Abstract
All sixty-nine hours of National Broadcasting Company’s (NBC) 2012 primetime Summer Olympic telecast were analyzed, revealing significant gender trends. For the first time in any scholarly study of NBC’s coverage of the games, women athletes received the majority of the clock-time and on-air mentions. However, dialogues surrounding the attributions of success and failure of athletes, as well as depictions of physicality and personality, contained some divergences by gender.
In an age where most televised sports are still a “boy’s club,” 1 the Olympics are a relative anomaly, featuring a plethora of women athletes competing in virtually all of the same sports as men. While ESPN’s SportsCenter offers women’s sports just 1.4% of the time, 2 the 2012 London Olympic Games consisted of an overall athletic population that was 44% women. 3 Sixteen years after National Broadcasting Company (NBC) dubbed the Atlanta Summer Games as the Olympics of the women, 4 signs of women’s progress continued to percolate surrounding the Olympic Games: every competing national team had at least one woman member with the new inclusions of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Brunei; 5 both the United States and Canadian teams had slightly more women athletes than men. 6 Thus, a potential paradox exists as critics have found gender differences in the production 7 and description 8 of women’s sporting events, while signs of increased participation could be viewed as progress for women in sports.
One decade after Bernstein queried whether it was “time for a victory lap,” 9 the Olympic telecast remains the pinnacle of analyses of gender treatment in mediated sports. 10 While part of the reason can be traced to the increased population of women athletes and the relative notion that people will watch the games regardless of an athlete’s gender as long as their home nation is competitive, 11 another reason for the intense focus on gender in the Olympics arises from the incredible magnitude of media permeation. The 2012 London Summer Games had a global reach of approximately 3.6 billion unique viewers spread across 220 territories and countries. 12 In the United States, NBCUniversal offered 5,535 hours of Olympic coverage in a variety of media formats. 13 The London games set a U.S. viewership record, with 217 million Americans watching some portion of NBCUniversal’s coverage. 14 The most important component of NBCUniversal’s Olympic coverage, the NBC broadcast network’s primetime telecast, averaged 31.1 million viewers 15 and generated more than 80% of the company’s Olympic ad revenue. 16
Thus, the Olympics are an important media event for the analysis of mediated gender issues 17 because of the large viewership, the increased participation of both men and women athletes, and the potential to influence wide swaths of populations. Such influence should not be understated, as “history is not always written by the winners, it is also written by those with the television rights.” 18
This study will analyze the crown jewel of the largest sports media event in history: the NBC broadcast network primetime telecast of the 2012 Olympic Games. Through the examination of clock-time, overall salience, and attributed descriptors to and about men and women athletes, insights can be offered regarding the role of gender in the ultimate case of media saturation.
Related Literature
Whether women have reached participatory equality in the Olympic Games remains a question for debate, but there is no question substantial progress has been made since the Modern Olympic Games were introduced in 1896. Women were not allowed to compete in the 1896 games, and though women participated in the 1900 Paris games, 19 Pierre de Coubertin never embraced female participation in the Olympics. Decades after women had gained entrance to the games, de Coubertin stated, “The only real Olympic hero . . . is the individual adult male. Therefore, no women or team sports.” 20 While fewer than two-dozen women competed in 1900, 21 the 2012 games featured a panoply of women athletes from a variety of backgrounds and nations.
Social identity theory 22 references how people associate or disassociate with various groups, particularly how their presumed interests and degree of appropriateness within and among various groups result in self-made partitions of social classification. Activities with traditionally masculine participation, such as sports, often forge men as a tacitly defined in-group, with women developing a cognitive set of cues that results in seeing sports as an out-group activity. While sport remains a masculine domain, 23 the Olympics remain the outlier, offering compelling avenues for the exploration of social identity-based communicative investigations. Put succinctly, it may be the case that while women continue to feel “outsider” status 24 within broadly defined sport, they may feel much more of an inclusive sense specifically within Olympic-based sport, 25 at least partially because of the personalized, episodic nature in which the Olympics are rendered.
When combined with media content-oriented notions of framing, 26 one must query the degree to which men and women Olympians and Olympic sports are offered by NBC’s broadcast in terms of selection, emphasis, and exclusion. 27 Given the potential gap between sport participation and sport media exposure, 28 such gendered differences will be reviewed in regard to (1) clock-time/exposure differences, (2) salience deviations, and (3) athletic depictions (regarding success and failure as well as physicality and personality).
Gendered Clock-Time in the Olympic Telecast
Considerable work has focused on the amount of coverage devoted to men and women athletes in sports in general. These tend to result in findings in which women’s sports are either diminished to single-digit media exposure percentages 29 or relegated to ancillary networks or websites, such as ESPNW. 30 Within NBC’s Olympic broadcast, however, results have been quite different. Without question, the Olympics feature the greatest spotlight for women athletes of any American sports media product. Remaining questions surround issues of equality and degree of coverage.
Two postulates consistent throughout prior research are that (1) the Summer Olympic broadcast features women athletes and sports at a significantly higher rate than the Winter Olympic correlate and (2) the Summer Olympic broadcast still consistently shows a higher proportion of men athletes than women athletes. Winter Olympic analyses 31 found that men athletes were shown more than women by a nearly two-to-one ratio when excluding pairs competitions. Meanwhile, the Summer Olympic analyses have resulted in much closer margins, albeit still privileging men’s competitions over women’s. In 1996, NBC promoted women athletes the majority of the time, yet favored men’s athletics by a relatively slim 53% to 47% margin. 32 Subsequent analyses of the Summer Olympics 33 have shown these same margins that appear small, yet are nonetheless statistically significant when taken over the course of a seventeen-night broadcast, still existed in the most recent Summer Olympic analyses 34 as NBC’s coverage consisted of 54.2% men’s athletics and 45.8% women’s athletics in the 2008 games. Clock-time disparities favoring men in the Summer Olympics have also been detected in other studies. 35 While London’s Olympic Games represent the highest rate of women’s athletic participation to date, the consistent significant differences found in prior studies result in the following clock-time hypothesis:
Gendered Salience in the Olympic Telecast
Another measure of Olympic media gender equity pertains to the salience of NBC’s coverage, traditionally unpacked as the number of times each athlete’s name is spoken within the telecast and operationalized as a “mention.” 36 Such analyses tended to hew along similar gender proportional lines to that of clock-time, finding that the majority of the mentions in the primetime Olympic broadcast are of men athletes, while an even greater proportion of the most-mentioned athletes—typically around two-thirds—are men. 37 As such, two additional hypotheses were postulated based on the composite of these findings:
In addition, the mentions within the telecast will also include analysis of the mentions within pre-produced spots for both (1) athlete profiles (within the telecast) and (2) network promotion of the Olympics (embedded within the commercial break). As such, two research questions are formulated to examine those differences:
Gender Descriptions in the Olympic Telecast
Perhaps the largest body of research related to gender and sport focuses on the language frequently employed within mediated renderings. 38 Scholars such as Blinde, Greendorfer, and Shenker see media coverage of women as a broader reflection of gender ideology, 39 while others have regarded women’s mediated sports as being opportunities to “add sex and stir.” 40 Gendered linguistic differences within mediated sport have been found in a multitude of nations 41 and, indeed, throughout history. 42
These linguistic differences in more recent Olympic telecasts have not been deemed as blatant as many of the biased renderings outside the Olympics 43 or of Olympics from decades ago. 44 Twenty-first-century studies of gender attributions in the Summer Olympics, however, have revealed linguistic differences between men and women athletes. 45 Markula may capture the sentiment within the aggregate of international Olympic media, noting that “while women receive increased coverage during the major events like the Olympic Games . . . women’s sport is ideologically controlled by trivializing women’s performances.” 46 NBC’s telecast, however, has been less likely to trivialize performances by gender than describe them in demonstrably different ways. 47
Studies of depictions of men and women athletes 48 within the Summer Games have found that the majority of commentary focuses upon attributions of success and failure of each athletic performance. Recent studies reveal that while attributions have significantly differed by the gender of athlete, such differences have not proven to be consistent over the course of a series of Olympic telecasts. For instance, the 2004 telecast contained an increased tendency for male athletes to have their successes attributed to courage, while women were more likely to have their successes credited to courage in the 2006 and 2010 telecasts. 49 Similarly, the last Summer Olympic investigation 50 found men athletes were ascribed more comments about their strength resulting in athletic success—a finding revealed in past analyses, 51 yet not in others. 52 Thus, authors have concluded that such inconsistency of taxonomical findings are important and should be subject to subsequent longitudinal research, yet “should be classified as gender differences rather than stereotypes.” 53 As such, the final two hypotheses for this study have been constructed around the notion of difference more than the presence of bias or stereotyping:
Method
The full sixty-nine broadcast hours of NBC’s Olympic primetime coverage were utilized during the seventeen nights of the 2012 Summer Olympics (July 27-August 12), representing 100% of NBC’s scheduled primetime coverage (which often aired until 12 a.m. EDT). Only comments spoken by network-employed individuals were analyzed for descriptors and mentions of athlete names because this dialogue can be largely scripted and supervised by NBC editors and producers, a process consistent with studies of sports media framing, as producers impact what is shown while announcers shape the dialogue arising from these airtime decisions. 54 Those network employees included host commentators (Bob Costas), on-site reporters (e.g., Andrea Kremer, Heather Cox), special assignment reporters (e.g., Mary Carillo, Ryan Seacrest), color commentators (e.g., Ato Boldon, Cynthia Potter), and all play-by-play announcers for both individual and team sports (e.g., Dan Hicks, Elfi Schlegel).
Three methods of coding were applied to each hour of Olympic coverage. The first method of coding pertained to the amount of time devoted to men’s and women’s sports. To calculate this, a single researcher (incorporating DVD recorder timers) measured and entered (to the millisecond) the total amount of time devoted to each event, making distinctions between men, women, and mixed gender sports. Any time spent at the actual athletic site, on a profile about an athlete of that sport, or host commentary about a specific sport was recorded (including two NBC specials, one on swimmer Michael Phelps, the other on the twentieth anniversary of men’s basketball’s Dream Team).
The second type of coding looked at the commentator’s actual use of the athletes’ names. Twelve coders watched each evening’s broadcast and logged/counted every mention of every athlete by any employee of NBC.
For the third method related to athletic descriptors, the unit of analysis was the descriptor (defined as any adjective, adjectival phrase, adverb, or adverbial phrase) used by a network-employed individual, and all hours were coded for (1) the athlete’s sport (2) the gender of the athlete (man or woman), (3) the ethnicity of the athlete (Asian, black, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, white, or other), (4) the nationality of the athlete (American or non-American), (5) the gender of the announcer (man or woman), and (6) the specific word-for-word descriptive phrase. Then, the descriptors were classified using the Billings and Eastman taxonomy, 55 which divides commentary into three recognizable categories: (1) attributions of success/failure (i.e., descriptions of the immediately viewable athletic performance), (2) depictions of personality/physicality (i.e., descriptions of external variables of athletes not directly attributable to the viewed athletic performance), and (3) neutral (i.e., comments that do not describe the athletic performance or depict the personality and/or physicality of the athlete—largely factual play-by-play dialogue). In all, sixteen classification categories were implemented for the analysis, encompassing comments pertaining to (1) concentration (i.e., “she has been the portrait of concentration the past few moments”), (2) strength-based athletic skill (i.e., “nowhere near enough power”), (3) talent/ability-based athletic skills (i.e., “she nailed her turn”), (4) composure (i.e., “feeling the pressure”), (5) commitment (i.e., “one of the hardest working gymnasts out there”), (6) courage (i.e., “showed a bit of guts there”), (7) experience (i.e., “didn’t medal in Beijing”), (8) intelligence (i.e., “very crafty”), (9) athletic consonance (i.e., “tough break”), (10) outgoing/extroverted (i.e., “effervescent”), (11) modest/introverted (i.e., “quiet young lady”), (12) emotional (i.e., “so amped”), (13) attractiveness (i.e., “comes in with a more mature look”), (14) size/parts of body (i.e., “the tallest blocker in the competition”), (15) background (i.e., “is a big Justin Beiber fan”), and (16) other. Using Cohen’s formula, 56 a second researcher coded 20% of the database and reliabilities were determined for the following variables: (1) the gender of the athlete (κ = 1.00), (2) the ethnicity of the athlete (κ = .98), (3) the nationality of the athlete (κ = 1.00), (4) the gender of the announcer (κ = 1.00), (5) the word-for-word descriptor or descriptive phrase (κ = .83), and (6) the name of the sport being discussed (κ = 1.00). Overall inter-coder reliability using Cohen’s kappa exceeded 96% when combining all categories.
Once all data were analyzed and tables created, chi-square analysis was employed to determine significant differences between groups by using the percentage of overall comments as expected frequencies. For example, because 44.7% of all attributions for success were about men athletes, it was expected that roughly the same proportion (44.7%) of comments about concentration, skill, composure, commitment, attractiveness, and so on should be established as expected frequencies for men athletes, and that significant deviations would be substantially more meaningful than employing .50 as an expected frequency for each individual category. For the clock-time table, however, .50 was inserted as the expected frequency as clock-time measures raw exposure, whereas the descriptor differences are contingent on how much exposure each athlete and sport receives.
Results
Content analysis of NBC’s 2012 London Olympic telecast resulted in just less than forty-five total hours of coverage.
Clock-Time by Gender in the 2012 London Summer Olympics.
At the time of the 2012 London Summer Olympics, there are no men’s events in the disciplines of Rhythmic Gymnastics and Synchronized Swimming.
Mixed doubles events were held for the disciplines of Badminton and Tennis, though no primetime coverage was devoted to these events. Equestrian is competed as a mixed gender discipline.
As outlined in Table 1, thirty-two total sports were included in NBC’s seventeen days of coverage of the Games; however, only seven received an hour or more of total coverage within the total composite. As Table 1 shows, women received 54.8% of the primetime coverage compared with 45.2% of the coverage devoted to men, a significant difference (χ2 = 1453.87, df = 1, p < .001). Within the seven sports that received more than one hour of airtime, collectively accounting for more than 96.9% of NBC’s airtime, women received more primetime airtime in beach volleyball (χ2 = 9663.74, df = 1, p < .001), diving (χ2= 5.32, df =1, p < .05), gymnastics (χ2 = 3634.11, df = 1, p < .001), and volleyball (χ2 = 1371.15, df = 1, p < .001). Conversely, men’s sports received greater airtime in cycling (χ2 = 891.09, df = 1, p < .001), swimming (χ2 = 895.67, df = 1, p < .001), and track and field (χ2 = 504.33 df = 1, p < .001). Consequently,
Top-Twenty Most-Mentioned Athletes in the 2012 Olympics.
As shown in Table 2, while
Sources and Distribution of Mentions of Athletes by Name in the 2012 Olympics.
χ2 = 4.64, df = 1, p < .05.
χ2 = 11.61, df = 1, p < .001.
χ2 = 78.55, df = 1, p < .001.
As shown in Table 3, male athletes received 5,793 total mentions (340 per primetime broadcast), whereas female athletes received 6,659 total mentions (392 per primetime broadcast), a significant difference (χ2 = 60.23, df = 1, p < .05). Significant differences, however, were offered by source with the host (Bob Costas) more likely to mention male athletes (χ2 = 4.64, df = 1, p < .05) and female reporters more likely to mention female athletes (χ2 = 11.61, df = 1, p < .001). Thus,
Descriptive Analysis of Success/Failure by Gender.
χ2 = 3.97, df = 1, p < .05.
χ2 = 13.51, df = 1, p < .001.
χ2 = 4.43, df = 1, p < .05.
Before delving into the findings of Table 4, it is important to note that these findings should be considered in the context of proportionality, which influences expected frequencies. Thus, women had more total mentions (likely the result of 9.6% more airtime) and expected frequencies were adjusted to reflect the balance of the overall descriptor database. Once that was accounted for, men were more likely to be depicted as succeeding because of experience (χ2 = 3.97, df = 1, p < .05), while women were more like to have their successes attributed to consonance (χ2 = 4.43, df = 1, p < .05). Regarding athletic failures, the one statistically significant difference resided in the women’s category, as they were more likely to have their failures attributed to lack of composure (χ2 = 3.97, df = 1, p < .05). In sum, the majority of the categories did not yield significant differences, yet these three significant attributions provide some support for
As Table 5 highlights, men and women were described in demonstrably different manners in three main external characteristics. Women athletes received increased frequencies of comments about their emotions (χ2 = 17.76, df = 1, p < .001) and appearance (χ2 = 6.41, df = 1, p = .02) than men. Conversely, the one area in which men received proportionally more comments than women was in the area of the unclassifiable, labeled “other/neutral” (χ2 = 10.41, df = 1, p = .005). Given that 44.4% of the categories yielded differences by gender,
Descriptive Analysis of Personality/Physicality Descriptors by Gender.
χ2 = 17.76, df = 1, p < .001.
χ2 = 6.41, df = 1, p = .02.
χ2 = 10.41, df = 1, p = .005.
Discussion
Forty years after the passage of Title IX—the 1972 education amendment that prohibits educational institutions that receive federal financial assistance from discriminating based on gender—the seventeen-night NBC network primetime Olympic broadcast proved to be an historic chapter in televised sports. As scholars began compiling complete content analysis data of U.S.-based broadcast network primetime Olympic telecasts with the 1994 games, NBC’s 2012 Olympic telecast marks (1) the first time women received more overall clock-time than men, (2) the first time women tallied more appearances than men in the most-mentioned athletes category, and (3) the first time women athletes received more overall mentions than male athletes. 57 When viewed through Gitlin’s observation that media frames are “persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation of selection, emphasis, and exclusion,” 58 it is clear that NBC’s persistent emphasis on male athletes within its primetime Olympic broadcast was broken in 2012.
NBC’s increased focus on women’s sports may be partly credited to the success of the U.S. Women’s Olympic team, which was a dominant force at the 2012 games. Team USA women won more medals than American men (63% of the U.S. gold and 55.7% of all U.S. medals). In fact, with the exceptions of the People’s Republic of China, Great Britain, and the Russian Federation—U.S. women Olympians claimed more medals than any country’s combined male and female total. 59 Indeed, if, as Tuchman suggests, “The news frame organizes everyday reality and the news frame is part and parcel of everyday reality . . .” 60 NBC’s primetime broadcast could be seen as both presenting and reflecting Team USA women’s dominance. That, however, would oversimplify NBC’s primetime broadcast presentation.
NBC’s increased attention to women athletes was not the result of the network devoting significant primetime coverage to a variety of sports in which U.S. women were successful. Rather, the imbalance between women’s and men’s airtime appears to be largely because of the network’s focus on women’s gymnastics and women’s beach volleyball. In both sports, women received more than three hours of additional coverage when compared with their male counterparts. For instance, in the case of beach volleyball, the U.S. team of Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings received a combined 1,130 mentions, representing more than the overall gender gap of 866 mentions favoring women athletes in the composite analysis.
Gymnastics and beach volleyball, however, carry their own gender baggage. Gymnastics has been dubbed a sex-appropriate sport for women, 61 and some studies of college students have revealed they perceived it to be a feminine sport. 62 The sexualized nature of beach volleyball, where women are often wearing tight-fitting bikinis, has been criticized by some, 63 and praised by others, with the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, commenting, “there are semi-naked women playing beach volleyball . . . glistening like wet otters . . .” 64
NBC’s increased attention to these two women’s sports would seemingly comport with Davis and Tuggle’s finding that “for female athletes to receive media coverage, they must be involved in socially acceptable individual sports and/or sports that highlight body type.” 65 Certainly this theory would apply to gymnastics and beach volleyball. Yet, it is also worth noting that American men earned only one medal in gymnastics and did not even qualify to compete in three of the six individual event finals in gymnastics. American men earned zero beach volleyball medals. Meanwhile, American women collected five medals in gymnastics (including a Team USA medal) and the gold and silver in beach volleyball, where Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings won their third consecutive gold medal and remained undefeated in Olympic competition. Thus, the heavy emphasis on women in these two sports may not be the result of one single gender-based factor, but rather a collection of factors that include the sport’s overall appeal to viewers, the gender appropriateness of the sport, the gender-based predicted success of U.S. athletes in the sport, pre-Olympic Games publicity, celebrity, and overall Team USA performance. 66 Collectively these factors may provide insight into both television programmers’ decisions and the audience’s desires to consume the television product.
The end game for NBCUniversal is, of course, ratings. The company’s attempt to recoup its $1.18 billion spent on 2012 Olympic rights fees results in the network’s cherry-picking the most desirable sports for its primetime network broadcast. As Angelini and Billings observed, NBC devoted more than 90% of its primetime air to five summer sports in 2008: beach volleyball, diving, gymnastics, swimming, and track and field. This was replicated by the network in 2012. 67 When agenda-setting theory, 68 which builds on Cohen’s assertion that the media “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but (they are) stunningly successful in telling their (audience) what to think about,” 69 is employed, NBC’s emphasis on these sports sets a primetime agenda focused on five sports at the expense of dozens of others.
McCombs and Reynolds state that “the New York Times frequently plays an intramedia agenda-setting role because appearance on the front page of the Times can legitimize a topic as newsworthy.” 70 Likewise, the power of NBC’s primetime broadcast as an intermedia agenda setter seems beyond question. With average audiences that outstrip the other three major broadcast networks combined, NBC’s primetime Olympic broadcast has taken competitors in non-mainstream sports and made them into household names. While Michael Phelps’s record setting feats during the past two Summer Games would have garnered significant attention in other media without NBC pushing the gas pedal, the stars of May-Treanor, Walsh Jennings, and Gabby Douglas would likely have been significantly dimmer had their performances been relegated to NBC’s ancillary networks outside of primetime.
Outside of the five major sports, NBC’s programming decisions when viewed through a gendered lens provide some interesting, if sometimes cloudy, insights into the network’s strategy. Women’s soccer received significantly more airtime than men’s soccer, but this can be attributed to USA Women’s Soccer winning gold and the celebrity of the team, which had just lost the World Cup Final to Japan in 2011. Meanwhile, USA men’s soccer failed to medal. News value was likely the main factor in the network’s decision to favor men’s basketball over women’s. While both Team USA men and women won gold, the men’s team received more coverage as it was a more salient story. The National Basketball Association (NBA) players competing for Team USA are international celebrities and the 2012 games marked the twentieth anniversary of the legendary original Dream Team that transformed international basketball.
In these contexts, such news judgments seem reasonable. Yet, the explanations for gender-based airtime differences in other sports do not seem as self-evident. Men’s cycling received triple the airtime of women’s cycling, yet American men failed to medal, while American women bagged four cycling medals. Meanwhile, in the first time boxing has featured an Olympic women’s division, American women clinched two medals, while American men secured four medals in wrestling. Yet, combined, these two sports received less than one-minute of primetime coverage. Another curiosity would the case of Kim Rhode, an American shooter who earned a medal in her fifth Olympiad in a row. Rhode’s gold-medal skeet shooting performance saw her become the first woman to win three gold medals in shooting while tying a world record when she hit 99 out of 100 clays. Such an historic performance by an athlete who has been competing in the Olympics since 1998 would seem worthy of more than passing primetime attention. Women’s shooting, however, received just seventy-five seconds of primetime air, compared with zero for men. Though that time was exclusively devoted to Rhode, the relatively meager primetime coverage relegated her to a tie for 412th on the most-mentioned athletes list. Other sports where Americans medaled, such as judo and taekwondo received no primetime coverage.
Durham notes that
decoding frames as historical records with an understanding of their ideological premises is necessary to understand whose particular meanings are included in a generalized version of history, whose are not, and on whose terms they are either included or excluded.
71
To that end, in the United States, the primetime Olympic broadcast is controlled by a multi-billion dollar media organization that has historically aimed its telecast toward a female audience. The network has determined that combat sports, such as boxing, do not appeal to female audiences. 72 This gender-based programming agenda, however, results in minimizing the accomplishments of many successful athletes on the most-watched Olympic broadcast in favor of the competitors in five major sports. The exclusion frame employed by the network creates true haves and have-nots among Olympic competitors, regardless if they are male or female, American or non-American.
In terms of salience, the importance of Michael Phelps in the 2012 broadcast should not be overlooked. While Phelps received the second most mentions, behind Misty May-Treanor, he was a central figure in the Olympic broadcast. His quest to break the record for most medals ever won by an Olympian was highlighted extensively by NBC over the course of several evenings. After he set the new record at twenty-two medals, NBC made Phelps the subject of an hour-long primetime profile. The volume of mentions May-Treanor and Walsh Jennings received was largely the result of the back and forth nature of beach volleyball games that typically causes the athletes’ names to be mentioned more often during competition than swimmers. Thus, it would be an error to interpret the exaggerated mentions for May-Treanor and Walsh Jennings as meaning they were a more important story for the network than Phelps, who was, by far, the most emphasized athlete in the telecast.
Noting the differences between framing and bias, Tankard observed that framing “is a more sophisticated concept. It goes beyond notions of pro or con, favorable or unfavorable, negative or positive. Framing adds the possibilities of additional, more complex emotional responses and also adds a cognitive dimension . . .” 73 When viewed through this theoretical lens, the network’s gender-based descriptions require a nuanced historical analysis. Of the twenty-five categories examined for attributions of success, failure and personality/physicality descriptors, significant gender-based differences appeared in only six (24%). Going back to 1994, this study marks the fourth time that men have been more likely to have their success credited more to experience. It marks the first time that women have been more likely to have their success credited to consonance, which previously had been more likely credited to men in the 2004 and 2008 games. This also marks the first time women have been more likely to have their failure attributed to a lack of composure. Thus, the attributions of failure and success continue not to be divided cleanly by gender.
In the area of personality/physicality descriptors, the increased comments for men in the other/neutral category is also a first, but the meaning behind this finding is difficult to determine, as, by their very nature, the comments are not easily categorized. Two stereotypes, however, seemed to emerge, as female athletes were more likely to be described as emotional and received significantly more comments about their attractiveness. In the former area, there is not enough data to suggest the increased comments toward women’s emotions are a network trend. From 1994 to 2010, Olympic women were only more likely to receive comments about their emotions once, during the 2010 games. 74 Whether this recent increased attention to women’s emotions is a short-term aberration or the beginning of a long-term trend is something that will require further study. It is certainly possible that female competitors were more likely to wear their emotions on their sleeve in the 2012 games, and thus their emotions may have been more apparent on the surface than men’s. At the same time, emotional displays by male and female athletes as well as spectators was a point of discussion in media outlets as the 2012 Olympics were dubbed “the crying games.” 75
The increased comments about women’s attractiveness during the 2012 games also require closer examination. Women were more likely to receive comments about their attractiveness during the 1994, 1996, and 1998 games. 76 This finding, however, was not replicated during the six Olympic telecasts from 2000 to 2010. While this tendency on the part of network announcers has reemerged, its importance should not be overstated. The small overall number of comments about athlete attractiveness—fourteen overall, which accounts for less than 0.09% of the descriptor database—indicates this descriptor was not an important point of emphasis by network announcers. There was, on average, less than one comment about athlete attractiveness per night. Compared with three Olympiads from 1994 to 1998, where athlete attractiveness descriptors, on average, accounted for 5.03% of the descriptor database, 77 NBC’s comments about this attribute were infinitesimal in 2012. Thus, this may not be a reemergence of stereotypical descriptions of women by network announcers but, perhaps, a statistical anomaly.
When the network commentary from the 2012 games is put into a longitudinal context, it becomes evident that if there are clear consistent dialogic gender biases on the part of the network announcers, they have not been detected in the studies that have been conducted dating back to the 1994 games. No specific dialogic gendered difference appears in more than four of the ten games studied, and the most recent appearance of one of the most prevalent differences (comments about women’s attractiveness) is too minute to conclude it has much importance.
Tankard notes that “framing recognizes the ability of a text—or a media presentation—to define a situation, define the issues, and to set the terms of debate.” 78 How NBC defines the Olympic experience and the athletes who participate in the Games remains an area that requires continued investigation. Future studies should be conducted to determine if any gender-based dialogic trends develop, if women’s dominance in clock-time and mentions is the beginning of trend or an aberration, and whether NBC expands its coverage to a broader range of sports that could impact overall trendlines.
Conclusion
The first woman to record an Olympic victory was Kyniska of Sparta, who did so in 396 and 392 BC. At the time, owners, not riders, were declared the victors in chariot races and the team Kyniska funded won. She did not physically compete nor attend the Games, as women were barred from the festivities. As Kyle notes,
She had no major impact on the regulations and operation of the Ancient Olympics. Her anomalous success did not alter the enduring ban on women at the games . . . Kyniska’s chariot racing was not intended to liberate the games, empower female athletes, or force discourse about gender roles in sport . . . (King) Agesilaus used his sister to show that Olympic chariot victories were won by wealth and not by manly excellence.
In essence, her role was political: a way for her brother to shame his enemies by “emasculating the Olympic chariot race.” 79
Conversely, Olympic Swimming Gold Medalist, Donna de Varona, has asserted that “(Title IX) not only transformed sport but our culture.” 80 It could be argued that Title IX has not only transformed women’s sport, but also “the biggest show on television.” 81 Over the past forty years, women’s sports participation has grown exponentially in the United States. Popular women’s sports like the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Women’s World Cup made athletes like Brandi Chastain mainstream celebrities, while increased focus on women’s college sports such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) March Madness did the same for players like Baylor’s Brittney Griner. Such women’s megasporting events have proven to draw high ratings; the 2011 Women’s World Cup final between the United States and Japan more than tripled the viewership of hockey’s Stanley Cup final, while rivaling other major events such as the Daytona 500 and NBA Finals. 82 Such a transformation would have been unforeseeable in 1972, when women’s athletics was relegated to individual/paired sports such as tennis or figure skating.
For years, NBC employees have claimed that the primetime broadcast focuses on the best stories, regardless of gender. 83 Opining that if women continued to make up a large portion of the Olympic television audience and women won a large portion of Team USA’s medals, NBC’s Tom Hammond said that the primetime network coverage would reflect those facts. “Television is a reactive medium,” he said. “We give the people more of what they want to see than what they ought to see.” 84 In 2012, NBC reacted by presenting a network primetime Olympic broadcast that, for the first time, favored women over men in three significant areas: clock-time, overall mentions, and Top-Twenty mentions.
During the 2012 games, NBC believed women provided the most compelling stories for the primetime broadcast and followed through its programming. This was in no small part because of the success of Team USA women. NBC has a long history of highlighting successful American athletes in its primetime Olympic broadcasts and the 2012 telecast appears to be no exception. As noted earlier, however, the success of American athletes is one of many components impacting NBC Olympic programming decisions. This did not result in gender parity, but rather a significant tilt in coverage toward female athletes. Indeed, true gender parity on the NBC primetime broadcast may be something that can only happen by accident. The unpredictable nature of the games, and the ratings-based need to tell the stories that are most salient to the general public, will always result in early and last-minute programming decisions that may favor a particular gender. Nonetheless, at least for the moment, NBC cannot be criticized for presenting a primetime Olympic broadcast that marginalizes women athletes in favor of men.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Alexis March for her assistance with coding and Sal Tuzzeo at Nielsen for his assistance clarifying some Nielsen data.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.