The Games Through the NBC Lens: Gender, Ethnic, and National Equity in the 2006 Torino Winter Olympics

A Unified Version of London 2012: New-Media Coverage of Gender, Nationality, and Sport for Olympics Consumers in Six Countries

“…When researchers examined NBC's broadcast coverage of the event in the United States and used raw clock time as the unit of analysis, results from several studies revealed that male athletes receive more total coverage than their female counterparts (Ange lini, MacArthur, Billings et al, 2008;Billings & Eastman, 2002Tuggle, Huffman, & Rosengard, 2002;Tuggle & Owen, 1999), and more coverage in specific sports such as track and field (Greer, Hardin, & Homan, 2009). …”

“…One of the most recent examinations of gender in Olympic media includes that of Billings et al (2008), in which the researchers analyzed prime-time coverage produced by NBC during the 2006 Winter Games and found male athletes received 50% more coverage than female athletes. Analysis of the 2008 Summer Olympics by Angelini and Billings (2010), in which gymnastics, diving, swimming, track and field, and beach volleyball were examined, revealed differences in commentary provided to male and female athletes participating in all sports examined except diving.…”

“…To determine any differences in the Olympic experience depicted to consumers around the globe, we examined online news websites from countries on six different con tinents. Specifically, we aimed to examine each outlet's coverage of gender, nationality, and type of sport, because these aspects of sport news coverage vary greatly among news outlets (e.g., Billings, Angelini, & Wu, 2011;Burch et al, 2012;Qing et al, 2010), and the divergent depictions can affect societies' understand ings of events such as the Olympic Games (Billings, 2007;Billings et al, 2008;Qing et al, 2010). This study was based on the notion that media have the power to pres ent different versions of reality to consumers, combined with the idea that new media can theoretically provide more equitable and accurate coverage of an event such as the Olympics because of its lack of spatial constraints (Burch et al, 2012;Jones, 2004;Qing et al, 2010).…”

Competing Separately, Medaling Equally: Racial Depictions of Athletes in NBC's Primetime Broadcast of the 2012 London Olympic Games

“…To code athletic descriptors, the unit of analysis was the descriptor (defined as any adjective, adjectival phrase, adverb, or adverbial phrase), and all hours were coded for (a) the athlete's sport, (b) the gender of the athlete (man or woman), (c) the ethnicity of the athlete (Asian, Black, Hispanic, White, Middle Eastern, or other), (d) the nationality of the athlete (American, or non-American), (e) the gender of the announcer (man or woman), and (f) the word-for-word descriptive phrase. Then, the descriptors were classified using the Billings and Eastman (2003) taxonomy later advanced in Billings et al (2008). The taxonomy divides commentary into three recognizable categories: (a) attributions of success/failure (i.e., descriptions of the immediately viewable athletic performance), (b) depictions of personality/physicality (i.e., descriptions of external variables of athletes not directly attributable to the viewed athletic performance), and (c) neutral (i.e., comments that do not describe the athletic performance or depict the personality and/or physicality of the athlete; often factual play-by-play dialogue).…”

“…The 204 nations represented in the 2012 Games offer an opportunity for the widest representation of race within any form of national or international sport. By Downloaded by [The University of Manchester Library] at 10:20 12 October 2014 using the Billings and Eastman (2003) taxonomy (later updated by Billings, Brown, Crout, McKenna, Rice, Timanus, and Zeigler, 2008) within the London Olympic Games, longitudinal trends can be pinpointed. Thus, three hypotheses are advanced: H 1 : NBC employees will use different performance taxonomies when describing the athletic successes of White, Black, Latin/Hispanic, Asian, and Middle Eastern athletes during the network's primetime broadcast.…”