Body Remains a Difference
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Body Remains a Difference Representation of Gender in Four Newspapers’ Reporting on the 2016 Olympic Games Joel Olsson Department of English Bachelor Degree Project English Linguistics Autumn 2016 Supervisor: Mikko Höglund Body Remains a Difference Representation of Gender in Four Newspapers’ Reporting on the 2016 Olympic Games Joel Olsson Abstract This thesis investigates how male and female athletes competing in the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro were portrayed in two British and two American newspapers (The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post). It also examines how the total amount of coverage was distributed between athletes of each gender. Previous studies have shown that female athletes are not given as much space as male athletes (Jones, 2004, Caple, Greenwood, & Lumby, 2011, Godoy- Pressland 2014) and that when they are reported on, not portrayed in the same way as male athletes (Eagleman, 2015). This can have negative effects for athletes and their sport (Knight & Giuliano, 2011). For this essay, a corpus was created out of articles from the four newspapers, which were subsequently analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The findings showed a greater equality in the amount of coverage provided by newspapers than had been shown by previous studies, but with such a small sample, results could not be generalised widely. For the qualitative analysis, articles from two specific events were analysed and determined to not contain any major differences between males and females, with only one exception, which was Los Angeles Times’ article on the women’s artistic gymnastics team all-around event. Keywords Language and gender, representation, media coverage, Olympic Games, modifiers Contents 1. Introduction ................................................................................... 1 2. Literature Review ............................................................................ 2 3. Method & Material ........................................................................... 4 3.1. Material ........................................................................................... .. 4 3.2. Method ............................................................................................ .. 5 3.3. Abandoned Area of Study .................................................................. .. 6 4. Results and Analysis ........................................................................ 7 4.1 Amount of Coverage .......................................................................... .. 7 4.1.1. Number of Articles............................................................................. .... ... 7 4.1.2 Number of Word Tokens ...................................................................... .... ... 8 4.2 Quality of Coverage ........................................................................... 12 4.2.1. Headlines ......................................................................................... .... 12 4.2.2. Modifiers .......................................................................................... .... 15 4.2.3. Specificity and Technical Terms ........................................................... .... 17 5. Conclusion .................................................................................... 20 5.1 Acknowledgements ............................................................................ 21 References ........................................................................................ 22 Appendix A – Additional Tables and Graphs ........................................... 24 Appendix B – List of Articles from The Daily Telegraph & The Sunday Telegraph ......................................................................................... 25 Appendix C – List of Articles from The Independent ............................... 27 Appendix D – List of Articles from Los Angeles Times ............................. 28 Appendix E – List of Articles from The Washington Post & Washington Post Sunday ............................................................................................. 29 1. Introduction When the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games began on 5 August 2016, the world’s attention turned to Rio de Janeiro. A select few are able to attend the Games, and some watch them on the TV at home, but with so many athletes and events, many have to rely on news outlets for information and results. One source claimed there were around 21,000 journalists present reporting from the 2012 London Olympics, and ahead of the Rio 2016 Games, it was stated that around 30,000 journalists and media staff would be attending, and those number reflect the importance of this event, and possibly also the influence it carries (Olympic Games Media, [Website], n.d., Moli, T. 2015). There were more journalists than competitors: The total number of athletes in Rio was 11,303 (Olympic Athletes at Rio 2016, n.d.). During the 2016 Summer Olympics, a number of unfortunate and striking headlines were highlighted as prime examples of sexist attitudes, conscious or not, the perhaps most prominent coming from Chicago Tribune: “Wife of a Bears’ lineman wins a bronze medal” (Chicago Tribune, 2016). While a few examples are a poor statistical basis, these headlines nonetheless raise a pertinent question: How gender equal is the reporting from sporting events? With reporters pressured to relay information from many events at a high tempo, perhaps it is not surprising that remarks such as the aforementioned headline slip through, but if biases are exposed, then that only makes the subject all the more important to examine. As an aside, when going through the data for this study, a great number of typos, missing words and other mistakes was observed, which might be proof of the hurried pace at which journalists (and editors) were working. Previous studies on gender and sports reporting have focused on female athletes in different sports in various media forms – TV (Caple et al., 2011), images (Godoy- Pressland & Griggs, 2014) and print media (Serra & Burnett, 2007, Godoy-Pressland, 2014), but only some have studied the Olympic games, and then mainly the 2012 London Olympics (Eagleman, 2015). Because it is the only truly global sporting event where both men and women compete in the same events at the same time (although not against the opposite sex), the Olympics seem an ideal place to examine gender equality in sports reporting. In the present study, there are several goals. The main objective of the study is to investigate the equality of coverage in the reporting on the 2016 Summer Olympics by four different newspapers. Previous studies have not looked at such recent events, and this study aims to explore whether the characteristics highlighted by previous studies, such as amount of coverage given to male and female athletes, and the manner of reporting on athletes of each gender, have developed in one or the other direction during the latest Olympic Games. Additionally, the study will determine whether any of the tendencies mentioned above are common to British or American newspapers, or if no such conclusions may be drawn. This will be accomplished through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of data collected from four different newspapers. 1 2. Literature Review There have been many studies that have focused on quality and quantity of coverage of male versus female athletes in the media, examining everything from amount of coverage in newspaper (Godoy-Pressland, 2014) and in television (Caple et. al, 2011), to imagery in print (Godoy-Pressland & Griggs, 2014) and online (Petca et al., 2013), and have found that women in sports are not treated in the same way sportsmen are. Various recent studies have found that female athletes are not covered as widely as their male counterparts (Godoy-Pressland, 2014), one study even concluding that on Australian TV, horseracing alone was given almost as much broadcasting time as female athletes (Caple et al., 2011). One consequence of this is that female athletes, and the organisations behind women’s sport, in this case female football players in Australia and the W-League, receive less sponsorship revenue, and that their sponsorship growth is hindered. This, in turn, forms a vicious cycle as lucrative sponsorship deals are dependent on a great deal of coverage, which could be achieved via a more professional structure, something which requires more money (Caple et al., 2011). Coverage on the ABC News website during the 2000 Olympic Games failed to give female athletes the attention their successes merited according to Jones (2004). Between January 2008 and December 2009, female athletes were only featured in 3.6% of all articles on sports published in five major British newspapers (Godoy-Pressland, 2014), a remarkable discrepancy. There seems to be a general belief that some sports are more or less suited to male and female athletes, that is, that they are seen as more or less masculine or feminine (Matteo, 1986). The term sex-appropriateness of sports appear in a doctoral dissertation, but is an unfortunate one, as it implies that certain sports are correctly viewed as suitable for male or female athletes. This is not what the dissertation claims, rather, it represents the views of participants of a study at Cornell University who were asked to rate various sports as feminine or masculine. The results showed that males were more committed to what was viewed as “masculine” sports, for example ice