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Moving Toward Parity?Dominant Gender Ideologyversus Community Journalismin High School BasketballCoverageErin Whiteside a & Jodi L. Rightler-McDaniels aa School of Journalism and Electronic Media ,University of Tennessee–KnoxvilleAccepted author version posted online: 14 Jun2013.Published online: 01 Aug 2013.

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Moving Toward Parity? DominantGender Ideology versus Community

Journalism in High SchoolBasketball Coverage

Erin Whiteside and Jodi L. Rightler-McDanielsSchool of Journalism and Electronic Media

University of Tennessee–Knoxville

This research uses a content analysis to explore how male and female highschool athletes are framed. In analyzing basketball coverage from 121 uniquenewspapers, results show that although boys received the bulk of the coverage,the gap in parity is much smaller compared to prior research. Furthermore,girls were generally not framed as overtly feminine. Still, the coverage alsoreflects lingering commonsense assumptions about gender, most notably inreference to the athletic body. The authors discuss the potential of high schoolsports coverage to challenge normative understandings of gender and sportsand to consider the role community journalism standards may play in theconstruction of equitable and just interscholastic sports coverage.

INTRODUCTION

Chris Lincoln has worked for KTUL in Oklahoma since 1974, and in arecent interview with the Tulsa World, the current sports director spoke

Erin Whiteside (Ph.D., Penn State University, 2010) is an Assistant Professor in the Schoolof Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee. Her research examinessports media industry practices and trends with a focus on gender and sexuality.

Jodi L. Rightler-McDaniels (Ph.D. Candidate, University of Tennessee) is a Graduate Teach-ing Associate in the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee.Her research interests include critical=cultural race, gender, and sexuality media and sport studies.

Correspondence should be addressed to Erin Whiteside, School of Journalism and ElectronicMedia, University of Tennessee–Knoxville, Knoxville, TN 37996. E-mail: [email protected]

Mass Communication and Society, 16:808–828, 2013Copyright # Mass Communication & Society Divisionof the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass CommunicationISSN: 1520-5436 print=1532-7825 onlineDOI: 10.1080/15205436.2013.778998

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about one of the major changes he has witnessed during his tenure: ‘‘Highschool sports are more important to us now than when I came here, becauseall of our studies show that there is more interest in high school sports thananything else except our . . . college teams’’ (Lewis, 2011, para 6).

Lincoln’s comments reflect existing industry trends in sports media.Local outlets are facing more competition than ever; along with the ever-growing presence of national giants such as ESPN and yahoosports.com,professional and collegiate teams are producing increasingly credible andsavvy content aimed at attracting fans away from those traditional inde-pendent outlets. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that local media may beredirecting resources to prep sports coverage, where they can avoid directcompetition with national outlets, and instead carve out a unique niche.Local media also provide a critical function in that sports can ‘‘ignite’’the passion of members of a community and bring them together in waysthat few institutions can duplicate (Lauterer, 2006, p. 198).

Although local media have always covered their area high schools, theintensity and visibility bestowed on prep sports is at an all-time high (Hardin& Corrigan, 2008). Perhaps not coincidentally, high school sports partici-pation, including that of female athletes, is also at record numbers (NationalFederation of State High School Associations, 2009).

Scholars have produced a thorough body of research documenting trendsin women’s sports coverage following the passage of Title IX, which is oftencredited for the explosion in girls’ and women’s sports participation rates(Suggs, 2005). Much of that work has pointed out the ways in which, despitethese participation increases, female athletes are still routinely trivializedand=or marginalized in sports coverage. Yet that existing research focuseson the collegiate and professional level. In light of the growing mediatedpresence of high school sports, this study seeks to establish a baseline forhow female athletes are framed at the interscholastic level through a com-parative analysis of boys’ and girls’ basketball coverage.

LITERATURE REVIEW

In working to understand how commonsense notions of gender areconstructed and contested through mediated sports discourse, many masscommunication scholars have turned to framing theory. Entman (1993)described framing as the practice of selecting and highlighting certain piecesof information about an issue or individual. Through their repeated use,certain frames may become more salient to audience members, in that theinformation will resonate to a greater degree with readers. Through thisprocess, frames shape reality by providing causal interpretations, answers,

HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL COVERAGE 809

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and=or moral evaluations of what is initially described (Entman, 1993).Kuypers (2010) further argued that frames be considered as a form ofpersuasion; from this perspective, frames can be understood as not only cen-tral organizing elements but inherently ideological. Doing so allows fordiscussion of how texts function as sites of struggle in the meaning-makingprocess and a space in which commonsense ideas are generated throughthe consistent deployment and=or exclusion of various frames (Carragee &Roefs, 2004). Still, the existence of frames do not automatically translate intodominant meanings; frames resonate more with audience members whenthey match existing belief systems, and thus it is critical to consider frameswithin wider cultural narratives (Carragee & Roefs, 2004; Entman, 1993).

There are many approaches to conducting a framing analysis, and thisstudy follows the work of Kuypers (2010), who argued for looking at ‘‘spe-cific properties’’ within news narratives, such as ‘‘key words, metaphors, con-cepts, symbols, visual images and names given to persons, ideas and actions’’(p. 310). Various scholars have used such an approach to demonstrate howfemale athletes are framed in ways that normalize them as an inferior versionof a male-defined standard, upholding hegemonic masculinity (e.g., Billings,2000; Duncan, 1990; Hardin, Lynn, Walsdorf, & Hardin, 2002; Kian,Vincent, &Mondello, 2009;Weiller &Higgs, 1999). Such commonsense logicis naturalized through the exclusion and=or trivialization of girls and womenin sports media, as well as through the cultural celebration of an ideal type ofmasculinity best showcased in (boys’ and men’s) sports featuring strength,power, and physical dominance.

Upholding Male Privilege in Sports: Framing Female Athletes as‘‘The Other’’

Scholars have consistently demonstrated that male athletes receive the bulkof mainstream sports coverage, a process that essentially frames male ath-letes as credible, and thus important. A recent content analysis by Messnerand Cooky (2010) showed that 100% of ESPN’s Sports Center programs ledwith a men’s sport and that the popular program devoted just 1.4% of itsairtime to women’s sports, a decline from 1999 (2.2%) and 2004 (2.1%).These findings echo prior research on collegiate and professional sportsacross multiple platforms (e.g., Bishop, 2003; Hardin et al., 2002; Huffman,Tuggle, & Rosengard, 2004; Kian & Clavio, 2011; Kian, Mondello, &Vincent, 2009; Nylund, 2007; Reichart-Smith, 2011).

Several studies have focused on basketball coverage, specifically; a contentanalysis showed that 84% of the ‘‘March Madness’’ coverage by USA Todayand the New York Times focused on men (Kian, 2008), as did 72% of onlinecoverage by espn.com and cbssportsline.com (Kian et al., 2009). Granting

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visibility conveys a sense of legitimacy, and thus the lack of space devoted towomen’s sports is essentially a denial of power, a practice that ultimatelyframes men’s sports as credible and legitimate while rendering women’ssports ‘‘a pale comparison’’ (Duncan, 2006, p. 236). In contrast to thesetrends, women tend to receive more coverage during the Olympics; a recentcontent analysis on snowboarding, for instance, showed that men and womenreceived equal airtime (Jones & Greer, 2012). Although such parity is oftenlauded, scholars have argued that international competition coverage is oftendriven by nationalistic narratives, which may trump dominant gender ideol-ogy (Wensing & Bruce, 2003).

A team or athlete’s importance may be bolstered in other ways beyondsheer visibility. Scholars have noted, for instance, that broadcast techniques,such as using multiple camera angles or slow-motion replay, can bedeployed in order to heighten the excitement of the game among viewers.Consistent with overall trends in sports coverage, men’s sports broadcastsfeature more of these elements compared to women’s (Duncan, 2006; Greer,Hardin, & Homan, 2009). In print, excitement may be communicatedthrough references to rivalries or rags-to-riches=upset narratives, themesthat resonate in a society like the United States where competition and classmobility are two key tenets (Baker, 2003). Indeed, the practice among sportsjournalists of going beyond the simple recounting of facts and scores, andinstead assigning ‘‘outsized significance’’ to various sporting events, iscritical in constructing such events as meaningful to audience members(Serrazio, 2010, p. 161).

Emphasizing femininity at the expense of athleticism. The female bodyhas been described as ‘‘contested terrain’’ in that it is a site where dominantunderstandings of gender are made and remade (Kane & Buysse, 2005;Messner, 1988). This process is manifest in myriad cultural arenas; numerousscholars, for instance, have pointed out how female politicians are oftenunderstood through heteronormative frames and reduced to objects of con-sumption, a process that, in turn, challenges their credibility (e.g., Carlin &Winfrey, 2009). However, unlike politics and other similar cultural rituals,sports discourse necessarily requires descriptions of the body in motion,making it an especially useful space for interrogating gendered narratives.Many have pointed to the practice of framing female athletes in ways thatinvite the audience to view them as passive feminine objects, rather thanactive athletic subjects. Framing women as objects for sexual consumptionis often achieved visually through shooting athletes in submissive poses orwearing feminine markers, such as makeup or jewelry (Duncan, 1990). Evenwhen women are not overtly sexualized, they are often still depicted in linewith normative femininity, through references to family, feminine-coded


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activities such as fashion or cooking, and through the practice of emphasiz-ing (feminine) emotional displays like crying or laughing (Billings, Halone, &Denham, 2002; Carter, 2010; Jones & Greer, 2012). These differingdepictions ‘‘play a fundamental role in the reproduction and preservationof gender relations that privilege males over females’’ (Kane & Buysse,2005, p. 216). Thus, the consistent deployment of these frames has translatedinto highly salient ideas about gender and sports; over time, the process hastransformed the female athlete into a kind of oxymoron, where ‘‘female’’ and‘‘athlete’’ are constituted as incompatible. Such ideology ultimately providesthe logic for justifying women’s exclusion from sports media coverage andthe general dismissive attitude toward women’s athletics in the sports medialandscape (Hardin, 2005).

The athletic body is a male body. As women are constituted as ‘‘TheOther,’’ common frames in sports also function to naturalize the athletic sub-ject as a male subject. Duncan (2006), for instance, critiqued the standardpractice of gender marking, or referring to events such as the ‘‘Women’sFinal Four’’ without making a parallel gendered construction on the men’sside. Doing so signifies—essentially, frames—men’s events and athletes asthe standard for which women to aspire and be measured against. This pro-cess is also manifest through comparisons; in one study on mediated hockeydiscourse, the authors noted the frequency at which broadcasters comparedfemale hockey players to male counterparts as an indicator of their talent.Doing so again establishes men as the standard bearers in sporting arenas(Poniatowski & Hardin, 2012). Other research has pointed to the lack ofathletic descriptors in women’s sports commentary in comparison to thatafforded to men; the failure to simply describe female athletes as athleticreaffirms a dominant gender ideology in which masculinity is a signifierfor athleticism and vice versa (Billings et al., 2002; Jones & Greer, 2012).

Sports have been indicted for not only defining an ideal type of mascu-linity that is marked by aggression, brute strength, and fearlessness but alsofor equating such characteristics as natural to men (Prettyman, 2011). Theproduction of what is often called ‘‘sexual difference’’ is manifest in sportsmedia content that downplays exhibitions of strength and physicality amongwomen (Hardin et al., 2002). Several studies, for instance, have shown thatwriters use more strength descriptors for male athletes (Kian & Clavio,2011; Weiller & Higgs, 1999). A recent analysis of snowboarding coveragesimilarly found that male snowboarders were constructed as powerfulthrough low camera angles, which gave the men ‘‘the appearance of sizeand might’’ (Jones & Greer, 2012, p. 616). Strength, power, and aggressionare celebrated in men’s sports in other ways as well. Journalists often praiseathletes who play through injury or demonstrate a fearless attitude toward


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putting one’s body in harm’s way (Messner, Dunbar, & Hunt, 2004).Messner et al. (2004) further pointed to the common practice of describingmen’s sports action by using war metaphors, a practice that reinforces thelink between sports and masculinity.

Framing as a function of social identity. AsLawrence (2010) noted, jour-nalists bringmyriad factors to the reporting process, including everything frompersonal experience to the desire for interesting and unusual angles to stories.Thus, journalists play a key role in constructing meaning via frame selection,and a growing body of work has explored the relationship between reportergender and representation to the tune of mixed results. Using content analysis,Everbach (2008) found that newspapers headed by female sports editors didnot include any more women’s sports content compared to those headed bymen, a finding that echoes Pedersen, Whisenant, and Schneider’s (2003) simi-lar analysis of high school coverage by editor gender in the state of Florida.Although women’s sports may not receive more visibility when women arein a decision-making capacity, female reporters may cover them differently.In their content analysis, Kian and Hardin (2009) found that female reportersused less stereotypical frames when covering female athletes, and a study byHardin, Simpson, Whiteside, and Garris (2007) showed differences in howfemale reporters cover Title IX with women less likely to situate the coveragein ‘‘battle-of-the-sexes’’ rhetoric through the use of war metaphors (p. 224).

In general, research has also demonstrated the ambivalent attitudesamong those in gatekeeping positions toward women’s sports. A survey ofsports editors at newspapers in the southeast, for instance, found that a ‘‘sub-stantial percentage of editors have beliefs about women that would justifyexcluding them from coverage’’ (Hardin, 2005, p. 73). Female sports repor-ters were less likely to hold negative views toward women’s sports, againsupporting the notion that social identity may play a role in how athletesare ultimately framed.

Prep Sports Coverage

For all the research examining representation and identity in sports media,very little has focused on content at the interscholastic level. One reasonmay be the little exposure high school athletes have traditionally received incomparison to professional and collegiate programs. However, high schoolsports coverage is an increasingly competitive and growing component tothe already-saturated sports media market (Hardin & Corrigan, 2008; Lewis,2011). The potential for new audiences via prep sports coverage is so enticing,for example, that it prompted ESPN to launch a dozen college-specific recruit-ing pages dedicated to covering high school recruiting (Ourand & Fisher,


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2011), and its city-focused sites such as ESPN Boston feature a sectiondevoted to prep sports coverage.1 The recruiting pages follow the highly suc-cessful model launched by rivals.com and other similar ventures, which focuson the careers of elite high school athletes (Fisher, 2010). Local media havesimilarly expanded their prep sports coverage as a way to carve out a focusedniche. In 2007, Gannett acquired a controlling interest in Schedule Star, theoperator of HighSchoolSports.net, where it engineered a partnership with85 daily newspapers and 23 television news stations. In 2008, theOrlando Sen-tinel launched its ‘‘High School Sports Zone,’’ which offers a customizedsports page and gives community members the opportunity to track theirlocal high school stars (Thinking Outside the Box, 2008).

In an article lamenting the lack of research on high school content, Hardinand Corrigan (2008) encouraged scholars to devote attention to this growingsports media genre. Two studies provide a starting point for answering theircall. In a content analysis of Florida newspapers, Pedersen (2002b) foundthat female high school athletes received 31% of the coverage; they were alsoless prominently displayed and less likely to be accompanied with a photo-graph compared with stories on boys. A separate study analyzing photo-graphs from that sample found that images of male athletes were betterpositioned and more often in color (Pedersen, 2002a). Still, given that femaleathletes are routinely marginalized in mainstream outlets, receiving 31% ofthe coverage may reflect a measure of progress for women’s sports advocates.

Community Journalism

Prep sports coverage by local media can be understood in the context of com-munity journalism. Lauterer (2003) described this type of journalism as onethat is inherently inclusive in that it is dedicated to chronicling ‘‘the everydaytopics that shape people’s lives in our neighborhoods and towns’’ (p. 7). In thisway, media can facilitate the development of community by providing aforum in which local issues are debated and discussed (Voakes, 1999). Surveyresearch indicates that individuals most want their local media to ‘‘be a goodneighbor,’’ a concept that includes such attributes as offering solutions tocommunity problems, as well as ‘‘caring about [one’s] community and high-lighting interesting people and groups’’ (Heider, McCombs, & Poindexter,2005, p. 961). Local sports coverage may be especially well situated for satisfy-ing this demand as ‘‘nowhere is the reciprocal relationship between the paperand community more strongly evident than in the arena of sports’’ (Lauterer,2006, p. 198). This potential for community building is strong because of

1For an example, see http://espn.go.com/boston/teams/preps/index


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sports’ apolitical nature, along with the ability to ‘‘print lots of names andfaces,’’ a key tenet to successful community journalism (Lauterer, 2003,p. 182). Developing a strong relationship with a community is more than anoble cause, however; doing so may protect local media outlets from theongoing industry recession as being the sole outlet for community focusedcontent functions as a hedge against falling circulation trends (Cass, 2006;Lauterer, 2003, 2006). It may be no surprise, then, that prep sports coveragecontinues to grow among local media outlets (Lauterer, 2006; Lewis, 2011).

This Research

It is well documented that collegiate and professional female athletes aredenied legitimacy through framing strategies that privilege their femininityover references to athleticism. In many cases, women’s sports are framedas illegitimate via the denial of visibility altogether. With the increased pro-minence and resources devoted by media outlets to high school athletes, itwill be critical for sports media scholars to investigate similar questions atthis level. Thus, this study developed several research questions with the goalof focusing on how male and female athletes at this level are framed in thecontext of gendered understandings of sports. Drawing from the literaturereview, we generated five general research questions.

RQ1: How are teams framed as important?Do the results differ by team gender?RQ2: How are teams and athletes framed as exciting? Do the results differ by

team gender?RQ3: What is the rate at which interscholastic basketball players are framed

in relation to traditionally masculine characteristics? Do the resultsdiffer by team gender?

RQ4: What is the rate at which interscholastic basketball players are framedin relation to traditionally feminine characteristics? Do the results differby team gender?

RQ5: What is the distribution of stories by reporter gender? Are theredifferences in how male and female reporters cover basketball?

METHOD

This study analyzes high school boys and girls basketball newspaper cover-age in the southern region as defined by the Associated Press Sports Editors.2

2The southern region includes Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina,Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Louisiana.


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This region was chosen because it includes a wide variety of newspapersserving various community sizes. In addition, Hardin (2005) surveyed sportseditors in this same region about their attitudes toward women’s sports,providing some general context about reporting choices and values.

We consulted each state’s high school athletic association’s website toassess when basketball seasons were held and determined that each state heldbasketball competition in both December and January of any given year.Thus, drawing from those 2 months, a stratified sample was constructed,where 2 random weeks were collected (two Mondays, two Tuesdays, etc.).3

This method of sampling has been measured as sufficiently representativeof a wider census of coverage (Riffe, Lacy, & Fico, 2008).

Sample Criteria

The articles were collected from the U.S. NewsBank database using thesearch terms ‘‘basketball’’ and ‘‘high school.’’ The initial search yielded2,092 articles. Unrelated articles (e.g., college basketball coverage) wereomitted, as were scores-only stories, articles that covered both boys and girlswithout a clear subhead divider, and articles shorter than three paragraphs.Duplicate articles were also removed. Numerous stories included briefs and=or subheads dividing separate coverage. In this case, only the first story wascoded and deemed to ‘‘end’’ at the paragraph preceding the subhead. Thisyielded a final sample of 459 unique articles from 121 distinctive newspapers,the majority of which were written by local newspaper staff.

Design and Measures

The stories were analyzed based on a series of coding categories drawn fromprior research on gender and sports. The concept of importance, as examinedin RQ1, was conceptualized by assessing girls’ and boys’ teams general visi-bility in the newspaper, which included (a) the overall number of articles, (b)the article length, (c) its placement (front page vs. inside the sports section),(d) the inclusion of voices (number of sources in each respective article), and(e) how the team was labeled through the use (or lack thereof) of genderqualifiers. RQ2 examined how teams were framed as exciting, which wasoperationalized with categories measuring (a) references to rivalries andother ‘‘big’’ games (noting that two top-ranked teams would be facing off,for instance) and (b) references to surprising outcomes, often referred to as‘‘upsets.’’ Masculine characteristics (RQ3) were conceptualized in part as

3A true random number generator was used fromwww.random.org. The specific dates studiedwere December 9–10, 12, 15, 19, and 22 in 2011 and January 4, 8, 10, 14, 17, 20, 25, and 29 in 2012.


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direct references to the body as large through (a) noting a player’s height and(b) descriptions of the body as big or imposing in some way. In addition,masculine characteristics were assessed by coding for references to (c) aplayer’s physical strength (e.g., calling a player ‘‘strong’’), (d) power=domination in relation to play (descriptions of a player ‘‘dominating inside,’’etc.), (e) athletic descriptors (calling a player ‘‘athletic’’ as well as otherdescriptors that imply athleticism, such as ‘‘speedy’’ or ‘‘quick’’), and (f)war metaphors. RQ4 measured the existence of feminine characteristics,which included an analysis of a variety of feminine-coded references. First,we coded for the presence of (a) bodily aesthetics (hair, makeup, fingernails,etc.) and (b) aesthetic styling (fashion, etc.). Next, we coded for emotionalreferences, including descriptions of (c) mental weakness (e.g., a player‘‘panicking’’ on the court) and (d) emotive displays (crying, laughing, etc.).Finally, this group of categories included references to (e) family (e.g., notingthat parents were in the stands) and (f) team chemistry (language thatdescribed teammates as friendly, or how well everyone got along, etc.). Bothcoders referred to a rich codebook throughout the coding process.4

Procedure

The codebook was pretested on a sample of 22 articles from outside thesouthern region. Following final modifications, intercoder reliability wasgauged on 15% of the sampled articles examined in the study, exceedingthe minimum 10% of the main sample generally expected for determiningreliability (Potter & Levine-Donnerstein, 1999; Riffe et al., 2008).

Using Holsti’s method, the intercoder reliability statistic was greater than.80 for all categories used in the analysis. The categories of ‘‘athleticism’’(.80) and ‘‘war metaphors’’ (.81) were among those closest to the .80 thresh-old; ‘‘height,’’ ‘‘family,’’ and ‘‘upset’’ all yielded intercoder agreements great-er than .97. The overall intercoder reliability statistic was .91. The sample’sremaining articles were then randomly divided among the coders. Resultantdata were analyzed using frequencies and cross-tabulations; only cross-tabulations with chi-square significance levels of p< .05 are reported.

FINDINGS

RQ1:How are teams framed as important? Do the results differ by team gender?Boys received 63.2% of the coverage. Slightly more than three fourths

(77.2%) of the boys’ coverage was coded as game stories with the remainder

4Full codebook available upon request.


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comprising features, advances, and follows. About three fourths (75.2%) ofthe girls’ coverage focused on game action.

The mean length for boys’ stories was 12.62 paragraphs compared to11.89 for girls. A one-way analysis of variance test revealed the differencewas not significant. For the articles in which placement could be determined,the majority (91.3%) appeared in the sports section with 6.6% on the frontpage of that section. A chi-square test showed no differences in story place-ment by gender. The majority of stories included at least one source(M! 1.44). A one-way analysis of variance test showed that the numberof sources included in boys coverage (M! 1.46) versus girls (M! 1.41)did not differ significantly.

Nearly two thirds (64.5%) of the articles included a gender qualifier inreference to the team. Stories on girls’ teams more often included a genderqualifier (72.8% of all girls basketball stories) compared to 59.7% of theboys’ stories. A chi-square test showed this difference to be significant:v2(1, 459)! 8.033, p< .01.

RQ2: How are teams and athletes framed as exciting? Do the results differby team gender?

About one fourth (25.5%) of the stories referenced rivalries and=orimportant matchups. For boys, 28.6% of the stories included such referencescompared to 21.3% of girls’ stories. Five percent of the stories includedreferences to upsets or surprising wins. A chi-square test showed that therewere no differences by gender on either variable.

RQ3: What is the rate at which interscholastic basketball players areframed in relation to traditionally masculine characteristics? Do the resultsdiffer by team gender?

Stories on boys included more references to physical size and heightcompared to articles on girls. Sixty-eight stories (14.8% of the overallsample) included at least one reference to physical size (describing playersas big, bulky, imposing, etc.). Slightly less than two fifths of the boys’ storiesincluded such descriptors compared to 9.5% of the girls’ coverage. A chi-square analysis showed this difference to be significant: v2(2, N! 459)!6.064, p< .05. Nearly two fifths (19.4%) of the overall sample referencedat least one player’s height, including nearly one fourth of boys’ coverageand 13.1% of that focused on girls. A chi-square test showed this differenceto be significant: v2(2, N! 459)! 3.372, p< .05.

Nineteen percent of the stories included references to physicality, 12%described players as athletic and 20% used language to imply one team orathlete ‘‘dominating’’ over another. There were no significant differencesby gender for any of these categories.

Finally, 19% of the stories included war metaphors; this variable wasmore often present in boys stories compared with girls, a difference that a


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chi-square test showed to be significant: v2(1, 459)! 42.272, p< .05. SeeTable 1 for full breakdown of masculine characteristics=descriptions bygender.

RQ4: What is the rate at which interscholastic basketball players areframed in relation to traditionally feminine characteristics? Do the resultsdiffer by team gender?

References to overt feminine markers were largely absent in the coverage;in the entire sample, no girls basketball story referenced bodily aesthetics,such as ponytails or makeup; conversely, just one boys story was codedfor the presence of this variable. Similarly, just two stories (one each on boysand girls) included references to aesthetic styling, such as clothing=shoes andother fashion-related elements. Coverage noting family members (11.1%of the total sample) and team chemistry (7%) yielded a similar lack ofdifferences by gender.

Nearly 12% of the stories referenced emotions, such as laughing, crying,and so on; 16% of the girls stories included emotion descriptors comparedwith 9.3% of the boys coverage. When the categories were collapsed to

TABLE 1Percentage of Stories With Masculine Descriptors=References by

Gender

CategoryNo

referencesOne

reference onlyMore than

one reference

Heighta

Boys 76.9% 13.1% 10.0%Girls 87.0% 9.5% 3.6%

Sizeb

Boys 82.1% 11.0% 6.9%Girls 90.5% 5.9% 3.6%

PhysicalityBoys 83.4% 11.7% 4.8%Girls 76.6% 15.0% 8.4%

DominanceBoys 81.0% 14.5% 4.5%Girls 78.0% 18.5% 3.6%

War Metaphorsc,d

Boys 78.6% 21.4% —Girls 86.4% 13.6% —

av2(2, N! 459)! 3.372, p< .05.bv2(2, N! 459)! 6.064, p< .05.cv2(1, 459)! 4.272, p< .05.dThis category was coded as presence or absence only (‘‘No

reference’’ and ‘‘One or more references’’).


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‘‘no references’’ and ‘‘at least one reference,’’ a chi-square test found thisdifference to be significant: v2(1, 459)! 4.571, p< .05. About 10% of thestories included mental weakness descriptors and coverage focused on girlsbasketball was more likely to include such language. A chi-square test deter-mined this difference to be significant: v2(1, 459)! 4.196, p< .05. See Table 2for full breakdown of feminine characteristics=descriptions by gender.

RQ5: What is the distribution of stories by reporter gender? Are theredifferences in how male and female reporters cover basketball?

There were 331 stories in which reporter gender could be determined andof that number, 315 (95.2%) were coded as written by men. Male reporterswrote 95.7% of the boys and 94.2% of the girls basketball stories; malereporters also wrote 100% of the stories at newspapers with a circulationgreater than 250,000.

There were some notable differences in content produced by male andfemale reporters. However, due to the low cell counts, chi-squares couldnot be appropriately calculated. Twenty-four percent of the stories written

TABLE 2Percentage of Stories With Feminine Descriptors=References by Gender

CategoryNo

referencesOne

reference onlyMore than

one reference

Physical aestheticsBoys 99.7% 0.3% 0.0%Girls 100% 0.0% 0.0%

Stylistic aestheticsBoys 99.7% 0.0% 0.3%Girls 99.4% 0.6% 0.0%

Emotional weaknessa

Boys 92.8% 6.2% 1.0%Girls 87.0% 9.5% 3.6%

Familyc

Boys 94.1% 5.9% —Girls 91.1% 8.9% —

Emotional displaysb,c

Boys 90.7% 9.3% —Girls 84.0% 16.0% —

Chemistryc

Boys 89.3% 10.7% —Girls 88.2% 11.8% —

av2(1, 459)! 4.571, p< .05.bv2(1, N! 459)! 4.571, p< .05.cThis category was coded as presence or absence only (‘‘No reference’’ and

‘‘One or more references’’).


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by men contained at least one height reference compared to just one storywritten by a female reporter. For all stories written by men, 22.5% includedwar metaphors; of the stories written by women, 43.8% included warmetaphors.

DISCUSSION

The results both diverge from and affirm existing research on the framing offemale athletes. Perhaps the biggest single indicator of ‘‘importance’’ is visi-bility, and the results of this study show that boys basketball teams stillreceive the majority of coverage, echoing prior research on mainstreammedia outlets’ treatment of women’s collegiate and professional sports, aswell as Pedersen’s (2002b) study of high school sports coverage in Florida.On the other hand, this study demonstrates that, with the exception of inter-national events like the Olympics, more space may be dedicated to femaleathletics at the high school level than anywhere else where both male andfemale athletes are regularly covered.

The distribution in coverage is more equitable compared to studiesdocumenting collegiate basketball content, as well as those measuring over-all coverage rates of men’s and women’s athletics in more general sportsmedia outlets. Furthermore, although a direct comparison to Pedersen(2002b) is not entirely appropriate, given that he focused on all sports inthe state of Florida only, the percentage of overall coverage awarded girlsbasketball here is greater than what that study documented. Still, it isunclear whether the slightly greater percentage of girls’ coverage (37% to31%) is reflective of overall growth rates in coverage of girls sports or aproduct of the sport focused on here; basketball is arguably the most visiblewomen’s collegiate sport in national media, and that visibility may be trick-ling down to local coverage. Future research should conduct a longitudinalanalysis to better evaluate the status of girls’ sports among newspapersports departments, and how that visibility may be mediated by sport type,specifically.

Despite the unequal story quantity for girls and boys, the findings pointto statistical parity in relation to other aspects of visibility; there were nosignificant differences in article length, placement, or number of sources,which suggests that when girls are covered, the same resources in the wayof reporter time and energy (to attend games and gather interviews), as wellas space in the newspaper are given to each. This finding is notable in lightof a survey of sports editors in the same region (south) as examinedhere, which showed lingering negative opinions toward female athletes(Hardin, 2005).


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Framing Female Athletes: Not Feminine, But Not Always Athletic, Either

Scholars have long critiqued sports journalists and other sports media pro-fessionals for framing female athletes in ways that privilege their femininityover their athleticism. The results diverge in some important ways from thatprevious research, as there was a literal absence of hyperfeminine referencesin the sample analyzed. This may be especially notable given that basketballis a rough, physical sport typically perceived as masculine (Hardin & Greer,2009). If the act of playing basketball itself is culturally understood as amasculine one, we might expect coverage to neutralize that ‘gender deviance’in some ways to restore a kind of gendered balance (Wright & Clarke, 1999).Furthermore, only 5% of the stories with bylines were written by women;prior research has documented that women use less stereotypical framesin sports (Kian & Hardin, 2009), but that lack of gender diversity did nottranslate into overt trivialization of female athletes. Not once did a featurewriter, perhaps with the goal of articulating detail and ‘‘color,’’ describe aplayer’s hairstyle, or juxtapose a tough player with references to femininemarkers, such as makeup or jewelry. Framing female athletes as feminineat the expense of athletic denies girls and women legitimacy in sports;women’s sports advocates should be encouraged by the lack of such indica-tors. Although girls were more often described as emotional and mentallyweak compared to boys, the presence of these references still representedonly a small part of the overall sample. Overall, the findings do not pointto female athletes as being framed as overtly feminine; in a space whereall things ‘‘feminine’’ are devalued, the lack of such frames grants a kindof legitimacy to the girls covered in this study.

Although feminine-coded descriptors, especially in relation to the body,were largely absent for both girls and boys, the same could not be said formasculine characteristics. The mixed findings point to lingering common-sense assumptions about sport and gender that uphold male privilege. Read-ers were more often directed to think about the physical stature of the boysthrough overt references to height and physical size. Calling inside players‘‘bigs’’ versus ‘‘post players’’ may be synonymous in some ways, but descrip-tors such as ‘‘big’’ invite readers to think directly about the body in waystypically situated as masculine. The lack of such language, as well as refer-ences to bodily size via height information, in girls’ coverage denies readersthe opportunity to consider the female body outside of normative genderexpectations, upholding dominant ideology regarding athleticism and mas-culinity. Furthermore, the game narrative in boys’ coverage was describedas more violent through the use of war metaphors. The use of war metaphorsin sports has long helped crystallize the association between sports andmasculinity, and the findings add to where this process is manifest.


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All this being said, boys coverage did not contain significantly more refer-ences to physicality=strength than girls, an important difference from pre-vious research (Kian & Clavio, 2011; Weiller & Higgs, 1999). An excerptfrom a girls story provides an example: ‘‘Fenty muscled in a shot [emphasisadded] while being fouled by Coddington and finished the three point playto put the Bulldogs ahead for good’’ (Lyon, 2011, para 10). Through this briefdescription of play, readers are given the opportunity to view this femaleathlete as physical and strong, a marked challenge to normative gender roles.

The lack of gender differences in references to physicality, athleticism,and excitement all suggest shifts from previous research, and challenges tocommonsense understandings of gender that function to privilege men insporting spaces. The findings also represent potential for the improvedquantity and quality of girls’ and women’s sports coverage. If the femaleathletic body is considered a site of struggle where meanings of gender aremade and remade (Kane & Buysse, 2005; Messner, 1988), then high schoolsports newspaper coverage may represent a point of fissure in a system ofmeaning that has largely functioned to disenfranchise female athletes. It isimportant to note that frames rebuild upon themselves within a narrativecontext (Entman, 1993), and understanding female athletes as strong, ath-letic, and exciting would provide the logic for increased similar coverageof female athletics—at least at the high school level.

Unanswered Questions

Another surprising finding in this study was the relative lack of femalereporters. Although women continue to be underrepresented in sportsdepartments, female reporters wrote fewer than 5% of the stories in thisstudy, including none at high circulation newspapers. This compares to priorresearch showing women comprise about 12% of all sports reporters at thenation’s largest 200 newspapers (Hardin & Whiteside, 2006), and 11% atAssociated Press Sports Editors–member publications (Lapchick, Moss,Russell, & Scearce, 2010). Further, Pedersen et al.’s (2003) study showed thatabout 9% of all high school coverage in the state of Florida was written bywomen. This data, therefore, raise a question: Why are so few women cover-ing high school basketball? On one hand, prep coverage in general is widelyconsidered an ‘‘entry-level’’ job. In the context of increased efforts to diver-sify sports departments, the lack of women gaining experience in thiscapacity is perplexing, considering its comparative low status. On the otherhand, given its visibility at the collegiate level, basketball—both boys andgirls—may represent the premier beat at the prep sports level. Women havehistorically been marginalized from higher status assignments in sportsmedia, which prevents them from building the kind of resume and portfolio


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needed for promotion (Ricchiardi, 2005; Whiteside & Hardin, 2010). Futureresearch should examine job assignment patterns to determine how thesenorms and processes may be impacting female sports journalists.

CONCLUSION

This exploratory study provides an answer to Hardin and Corrigan’s (2008)call for focus on what is an explosive growth sector of sports media. Thefindings thus locate an important shift in sports coverage; at the high schoollevel, newspapers are conveying a sense of legitimacy toward female athletesby awarding them more visibility than what they do at the collegiate andprofessional levels, and dedicating similar amounts of resources given toboys. Furthermore, girls are not framed as ‘‘feminine’’ in ways that theyare at more advanced levels of play. Age likely provides one answer; highschool girls, because of their youth, may be excused from being hyperfemi-nized (and by extension, sexualized) in the ways of their professional andcollegiate counterparts. Still, other less sexually charged feminine indica-tors—such as references to family and team chemistry—were just as likelyto appear in boys’ coverage as that of girls’.

A second reason for the increased parity in coverage may stem from themuted role of market interests in high school sports. Although local news-papers are bound to political and economic constraints, they also play acritical role in building community—and benefit financially from their abil-ity to succeed in this capacity (Cass, 2006; Lauterer, 2006). In a hypercom-mercial environment, women’s sports are often sacrificed through theirexclusion and=or marginalization, or through the practice of packagingcoverage in ways that reflect tried-and-true formulas about men and womenin sports (Duncan, 2006). Yet when the focus is not solely to attract spon-sorship, but instead to knit together members of a single community, it nolonger makes sense to trivialize female athletes—at least overtly. In this way,high school sports coverage in the context of community journalism pro-vides a glimpse at how women’s sports may fare outside of a media environ-ment dominated solely by commercial interests.

The coverage examined here also represents good community journalismbased on the standards outlined by Lauterer (2003, 2006). Although theamount of girls’ coverage is not entirely equitable compared to that awardedto boys, the overall coverage is generally more inclusive than what is avail-able at outlets that do not serve focused communities. Furthermore, thecontent is also more just and fair. The respectful coverage indicates a senseof thoughtfulness toward members of the community, which hearkens toreaders’ desires that their newspaper ‘‘be a good neighbor’’ (Heider et al.,


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2005, p. 961). Finally, the standards and expectations of communityjournalism may also offer explanations for why the findings in this studydiverged from previous research. Ultimately, the responsibility of connect-ing with community members may trump dominant gender ideology andfurther function as the guiding force for coverage choices, even in a culturewhere women’s sports are generally not respected.

Although the findings reflect (a limited) measure of gender parity, Hardinand Corrigan (2008) wrote that commercial interests are an increasingly rel-evant component in the prep sports landscape. If collegiate and professionalcoverage is any indicator, the differences documented here may be shortlived. Furthermore, an increasingly visible type of high school coverage isnot conducted within the context of community journalism; major outletsthat do not publish within the realm of focused communities are dedicatingan increased amount of resources toward prep sports. It will thus be crucialto continue to examine high school coverage, including the ways in whichfemale athletes are granted and=or denied legitimacy in what is becomingan increasingly lucrative area of sports media.

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