“We F—ing Got Osuna”: Examining the Maintenance of Patriarchy and Journalistic Routines in A Major League Baseball Clubhouse

ABSTRACT

Elite professional athletes in the NBA, NHL, NFL and MLB have all been accused of domestic violence. This occurs in a cultural arena already predicated on patriarchy and capitalism and rife with toxic masculinity, which combine to create traumatic, gendered realities for women sports journalists and violent and exploitative labor norms for athletes. Through a critical discourse analysis of 76 articles from U.S. newspapers, magazines, and online news sites, this study examines the specific case of a 2019 outburst from Houston Astros assistant general manager Brandon Taubman, who directed pointed praise of an Astros player accused of domestic violence at three female sports journalists, one of whom wore a domestic violence awareness bracelet. By examining news coverage of this prominent incident — and the meta-journalistic discourse that permeated it — this study identified three problematic discursive maneuvers through which journalists avoided directly addressing the topic of patriarchy and its influence in this incident and the wider sports industry, while instead prioritizing issues of journalistic credibility and baseball culture and minimizing domestic violence as strategic distraction.

KEYWORDS:

• Sports journalism
• domestic violence
• critical discourse analysis
• patriarchy
• metajournalistic discourse‌
• Houston Astros

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The authors recognize the marginalizing discursive nature of referring to certain sports journalists as “women” or “female” sports journalists. But the present study seeks to explain the exceptional use of the term to better understand the persistent nature of patriarchy reinforced in men’s sports locker rooms.

2 This list does not necessarily include every source that ran a story on Taubman’s verbal attack. The list is only comprised of titles available through our search. But as this CDA is not meant to be a representative sample, it still comprises a useful insight into the tone of the media’s coverage of this event overall.