2. Literature Review
2.1 Social Meaning of Mediated Sports
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2. Literature Review
The media coverage of women sports has received attention among
communication scholars. The relevant discussions can be organized into three main areas as follows: (1) the social meaning of mediated sports, (2) gender differences in news coverage of sports, and (3) newsroom operation and gendered news.
2.1 Social Meaning of Mediated Sports 2.1.1 Sports Fields as Miniature Society
Many people consider sports as one kind of entertainment, but sports are more than just that. Through games and races, people not only learn the rules of sports, but are also instilled with social rules, the values and concepts that are implanted in sports.
Many scholars have stated that sports are the socialized mechanism embedded with ideology, which allows the public to receive the values and standards expressed through sports unconsciously (Hargreaves, 1982; Real, 1975; Wenner, 1989). Lipsky (1981) even regards sports as the dramatic life-world where social values are
enhanced and developed. As the miniature of the real society, sports can serves as the mirror of the society and reflect the social circumstances (黃雅惠, 2003). Under this premise, it is easy to discover the presence of gender inequality, one of the most commonly discussed and analyzed phenomena in the social science studies, to be reflected in the miniature of the real world –sports fields. Therefore, the gender issue discussed widely in the sociological field is also worth studying in the sports field, the critical site for the construction and maintenance of gender identity.
In a biological point of view, men and women were born to be different.
However, gender differences are not only naturally formed, but are also reaffirmed, enhanced and built through the socialized process. In the sports field, the acclamation
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for achievements of male athletes indicates the cultural message of dominance by powerful male athletes, and thus reinforcing gender ideology (Weiller, Higgs &
Greenleaf, 2004). Men’s sports activities, featuring masculine virility, power,
toughness etc., construct masculinity and represent the power of sports to shape male gender identity (Katzs, 1996).
On the contrary, for the female, and even though there is research stating that women sports have progressed and are considered important (Gibbon, 2003), female athletes are overall ignored and undervalued. Women are discouraged from
participating in more aggressive sports, and are encouraged to participate in sports
“appropriate” for them, which are usually graceful and aesthetically pleasing. In Hardin and Whiteside’s research (2008), the sports are generally categorized as feminine or masculine based on the level of contact and aesthetic elements. Some scholars see the problem of gender disproportion in sports in a more serious and extensive way by stating that the sports culture has arbitrarily and habitually long been the male’s culture with the female as the audience, which leads to the stereotype that the female is innately inferior to the male (Coakley, 1977; 張孝銘, 1998; 黃郁 婷, 2005). With the sports embedded with stereotyped and imbalanced hierarchy for both gender, the concept of male-dominance in the real world is brought into the sports field, and is further strengthened and developed.
2.1.2 Media as Magnifier for Social Values
Dated from the 1990s, a decade after the first sports news in 1733, studies have shown that sports news hold significant status in newspaper reporting. In Laster’s 1988 research, the sports news accounts for 21% of the front news in USA Today, ranking first among all kinds of news. In 1992, after its 102-year history, even The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper known for its financial specialty, published a daily sports page during the 1992 Winter and Summer Olympics (Donaton, 1992). In
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Taiwan, sports news has proven its significance in newspapers as well. Chen pointed out that main newspapers in Taiwan include specialized pages for sports news. Sales for China Times Express even increased by 10% after the establishment of the specialized column for professional baseball (陳芸英, 1994). According to the research, more than 20.2% of people read the sports news in newspaper frequently and sports news has occupied regular pages and amounts, indicating that people have a certain level of need for sports news (胡幼偉, 1999).
With the help of advanced media, the time and space limits are lifted and sports news has penetrated into our daily life quietly, yet profoundly. According to USA Today, the television broadcasting time for the Summer Olympics was estimated to reach 171.5 hours by 2000, with the increase of ten times from the merely 15 hours back in 1960. The broadcasting rights cost US$ 4,169,096 per hour by 2000, growing hundreds of times from US$36,667 at the very beginning (1996, 3E). For the recent 2008 Beijing Olympics, the value of TV broadcasting right has been in argument with various statistics and measurements. Some estimate the broadcasting right as US$800 million (香港文匯報, 2007), while the scholar, Lin, offers another figure of
US$1,714.7 million (林永富, 2004). No matter which figure is the most correct one, it all points to the fact that the broadcasting and news coverage for the sports have become the new focus for various forms of media and it is obvious that sports have penetrated into our life for the mass public and develop its influence.
In addition to the basic functions of entertainment and education, many scholars have agreed that the media contain the function of socialization as the mirror to present the society as a whole by providing images and information, and thus reflecting, transmitting, and continuing the cultural values and social norms (Cohen, 1963; Laswell, 1948; Lippman, 1922; McQuail, 1983; 李慈梅, 2003; 侯致遠, 1991).
However, more scholars believe that the media can do more than just being the
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passive channel of transmission and informing.
With the ability to broadcast the values to people they can reach through
controlling the mediated sports content as a vehicle, the media is able to reinforce the cognition, beliefs, cultural values, stereotypes, and attitudes suffused in the world.
Moreover, it is also capable of constructing values and producing ideology with its own version of interpretation, thus making audience enforce the judgment for the values embedded in the mediated sports, e.g. heroism and male-dominance in the sports field (Dominick, 1990; McQuail, 1983; McPherson, Curtis, & Log, 1989;
Tuchman, 1978).
Hargreaves (1982) asserted that though the media context cannot control the audience’s thoughts directly, it is actually potential to create and frame the issues to enforce its interpretation. Other scholars also agree that the media hold the power to choose how to feature athletes and the narrative to highlight their performances, thus shaping popular beliefs, attitudes and values, and constructing a sense of reality (Lee, 1992; Weiller et al., 2004). It is this interpretive power of media which influences the audience’s reception. Thus, Weiller et al. (2004, p.14) state that, “By emphasizing certain facets of female participation in sports, while ignoring others, sports media effectively shape public agenda and influence the public’s judgement about the world of sport.”
With this regards, this research is aimed to examine whether the media exercise their power in influencing the values in the sports news in newspaper by reinforcing conceptions of sexual difference in Taiwan.