Framing, Athletics, and Gender: A Study of Newspapers and the 2004 Olympics

This study serves as an extension of previous research focusing on media content and gender portrayal of female athletes, most notably Kinnick’s research of the 1996 Olympics (1998). In particular, this research analyzed newspaper content for the presence of common framing devices traditionally used to inject gender bias into coverage devoted to female Olympians. More specifically, a data set of 210 articles systematically drawn from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times

was manually coded to compare coverage of male and female Olympians during the 2004 Olympic Games.

While there were some notable exceptions, similar to Kinnick’s analysis of the 1996 Games, this research paints an optimistic portrait of media portrayal of women Olympians. The frames used by journalists to propagate gender bias in the past still exist. However, the most important finding gleaned from this 2004 Olympics research is that most of the frames studied were applied similarly to both male and female athletes. In general, female athletes still lagged behind their male counterparts in the amount of coverage. However, this research also dug into the qualitative components of that coverage -- use of quotes, type of sport covered, and presence of gender bias descriptors -- and found more equitable treatment of female Olympians than previous research has shown. Physical attractiveness descriptors were more likely to be used when the subject was female, mirroring much of the related body of research. Despite the continuing presence of frames employed by journalists to structure information about their subjects, both male and females were framed as athletes first and foremost in the majority of articles in this data set.