“Part of the gig:” Negotiating the press conference rite surrounding Naomi Osaka’s “bombshell” decision

Abstract

This article seeks to complicate notions of metajournalistic discourse by building on research on journalistic evidence and news narratives to argue for concepts of both manifest and latent forms of discourse. Through a textual analysis of news narratives, article thrust, and style in UK and French digital news coverage of Naomi Osaka’s decision to withdraw from press conferences at the cusp of the 2021 French Open, we argue that journalists interviewed each other or commented themselves on her reasons for not participating in press conferences in what we refer to as manifest metajournalistic discourse. However, our analysis also found a latent form of metajournalistic discourse that appears as the coverage itself, through an argumentation of news storytelling that is imbued with journalists’ sentiments or “takes” of an issue or topic. Specifically, we argue that journalists use both recognizable journalistic forms of texts, such as first-person, bylined articles and quotes (what we refer to as a manifest form of metajournalistic discourse), and paraphrasing, description, sources, and other reporting (what we refer to as a latent form of metajournalistic discourse) when reporting on themselves and others.