Is ESPN Really the Women’s Sports Network? A Content Analysis of ESPN’s Internet Coverage of the Australian Open

Abstract

A major topic of analysis in sport has been the gender gap and hegemonic masculinity that have historically been present in the media. Following Cunningham’s rationale of analyzing sports that are as gender equal as possible, this current study examines the coverage of the Australian Open on ESPN’s website. The findings reveal that although ESPN emphasized the men’s game quantitatively, it did not give it more prominence proportionally. On one hand, despite having journalists on-site to cover the women’s tournament and despite not being limited by airtime, ESPN.com frames the men’s game as more important than the women’s game in the amount of coverage dedicated to each gender. On the other hand, there is no gender difference in terms of production value, which is in striking opposition to the previous literature about gender media coverage in sport.

Twitter, Team GB and the Australian Olympic Team: representations of gender in social media spaces

“…The coverage of female athletes and female sports in non-Olympic years (2009) was around 4.5%. However, in Olympic years (2008, 2012, there was slightly more women focused sports stories, at around 14% (Litchfield and Osborne 2015).…”

“…Therefore, her work shows at the very least the potential for online sports reporting to represent women athletes (at least quantitatively) in numbers that are rarely seen in traditional sports media spaces. Coche (2012) has also examined gendered sports coverage in online spaces. In her American based study, her research focussed on the Australian Open (tennis) coverage on the ESPN website (Coche 2012).…”

“…Coche (2012) has also examined gendered sports coverage in online spaces. In her American based study, her research focussed on the Australian Open (tennis) coverage on the ESPN website (Coche 2012). Although the Australian Open features equal numbers of female and male competitors, Coche (2012) discovered that there were differences in the sports media attention awarded to the male and female athletes competing.…”

Comparing Flagship News Programs

“…Studies have uncovered inequalities relating to overall exposure (Coche, 2013), production qualities (Greer, Hardin, & Homan, 2009), and differing dialogues (Angelini, MacArthur, & Billings, 2012) when compared to male athletes in similar sports. Such trends differ depending on sport, season, and nation rendering sports coverage (see Billings, 2011), yet the influence of one media entity in the United States has received considerable attention: the wide-reaching media conglomerate, ESPN.…”

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“…Authors studied more than one hundred hours of sports casting on two channels: ESPN and FOX Sports (the study follows research of Coche (2013)) in order to estimate the difference between the proportions of women/men sports. Regardless of media, women's sports were shown approximately 1% of the time and, when shown, women's sports stories were approximately 70% of the length of a men's story.…”