Journal of Sports Media

Abstract:

The Olympics offer female athletes the opportunity to shine on the biggest stage, and media tend to cover women's sports more and better during those events. This report is a sex-based quantitative content analysis of NBC's U.S. prime-time broadcast coverage of the 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 Summer Olympic Games. It focuses on two main aspects: (1) coverage of men's and women's events and (2) the sex of sources and speakers featured. Results indicate that while NBC's coverage prominently features female athletes, men's sports were still overrepresented during the Tokyo 2020 coverage compared to American men's success in the competition, and the coverage of both the latest Summer Games in Japan and the previous six editions include hegemonic masculinity cues. Primarily, women's coverage became increasingly less diverse over time, focusing mostly on a few major sports, all deemed "socially acceptable" per stereotypical gender norms (gymnastics, track and field, beach volleyball, and swimming and diving). Meanwhile, women involved in physical-power or hard body-contact sports are almost never featured in prime time, despite their successes in competition. Regarding sources and speakers, men have almost always been seen and heard (either working for NBC or being interviewed) more often than women.