The Canadian State of Mind: Coverage of Men and Women Athletes in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Prime Time Broadcast of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games

Abstract

The following study represents the first attempt in to empirically analyze the Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s (CBC) prime time Olympic broadcast to determine if there were significant trends based on the sex of the athlete. All 72 hours of the CBC’s 2014 prime time Winter Olympic broadcast were analyzed. When excluding mixed-pair competitions, men received 60.4 percent of the airtime. Men received 61.2 percent of the mentions and comprised 65 percent of the top 20 most-mentioned athletes list. Sportscaster dialogues surrounding the attributions of success and failure of athletes, as well as depictions of physicality and personality, contained some divergences based on the sex of an athlete. Men were more likely to be depicted as succeeding because of athletic ability and intelligence while women were more likely to have their successes attributed to experience. Additionally, men were more likely to have their failures attributed to lack of intelligence. In the areas of personality/physicality, women athletes were more likely to receive comments about their size/parts of the body while men were more likely to receive comments in the areas of outgoing/extroversion and emotions.

Notes

^1. This excludes media that focus exclusively on women’s sports, such as the now-defunct Women’s Television Sports Network.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul J. MacArthur

Paul J. MacArthur (M.P.S., Syracuse University) is a professor of Public Relations and Journalism at Utica College. His research interests include the Olympics, mediated sport, cable/satellite television, media law, media history, sports history, winter sports and professional wrestling.

James R. Angelini

James R. Angelini (Ph.D., Indiana University) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Delaware. His research interests include the cognitive processing of media with a focus on mediated sports and identity.

Lauren Reichart Smith

Lauren Reichart Smith (Ph.D., University of Alabama) is an assistant professor of sports media in the Media School at Indiana University. Her research primarily focuses on issues of gender, race, and nationalism within sports media.

Andrew C. Billings

Andrew C. Billings (Ph.D., Indiana University) is the Ronald Reagan chair of Broadcasting in the Department of Journalism & Creative Media at the University of Alabama. His primary research interests reside in the intersection of sport, media, and issues of identity.