Marie Hardin

Olympic Photo Coverage Fair to Female Athletes

A content analysis of four Florida dailies and one national newspaper during the 2000 Games shows that newspaper editors included fair numbers of women in Olympic photos and chose photos that depicted female athletes in a realistic manner.

Sporting Images in Black and White: Race in Newspaper Coverage of the 2000 Olympic Games

The Olympic Games is a global sporting event framed in popular culture as promoting diversity and equal opportunity. This study looks at racialized depictions of U.S. Olympic (2000) athletes in 5 U.S. daily (4 regional and 1 national) newspapers. More than 800 images of U.S. Olympic athletes were examined to see if depictions mirrored the reality of the Games and if depictions reinforced notions of racial and sexual difference. The medal count of U.S. athletes, tabulated by race, gender, sport type, and sport category, was used as the “reality gauge” for this study. While the newspapers presented ratios of male and female competitors realistically, they overrepresented Black athletes. Black males were also overrepresented in strength sports. Such depictions reinforce hegemonic notions of Black primitive athleticism and of racial difference.

Fewer Women, Minorities Work in Sports Departments

A survey found that women and racial minorities are underrepresented in sports departments, whether the standard for measure is their representation in the wider population or in the rest of the newsroom.

Research in Communication, Disability, and Sport

Explorations of the intersections of disability and sport have painted a multilayered picture of crucial aspects of communication including issues of gender, health, politics, and organizational tensions. Media-focused scholarship has identified different ways that sport articulates, perpetuates, and can challenge ableist views of disabled bodies. This article explores sites for additional communication research building on work on disability and sport from outside the communication and media studies field. The scholarship on disability and sport is explored around three themes: disability sport and rehabilitation discourse; disability metaphors and stereotypes; and sport, public controversy, and disability law. Possibilities for communication-focused work around each of these themes are also explored, and a case is made for the continued emphasis on integration of feminist, queer, and critical race theory into the study of discourse around disability and sport.

Running a Different Race: The Rhetoric of “Women’s-Only” Content in Runner’s World

When Runner’s World (RW senior editor Eileen Portz-Shovlin (2002) recounted the birth of the magazine’s “Women’s Running” column in 1994, she began with a story about a women’s road race in Sweden the previous year. When she and a friend arrived at the starting line, she looked around at a field of 30,000 other women runners, proof of what she already knew: Women’s running was a phenomenon. “We were hearing about big women’s races,” she reported. Participation in the “Race for the Cure” (breast cancer research) series, women’s races started in 1983 also grew during the 1990s, becoming some of the largest 5K (3.1 miles) events in the country—drawing upwards of 20,000 runners (Zemke, 1998).