{"title":"“You Don’t Want Us to Solve This”: Agenda Setting in the Federal Hearings on Name, Image, and Likeness","authors":"Molly Harry","doi":"10.1177/21674795241265008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/21674795241265008","url":null,"abstract":"From 2020 to 2024, the United States Congress held 11 hearings pertaining to name, image, and likeness (NIL). Various stakeholder groups have participated in these hearings including Congress and those looking to “maintain” or “disrupt” college sport and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Despite the significance of NIL to college athletics, limited research has examined these hearings and the messages communicated within them. Thus, critical discourse analysis and agenda setting theory were used to shed light on the language surrounding NIL through the Congressional hearings. Findings demonstrate the aforementioned groups’—Congress, “Maintainers,” and “Disruptors”—used narrative framing and topic selection, resulting in conflicting agendas and mixed messaging. Implications include improved communicative and political strategies for NIL stakeholders, enhanced NIL education for college athletes, and the extension of agenda setting theory to sport communication.","PeriodicalId":46882,"journal":{"name":"Communication & Sport","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141732627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Japanese National Basketball Association Fans and Social Media Acceptance: Exploring the Role of Brand Respect","authors":"Jeongbeom Hahm, Rei Yamashita","doi":"10.1177/21674795241251753","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/21674795241251753","url":null,"abstract":"This study explores the factors influencing satellite sport fans’ social media engagement, focusing on Japanese National Basketball Association (NBA) fans. Using the technology acceptance model and Brand Respect Scale, we analyzed the effects of perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment, and perceived trustworthiness on social media stickiness and investigated the mediating roles of brand trust, brand performance, brand acceptance, and brand reputation. A partial least squares structural equation modeling analysis of data from 813 Japanese NBA fans revealed that perceived usefulness and enjoyment significantly affected social media stickiness, while perceived trustworthiness indirectly influenced this stickiness through brand trust and acceptance. The study advances the theoretical understanding of social media behavior among satellite sport fans and provides practical implications for optimizing social media strategies to enhance fan engagement. Our findings offer valuable insights for sport teams and organizations seeking to strengthen their connection with geographically distant fans. In addition, this research paves the way for future studies to encompass diverse age groups, sports, and regions to offer a more comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing satellite sport fans’ social media engagement.","PeriodicalId":46882,"journal":{"name":"Communication & Sport","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141079307","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Playing (& Smoking) by the Rules: Sport Media’s Racialized Coverage of Athlete Drug Use","authors":"Patrick Crowe, Vincent Peña","doi":"10.1177/21674795241249142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/21674795241249142","url":null,"abstract":"Sports media research has often found that athletes are depicted differently based on stereotypes attached to their racialized bodies, and often along a Black/white racial binary. Furthermore, Black men often receive more and harsher penalties for drug use compared to all other racial and gender categories. Using critical discourse analysis, this study explores how NFL athletes who either openly admitted to using illicit drugs or failed National Football League (NFL)-mandated drug tests were covered by sports media. Four NFL athletes (two Black, two white) were selected based on their prominence — Josh Gordon, Randy Gregory, Chris Long, and Aaron Rodgers. The findings tell us that the selected Black athletes were often demonized in coverage by being portrayed as addicts or criminals and objectified as commodities whose value rose and fell with each suspension/return. Additionally, journalists often deployed neoliberal logics to both criticize and defend Black and white athletes. The white athletes in the study were portrayed as intellectuals looking to challenge the NFL’s authority, “good person(s),” and went unpunished for their drug admittance. This study finds that monolithic coverage of athletes is not fair, however the stereotypical notions of the Black/white binary are present when analyzing media discourse on athletic drug use.","PeriodicalId":46882,"journal":{"name":"Communication & Sport","volume":"151 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140651826","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Olan Kees Martin Scott, Michael Van Bussel, Bo (Norman) Li, Adam T. Pappas, Gillian Golosky, Victoria Dewar
{"title":"Telecasting Tokyo to a Locked Down Nation: Australian Broadcast Coverage of the 2020 Olympic Summer Games","authors":"Olan Kees Martin Scott, Michael Van Bussel, Bo (Norman) Li, Adam T. Pappas, Gillian Golosky, Victoria Dewar","doi":"10.1177/21674795241247770","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/21674795241247770","url":null,"abstract":"This study explored how nationalism was perpetuated by the Seven Network’s broadcasting of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games during a time, in which much of Australia was in various forms of Covid-19 lockdowns. Self-categorization theory was used to analyze all the primetime coverage of the Seven Network’s main channel for name mentions, description of success or failure, and personality and physicality of the Olympians. Results of this study underscore large differences in the way in which the Seven Network portrayed Australian and non-Australian athletes. Whilst the majority of the top-20 most-mentioned athletes list were Australian, non-Australian athletes received the bulk of the name mentions. There were also differences in the ways in which Australian and non-Australian athletes’ success and failure were portrayed. This study contributes to the literature by uncovering how a major sporting event was covered by a national broadcaster during the Covid-19 pandemic and shows that Australian media catered its coverage to its home audience, who were in lockdowns. Thus, interest and viewership of the Tokyo Olympics was high, which might have been the impetus for the Seven Network to create a largely partisan program.","PeriodicalId":46882,"journal":{"name":"Communication & Sport","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140622849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yoseph Z. Mamo, Christos Anagnostopoulos, Simon Chadwick, Damon P. S. Andrew
{"title":"“I Feel Qatari Today […] I Feel Disabled Today, […] I Feel Like a Migrant Worker Today…”: On Sport, Leadership, and Moral Legitimacy","authors":"Yoseph Z. Mamo, Christos Anagnostopoulos, Simon Chadwick, Damon P. S. Andrew","doi":"10.1177/21674795241243374","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/21674795241243374","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines the public’s perceptions of a speech delivered by FIFA’s president in a press conference one day before the Qatar 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup. In total, 34,714 publicly available user responses were collected from news media YouTube channels in North America, Europe, and Asia, as well as from Twitter hashtags related to the press conference. This user-generated content was analyzed using sentiment analysis to determine the degree of positivity or negativity, followed by qualitative thematic analysis to identify specific factors influencing public perceptions of Infantino’s speech, including both positive and negative aspects. The results suggested that FIFA’s communication was “debated” due to questions and challenges posed by the public. It is noted, however, that the magnitude of negative and positive evaluations varied according to the medium used and the region. Negative evaluations related to ‘hypocrisy’, ‘lack of transparency’, and ‘diplomatic hedging’, whereas positive evaluations related to ‘symbolic communication’, ‘activist governance’, and ‘cultural appropriateness’. Using the public as a resource for institutional evaluation, this research contributes to the scholarship of sport management by analyzing the impact of communication on an organization’s moral legitimacy.","PeriodicalId":46882,"journal":{"name":"Communication & Sport","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140545499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Girl Power and Brand Power: Postfeminist Sensibility in News Coverage of Tokyo’s Girl “Prodigy” Skateboarders","authors":"Brigid McCarthy","doi":"10.1177/21674795241242721","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/21674795241242721","url":null,"abstract":"This paper analyses news media coverage of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic skateboarding competition, which paid significant and celebratory attention to the extraordinary youth of the medallists in the women’s disciplines. The coverage was marked by a postfeminist sensibility that constituted the girl-child skater via a ubiquitous and enduring girl power discourse, and idealised them as sites of extraordinary feminine capacity. These narratives located girls’ success in their exceptional youth, market potential, and personal agency, reinforcing neoliberal norms which privilege individualism, entrepreneurialism and choice. However, while offering the girl athletes as testaments to feminist progress in a historically male sport and culture, news narratives tended to render girls’ athletic labour virtually invisible and to elide larger issues that may impact women skaters and girl-aged elite athletes. This paper addresses a call for further attention to postfeminist sensibility as it manifests in contemporary media coverage of women’s sport in order to understand the kind of contradictions that can manifest in media narratives that simultaneously celebrate women’s achievements while denying the existence of larger structural issues affecting them. Additionally, it addresses a gap in feminist sport media research that has largely overlooked the girl-child elite athlete.","PeriodicalId":46882,"journal":{"name":"Communication & Sport","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140331262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Patrick C. Gentile, Luke A. Skuratowicz, Zachary W. Arth
{"title":"“I Just Learn a Single Phrase:” Language Acquisition and Cultural Fusion in Professional Baseball","authors":"Patrick C. Gentile, Luke A. Skuratowicz, Zachary W. Arth","doi":"10.1177/21674795241242719","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/21674795241242719","url":null,"abstract":"This paper seeks to understand how Americans in the professional baseball community communicate with Spanish-speaking players. To further uncover how English-speaking players interact with their Spanish-speaking counterparts, 22 interviews were conducted with American members of the baseball community. Through the purview of cultural fusion theory, this article seeks to understand how English and Spanish-speaking baseball players accommodate each other. More specifically, the researchers interviewed ten current MiLB players, three former players, four current coaches who also played professionally, four team and league personnel, and one athletic trainer. It was concluded that baseball is a language that everyone can use to communicate through and players must be comfortable to immerse themselves in Spanish to learn and to be willing to fail. Interviewees also claim that language learning improves team chemistry which can impact wins and losses.","PeriodicalId":46882,"journal":{"name":"Communication & Sport","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140331216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A (Meta) Picture is Worth a Thousand “Likes:” An Analysis of Engagement with Sports Network Images on Instagram","authors":"Rich G. Johnson, Miles Romney, Kevin John","doi":"10.1177/21674795241233174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/21674795241233174","url":null,"abstract":"Previous studies on sports images have often focused on gender and race representation. However, with the rise of social media, sports photographers worldwide are fighting professionally produced and user-created images for audience attention. Recent scholarship has shown that stronger storytelling elements in sports photographs spur an increase in lower-level engagement metrics. The current study dives deeper into the types of images that generate key social media engagement. Researchers conducted a biometric analysis of 28 randomly sampled Instagram images from sports networks’ official feeds. Results indicate that social media images containing metacommunicative themes increase audience engagement. These findings offer insights into improving social media engagement for sports news sources.","PeriodicalId":46882,"journal":{"name":"Communication & Sport","volume":"68 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140196149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Show HBCU Referee Bias the Red Card: Testing Communication Theory in Division I Women’s College Soccer","authors":"Andrew Dix","doi":"10.1177/21674795241239562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/21674795241239562","url":null,"abstract":"The current study focused on the red cards and yellow cards that referees gave to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in Division I women’s college soccer for their in-game communicative actions. These cards are distributed to players who are perceived to have engaged in a reckless play or an action that involved excessive force. Within the United States, HBCUs are institutions of higher education that historically and primarily serve students who are of African American descent. Thus, the strong Black woman collective (SBWC) theory of communication was the theoretical frame because this study focused on small groups that were mostly comprised of African American women. Previous studies on referee bias were summarized in the literature review. Publicly available data on 19,360 soccer games were then analyzed. The findings indicated that referees gave more red cards to HBCU women’s college soccer teams relative to predominantly White institution (PWI) women’s college soccer teams at a statistically significant level. Yellow cards were also disproportionately distributed to HBCUs relative to PWIs. Implications for communication theory were noted in the study discussion as were interpretations on why referee bias against HBCUs continues to occur.","PeriodicalId":46882,"journal":{"name":"Communication & Sport","volume":"85 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140142107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Immortal 38: How the Media Afterlife of Slovak Ice Hockey Legend Pavol Demitra Created a Marble Hero","authors":"Peter Mikuláš, Alice Nemcova Tejkalova","doi":"10.1177/21674795241235085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/21674795241235085","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we focus on the posthumous media image of the deceased professional ice hockey player Pavol Demitra. He was a world-famous athlete, starring in both the NHL and KHL, but this paper primarily focuses on his fame in Slovakia, his native country. Demitra became a legend in his own lifetime, but his story only gained its true shape after he had died. The media played a dominant role in this deeper reflection of Demitra’s life. First, we monitored the Slovak media in the ten years following his tragic death. Next, we focused on the quantitative analysis of two categories, heroism and cultural and societal overlaps, which formed the basis of Demitra’s fame legacy. Through our third step, a qualitative frame analysis, we demonstrated how the media dealt with athlete’s framing. The results showed how Demitra was put on a pedestal and, in some aspects, immortalized as a divine, heroic statue made of marble. At the same time, his legacy has continued thanks to his son Lucas, a successful athlete, keeping the name alive.","PeriodicalId":46882,"journal":{"name":"Communication & Sport","volume":"52 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140057776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}