Who is responsible for the team’s results? Media framing of sports actors’ responsibility in major sports competitions

Abstract

Media are no longer just a witness to sports events, facilitating our access to them, but have become the most powerful judging platform for sports competitions, serving as a guide for their interpretation and evaluation. The present study focuses on media framing of sports actors' responsibility when it comes to major sports competitions. Who is responsible for the team's performance and results?In analysing media discourse, framing effects of sports events coverage will be examined from two inter-correlated dimensions, textually and visually. Based on an event-related corpus of on-line press articles from four national newspapers, this case study covers two major sports events: 2010 European Women's Handball Championship and 2011 World Women's Handball Championship.The discursive analysis of the press articles shows that, if winning competitive settings favour the emergence of a personification effect, building up sports heroes on both textual and visual dimensions, the responsibility of failure is rather diffused towards a collective referent. However, the visual component of press articles, along with the indirect strategy of addressing the responsibility issue throughout reported speech techniques, works as an alternative to the personification effect.Keywords: responsibility; visual framing; competitive situation; personification effect; media discourse. IntroductionToday our sports experiences and social imaginary attached to this field are grounded in the general approach of sports as media product. Most of our sports experiences are, in fact, mediated ones, as the public visibility and accessibility towards sports actors and events is mainly provided by media. While gaining their centrality inside the world of sports, media ended up transforming that world (Whannel, 1992, p. 3) and speeding up its commodification process. Sharing the public dependency constrains, as well as the entertaining component, sports and media are "inextricably linked together in a symbiotic relationship" (Valgeirsson & Snyder, 1986, p. 131), which is best described by its commercial nature. Both sports and media build on attracting and retaining large audiences and, in so doing, they join their forces in providing us with a hybrid experience of sports events as both competition and entertaining shows. The sports-media dyad is defined by the reciprocity of the structuring effect (Bourdieu, 1998) that both social fields exert upon each other. In order to gain public visibility, sports events need to be "mediazable", meeting the general condition of a media show and reflecting the "spectacularization effect" of media upon the sports ethos. This implies correlating the competitive content with a spectacular form in order to provide an attractive media product for the audience. The need to build up on the "fun factor" (Kellner, 2003, p. 3) of sports events converts them into one of the most popular genres of entraining shows and, thus, a valuable asset for media's continuous chase for rating points. The boomerang effect of...

Sport for Development and Peace: Framing the Global Conversation

“…Frames from current events reporting can be applied to sports media (Chuma, 2012; Dumitriu, 2013; Girginov & Hills, 2008; Kian & Hardin, 2009; Kian, Mondello, & Vincent, 2009; Kozman, 2015; Mercurio & Filak, 2010; Pirinen, 1997; Sanderson, Weathers, Grevious, Tehan, & Warren, 2016; Seippel et al, 2016). For example, White athletes accused of crime are more often portrayed using a thematic frame—implying societal forces are behind the crime—whereas Black athletes are more often covered using an episodic frame, focusing blame on individual issues (Mastro, Blecha, & Seate, 2011).…”

“…Few studies, though, have applied Semetko and Valkenburg’s (2000) five frames to sport news. Responsibility can be used to understand attributions of success in sporting events (Dumitriu, 2013), while coverage of steroid use in Major League Baseball employed the frames of conflict and morality (Kozman, 2015). However, other than Kozman’s (2015), no studies have applied all five frames to better understand sport media coverage.…”