p. 5 Athlete Bios pp. 6-56 Coach Bios p. 57 Times History pp. 58-110 Record Progressions, All-Time Top Pool Schedule Performances and Performers 2007 Worlds Results pp. 111-114 PRELIMS FINALS PRELIMS FINALS Records pp. 115- 116 Sunday, July 26 Monday, July 27 World, American, U.S. Open and 100m Fly (W) 100m Fly (W)- Semi 100m Back (W) 100m Breast (M) World Champs records 400m Free (M) 400m Free (M) 200m Free (M) 100m Fly (W) USAS Info pp. 117-118 200m IM (W) 200m IM (W)- Semi 100m Breast (W) 100m Back (M)- Semi 50m Fly (M) 50m Fly (M)- Semi 100m Back (M) 100m Breast (W)- Semi 400m Free (W) 400m Free (W) 1500m Free (W) 50m Fly (M) 100m Breast (M) 100m Breast (M)- Semi 100m Back (W)- Semi Quick Facts 400m Free Relay (W) 400m Free Relay (W) 200m Free (M)- Semi 400m Free Relay (M) 400m Free Relay (M) 200m IM (W) WHAT: 13th FINA World Championships WHEN: Tuesday, July 28 Wednesday, July 29 July 17 - August 2, 2009 50m Breast (M) 200m Free (M) 50m Back (W) 100m Free (M)- Semi Open Water Dates: July 19-25 200m Fly (M) 100m Back (W) 100m Free (M) 50m Back (W)- Semi Pool Dates: July 26 - Aug.
    [Show full text]
  • “Beautiful Power Shield!” Vs. “Explosive Superman Punch!”
    “Beautiful Power Shield!” vs. “Explosive Superman Punch!” A Comparative Analysis of Promotional Metadiscursive Language in eSports and Mixed Martial Arts Sports Commentaries ”Vacker kraftsköld!” vs. ”Explosivt Supermanslag!” En komparativ analys av promotionsbefrämjande metadiskursivt språk i eSport och mixed martial arts sportkommentarer Anton Gustin Faculty of Arts & Social Science English English III: Degree Project 15hp Supervisor: Peter Wikström Examiner: Andrea Schalley Fall 2018 Title: “Beautiful Power Shield!” vs. “Explosive Superman Punch!”: A Comparative Analysis of Promotional Metadiscursive Language in eSports and Mixed Martial Arts Sports Commentaries Titel på svenska: “Vacker kraftsköld!” vs. ”Explosivt supermanslag!”: En komparativ analys av promotionsbefrämjande metadiskursivt språk i eSport och mixed martial arts sportkommentarer Author: Anton Gustin Pages: 76 Abstract Sports commentary is an essential part of live broadcasted sports as well as eSports and is a task that requires that the caster be verbally proficient and can maintain a high tempo when speaking, especially in more fast-paced sports. This study aims to analyze this promotional language sportscasters use by approaching it from the linguistic phenomenon of metadiscourse. This will be achieved by utilizing a theoretical framework adapted from previous research on eSports commentaries. By comparing a traditional sport, in this case mixed martial arts, with that of the eSport of Super Smash Bros. Melee, the aim is to see what differences can be found between the two sports’ commentaries and their use of metadiscursive promotional language. After comparing these two sets of commentaries, the results show that there are some differences in how promotional language is used to enhance the understanding and excitement of their respective sports.
    [Show full text]
  • Women and Sportscasting: a Different Kind of Ballgame
    Volume 44 Number 1 Article 4 September 2015 Women and Sportscasting: A Different Kind of Ballgame Bruce Kuiper Dordt College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/pro_rege Part of the Broadcast and Video Studies Commons, and the Christianity Commons Recommended Citation Kuiper, Bruce (2015) "Women and Sportscasting: A Different Kind of Ballgame," Pro Rege: Vol. 44: No. 1, 18 - 28. Available at: https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/pro_rege/vol44/iss1/4 This Feature Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University Publications at Digital Collections @ Dordt. It has been accepted for inclusion in Pro Rege by an authorized administrator of Digital Collections @ Dordt. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Women and Sportscasting: A Different Kind of Ballgame ibility, and increased division of loyalties as com- pared to their male counterparts. It has been only within recent history that wom- en have been able to be part of the sports broadcast- ing industry, beginning with Jane Chastain’s brief tenure with CBS in 1974 as a sportscaster for NFL games. Her experience is one of many examples that showcase both the joys and the struggles of trying to break into this demanding industry. Since the realm of sports has been a “man’s world” for many years, examining how women entered one arena of that world will highlight how rhetoric has been and is used to prevent and to foster such dramatic by Bruce Kuiper changes. By focusing especially on the relationship between the audience and various situations, this Introduction paper will emphasize the power of mediated mes- Sports announcers appear as though they have it sages in this specific area.
    [Show full text]
  • Women Play Sport, but Not on TV
    Article Communication & Sport 00(0) 1-28 ª The Author(s) 2013 Women Play Sport, Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav But Not on TV: A DOI: 10.1177/2167479513476947 Longitudinal Study of com.sagepub.com Televised News Media Cheryl Cooky1, Michael A. Messner2, and Robin H. Hextrum3 Abstract One of the long-standing trends in research on gender in sports media is the lack of coverage of women’s sport and the lack of respectful, serious coverage of women’s sport. In this article, we critically interrogate the assumption that the media simply provide fans with what they ‘‘want to see’’ (i.e., men’s sports). Using quantitative and qualitative analysis, we examine 6 weeks of the televised news media coverage on the local news affiliates in Los Angeles (KABC, KNBC, and KCBS) and on a nationally broadcast sports news and highlight show, ESPN’s SportsCenter.Part of an ongoing longitudinal study, the findings demonstrate that the coverage of women’s sport is the lowest ever. We argue that the amount of coverage of women’s sports and the quality of that coverage illustrates the ways in which the news media build audiences for men’s sport while silencing and marginalizing women’s sport. Moreover, the overall lack of coverage of women’s sport, despite the tremendous increased participation of girls and women in sport at the high school, collegiate, and professional level, conveys a message to audiences that sport continues to be by, for, and about men. 1 Department of Health & Kinesiology and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA 2 Department of Sociology and Gender Studies Program, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA 3 Faculty of Fine Arts, Laguna College of Art and Design, Laguna Beach, CA, USA Corresponding Author: Cheryl Cooky, Department of Health & Kinesiology and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, Purdue University, 800 W.
    [Show full text]
  • Social Hair from Dunedin’S Extraordinary Wig Factory, Freedom Hair, to Gendered “Norms” Around Body Hair, Lucy Hunter Explores a Surprising Cultural Phenomenon
    NEWS: GUIDE TO YOUNG BACK BENCHES SCARFIE CONFESSIONS HAVE MIC, WILL YELL ISSUE 22 Monday sees Critic bring Back In a small room with friends, An inside look into the emerging September 8, 2014 Benches and its host Wallace recovering from a night on the piss, popularity of e-sports and casting. critic.co.nz Chapman to the students. PAGE 14 a type of “confession” starts. PAGE 20 PAGE 28 SOCIAL HAIR From Dunedin’s extraordinary wig factory, Freedom Hair, to gendered “norms” around body hair, Lucy Hunter explores a surprising cultural phenomenon. Pg 24 ISSUE 22 September 8, 2014 NEWS & OPINION FEATURES CULTURE ABOVE: From “Scarfie 14 | CRITIC’s GUIDE TO 20 | SCARFIE CONFESSIONS 32 | FOOD Confessions” After having four or five too many beers, groups become invulner- YOUNG BACK BENCHES 33 | ART Illustration: able to giving a shit. It’s an especially lost cause as a particularly Critic is here with our guide to the most 34 | FILM Daniel Blackball informative event of the election season unique moment settles into the room. It’s hard to describe what this - Young Back Benches, hosted by the “moment” is, but when the conditions are right – that is, late at night, 36 | MUSIC COVER: preeminent Wallace Chapman. Student in a small room with friends your age, recovering from a night on the 38 | BOOKS From politicians from across the spectrum piss – a type of “confession” starts. 39 | GAMES "Social Hair” will be going head-to-head in a great By Max Callister-Baker rhetoric battle this Monday at Re:Fuel. 43 | TOO MUCH SCREENS Illustration: Daniel Blackball A harem of MPs will be present, as well 46 | LOVE IS BLIND as a menu of tongue-in-cheek themed 24 | SOCIAL HAIR drinks.
    [Show full text]