For the last thirty-five years, the Gender in Televised Sport Report has analyzed the quantity and quality of coverage of women’s and men’s sports on televised news and highlight shows. After providing an overview of shifts in the sport media landscape and outlining several key changes to the 2024 sampling procedures, we contextualize the most recent iteration of our longitudinal study in relation to thirty-five years of shifting representations of men’s and women’s sports in televised news and highlight shows. Our findings point to a siloing effect of high-quality coverage of women’s sport. Although high-quality coverage of women’s sports exists on emergent and niche platforms, legacy networks primarily interrupt their regularly scheduled broadcasting of the men’s “Big Three” when rare and record-breaking moments occur in women’s sports. Since men’s sports remain the default topic within “mainstream” coverage, we conclude by discussing how the siloing of women’s sports to niche outlets may limit opportunities for audience-building in women’s sports.
Tommy John Surgery (TJS) revolutionized baseball by repairing a previously career-ending injury. Its invention necessarily altered traditional narratives about athletic performance and decline, but John’s subsequently improved pitching gave rise to suspicions that TJS was an unnatural performance enhancement. John’s counterargument successfully enabled TJS to be approved by baseball, but undermined the seriousness of the surgery and the cause behind the injury. Doctors and former players are now calling for a change to the public discussion of TJS in an effort to prevent a possible “epidemic” of youth pitchers requiring the procedure. This call is hampered by the sterling reputation TJS enjoys, which is due largely to how John and Major League Baseball redrew the line between a medical “fix” and an unnatural “enhancement.”
This study examined how prominent sports-betting accounts frame betting on social media and how college athletes encounter, interpret, and respond to such content. Using a mixed-methods design, this study combined a large-scale social media content analysis ( n = 38,925 posts from X) with semi-structured interviews ( n = 17) with current National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) athletes. Findings indicated that betting-related content is highly concentrated among a small group of high-volume accounts and is frequently framed around opportunity, strategy, and entertainment, with comparatively little emphasis on gambling-related risk. Interview data revealed that college athletes experience pervasive, often unavoidable exposure to sports-betting content that contributes to perceptions of betting as a normalized component of sports culture despite institutional prohibitions. Integrating framing theory with normalization scholarship, the study proposes a feedback loop in which content production, engagement, algorithmic amplification, and repeated exposure reinforce the visibility and cultural legitimacy of sports betting. The findings have implications for college athletes’ well-being, media literacy, and responsible communication practices among media companies and sportsbook operators.
This article examines Hebrew-language Twitter (X) discourse surrounding Israel’s Tokyo 2020 Olympic gold medalists, Linoy Ashram and Artem Dolgopyat, demonstrating how their victories became flashpoints for social debate even as they were celebrated as national achievements. Drawing on a mixed-methods framework, including quantitative analysis of over 3,900 Hebrew-language tweets, semantic network mapping, and qualitative thematic interpretation, the study analyzes discourse within Israel’s dominant linguistic majority. Focusing on Hebrew speakers provides a conservative test: if fragmentation occurs even within Israel’s culturally dominant linguistic ingroup, this suggests that digital platforms can unsettle the integrative logic of media events even within a relatively shared national public. The analysis reveals that these achievements provoked competing narratives along political, religious, ethnic, and class lines. Ashram’s win sparked debates over Shabbat observance, political legitimacy, and inequality; Dolgopyat’s victory exposed tensions regarding immigrant identity and the Rabbinate’s marriage monopoly. Notably, gendered discourse was overshadowed by Israeli-specific intersecting conflicts. Network analysis revealed high modularity and distinct thematic clusters, underscoring a fragmented public conversation. These findings challenge classical media event theory, suggesting digital mega-events increasingly surface rather than bridge societal divisions, transforming sporting achievements into terrain where competing identities are publicly negotiated.
Mythic rhetoric is a mainstay in sports communication. Stories of athletes achieving greatness through struggle provides a foundation for communities to build, manage, and share collective identities and ideologies. One of the unexplored weaknesses of sports myths lies in how rhetors respond to losses. Sports myths are a powerful resource used to shore up mutual identity, but they are tethered to real-world outcomes that run counter to mythic themes. Thus, losses can spur on mythic evolution to address ensuing inconsistencies. In those cases, rhetors are left with several options: ignore the outcomes or adapt the myth, either grounding or broadening it to transcend shortcomings. These tendencies were evident in the Chinese government’s responses to Xu Xiaodong, a mixed martial artist who made headlines defeating Wushu masters. Wushu, a term referring to a collection of traditional Chinese martial arts, is a core myth for the government. Seeing masters rack up losses threw their mythology into chaos. This analysis examines the state-run media’s responses to the Xu situation as a means of understanding the delicacy of sports myths and a consideration of how rhetors who rely on those myths respond to losses when myths evolve because of real-world outcomes.
In 2017, Nike sponsored “Breaking2”: an orchestrated race, centered around Eliud Kipchoge’s efforts to break the 2-hour barrier in the marathon. Eight years later, Nike produced “Breaking4,” wherein Faith Kipyegon attempted to become the first woman to break the four-minute mile barrier. While neither athlete was successful, both produced world fastest times (yet were outside of official record-eligible conditions) and received substantial media attention. However, to date, there lacks critical scholarship analyzing the events and comparing their coverages: a significant oversight given the structurally parallel curation of both events. To address this gap, we conduct a comparative qualitative critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyze U.S. media coverage published before, during, and after both races. Our analysis identified three themes: (1) technological mediation of human performance, (2) questions of athletic legitimacy and institutional rule-making, and (3) Nike’s corporate role as both facilitator and protagonist. Our analysis also revealed softened skepticism and criticism of these events over time, with Breaking4 coverage normalizing the technologized environment and framing Kipyegon’s attempt through the language of inspiration. This ultimately reveals how media discourse defines what “counts” as a barrier, who is imagined to break it, and how corporate sport spectacle is made culturally meaningful.
Research has shown the pervasive online harassment of women in sport, yet limited scholarship has examined public perceptions of the online harassment of women in sport. We use quantitative and qualitative responses from a national survey of U.S. adults over two waves in December 2025 and February 2026 (N = 1,912) to examine sociodemographic factors, sports following, and exposure to online harassment as predictors of opinion and to explore how respondents explain their opinions. Over 40% reported that levels of online harassment of women are higher in sport than outside of it and that levels of online harassment of women in sport have increased over the past 3-5 years. Exposure to online harassment, age, sexuality, and race/ethnicity predict opinion. Qualitative comments illustrate divergent perceptions of online harassment as variously gendered, motivated by sexism, experienced disproportionately by women, and commonly emerging as body shaming, or as gender-neutral, a phenomenon experienced by men and women equally and facilitated by the anonymity, availability, and deregulation of social media and online spaces. Our focus on public opinion contributes to the small but growing area of online hate speech in sport and has potential to inform policies to prevent and manage online harassment.
Advances in communication technology have led to sharp increases in sports betting via smartphones and other mobile devices around the world. At the same time, legal changes in places such as the United States have drastically altered the media ecosystem surrounding sports. As a result, sports betting now permeates many facets of sports media coverage and the broader culture of sports. Despite these developments, mobile sports gambling has received relatively little attention from communication scholars. In this agenda-setting commentary, we argue that communication researchers are uniquely positioned to elucidate the causes and consequences of mobile sports betting and build and test theory related to this issue. In doing so, we illustrate research opportunities for studying mobile sports gambling across the field. We begin by documenting the rapid increase in mobile sports betting and gambling-related media content in society. We then explain why features of mobile sports betting and the contemporary media ecosystem combine to create complexities that require the attention of communication scholars. Finally, we bolster our arguments with survey data from a sample of 1,075 American adults who reported using a mobile device to gamble on sports in the past year.
This study examines racial disparities in emotional expression within online football fandom by analyzing sentiment in YouTube comments referring to white players and players of color across different match contexts (previews, wins, losses, and draws). Using a two-way ANOVA with 239 observations derived from 5,819 comments, we identify significant racialized patterns in sentiment expression. White players received significantly higher sentiment scores than players of color overall, with disparities most pronounced following wins and in previews: contexts where praise and positive evaluation are typically expressed. Notably, following losses, sentiment was equally negative across racial groups, indicating that racial bias operates primarily through the withholding of praise rather than the attribution of blame. These findings align with social identity theory’s distinction between in-group favoritism and out-group derogation, suggesting that bias in football commentary manifests predominantly through preferential allocation of positive sentiment to white players rather than through explicit negativity toward players of color. The results reveal that affective inequalities persist in online football discourse despite formal diversity initiatives, and that racial bias operates not only through overt hostility but through subtle, patterned inequalities in the distribution of emotional rewards.
Disability sport has become increasingly visible in digital media environments, yet comparatively little is known about how elite para-athletes sustain athletic legitimacy through routine, athlete-managed social media practices. This study examines how elite wheelchair basketball players organize Instagram content to render elite credibility publicly recognizable. Drawing on qualitative visual content analysis of 360 posts produced by 24 national team-level athletes from Canada, Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, the study adopts a dramaturgically informed, cross-national comparative design. The findings indicate a recurring visual repertoire in which legitimacy is most consistently communicated through institutional competition settings, routinized preparation displays, visible team affiliation, and moderated affective presentation, while several US-based accounts more frequently incorporate commercially integrated and motivationally elaborated forms of visibility. Captions primarily function as concise multimodal alignment devices rather than sites of extended narrative elaboration. The study contributes to communication and sport scholarship by specifying how athlete-managed Instagram environments can function as routine sites of legitimacy work within platformed parasport cultures.
In two studies we examined the perceptions of bandwagon fans—those whose interest is inconsistent or contingent upon a team’s current performance—and hardcore sport fans—those with a persistent and unflinching zeal for their team even through periods of poor performance. In both studies, participants were randomly assigned to read about a bandwagon or hardcore basketball fan prior to rating their perception of the target person’s trustworthiness (likability, honesty, expertise) and personality (big five dimensions). Additionally, we assessed several possible mediators of the effect of manipulating fan type on perceived fan trustworthiness: perceived genuineness, consistency, prototypicality of the target as a fan, and the target’s presumed fanship and fandom identification. The results of both studies showed that hardcore fans were perceived more positively than bandwagon fans. Mediation analyses suggest that perceived genuineness (Studies 1 & 2), consistency, prototypicality, fanship, and fandom (Study 2) may all be factors driving this effect. The results provide empirical evidence for the positive perception of hardcore (vs. bandwagon) fans and, more importantly, suggest important mechanisms for fan perception.
The efforts of institutions to eradicate hate both within and beyond the sporting domain have led professional football leagues such as the Premier League and La Liga to develop their own anti-racism campaigns. This study examines X users’ reactions to posts published by each competition under the slogans No Room for Racism and LaLiga VS Racismo . Through a longitudinal, mixed-method analysis, ( N = 238) posts and ( N = 20,329) responses were examined to assess the evolution of online discourse, the level of hostility, and the degree of polarization surrounding these campaigns. Our findings indicate that hostile discourse tends to emerge sporadically, particularly in response to visible social events rather than as a direct consequence of the campaigns themselves. Qualitative analysis further shows that a substantial proportion of toxic or negative responses does not stem from overtly racist discourse, but from users criticizing the perceived effectiveness or constituency of the campaigns. The results also reveal differences between the two leagues: while the Premier League exhibits a relatively balanced distribution of positive and negative responses, La Liga is characterized by a predominance of negative affect. These findings contribute to the literature on sport, racism and digital polarization by showing how institutional anti-racism campaigns become embedded in broader conflicts over their legitimacy and effectiveness.
Digital media platforms have become central spaces where sports fans engage, form communities, and construct their identities. These platforms also give rise to sports influencers and creators who reshape how fans perceive and perform fandom. Yet, digital media's role is double-edged—it fosters connection but can also amplify toxicity and cultural insensitivity. Social awareness, especially around race and gender, further complicates fan and athlete identities. This study draws on social identity, self-categorization, and family systems theories to conduct 22 in-depth interviews to explore how fans perceive their sports identity and digital media use. Themes include engagement, self-presentation, authenticity, and motivations. Participants often linked their fandom to family, using both real-life and digital spaces to bond with others. Matters of social justice in sports challenged some to reassess their values, while digital authenticity was viewed with ambivalence—desired by some, feared by others. This work also found many projected their sports identity online for a similar reason as with their families: it’s the easiest way to connect with others without risk of dire conflict.
Allen Iverson’s Hall of Fame basketball career and its aftermath continue to fascinate students of sport, race, and culture. This essay examines Iverson’s on-and-off court stylings to argue for the radical character at both the heart of his play and his professional example. Through animated styles of play and speech suggestive of a catalog of aesthetic and moral resistance, he stewarded an ethic of Black belonging, modeling a politically charged counter to the neoliberal tendrils suffocating the NBA and its values of commodification, consumption, and white appeasement. Critical analyses of his crossover dribble, “practice” presser, and Hall of Fame induction speech show the ways Iverson challenged appeasement, hyper-professionalism, and disregard for Black autonomy and creativity.
Media play a central role in translating athletic success into national meaning, yet gendered dynamics of sport nationalism remain underexamined. Although women have achieved high visibility in Chinese elite sport, differences in their national representation are insufficiently explored. Drawing on discourse analysis of news headlines and selected national media reports published within one week of major victories, this article examines portrayals of the Chinese women’s volleyball team and tennis player Li Na. Coverage of women’s volleyball is closely intertwined with nationalist discourse, mobilising narratives of collective struggle, historical memory and national revival that frame the team as gender-neutral ‘national warriors’. In contrast, portrayals of Li Na foreground individual success, celebrity and commercialisation, producing a more ambivalent and gendered articulation of nationalism marked by androgyny and relational dependence. The article demonstrates how gendered sport nationalism is differentiated within Chinese media through distinct representational logics applied to team and individual female athletes.
Grounded in the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning and the cognitive-affective-conative model, this study examines how the presence versus absence of sports commentary shapes viewers' cognitive and affective responses and, ultimately, viewing intention, as well as whether these pathways vary by prior knowledge. An experiment using a one-factor, two-level (commentary present vs. absent) between-subjects design was conducted with 124 undergraduate and graduate students in South Korea. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling with bootstrapped confidence intervals. Results showed that viewers exposed to commentary reported higher subjective attention and processing fluency than those in the no-commentary condition. Serial indirect effects were supported, indicating that commentary strengthened viewing intention via cognitive responses (attention and fluency) and affective responses (enjoyment and excitement). Regarding conditional serial indirect effects, the results suggested an expertise-reversal pattern in which the benefits of commentary were attenuated as prior knowledge increased, primarily through fluency-based pathways rather than attention-based pathways. These findings clarify the psychological mechanisms through which commentary shapes sports viewing experiences and suggest that personalized audio and information formats aligned with viewers' knowledge levels may enhance engagement.
