Gendered coverage of the Olympic Games in German print media: a longitudinal content analysis in the context of participation, success and disciplines

Abstract

With more than 10,000 participants from all over the world competing in hundreds of events, the Olympic Games have relevance based on both their large scale and their omnipresence in the media, generated by approximately 30,000 international media representatives working on site. These figures raise the questions of what the mediated reality of the Olympic Games looks like and what central reference points shape this mediated reality. International studies on visual print media coverage often claim that sportswomen are still systematically underrepresented and content-related visualisations display gendered differences. Anchored in systems theory and agenda-setting theory, this article examines the visualisations of male and female Olympians in print media and the relevance of participation, success and disciplines to gender. The sample comprises a total of 3394 pictures from two daily German newspapers’ coverage of the Summer Olympics from 2000 to 2016. The longitudinal design allows analysing changes in the visual construction of gender in 21st-century sport media. The study results indicate growing marginalisation of female Olympians in recent decades and disprove that success is the most important news value in Olympic Games coverage.

Keywords:

• Gender
• olympic games
• print media
• content analysis
• visual communication

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Disclosure statement

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

Figure 1. Gender ratio of the photographs from 2000 to 2016, n = 3394, in percent, Chi²(4) = 21,681, ***p = .000, Cramer V = 0.080.

Figure 2. Size of the photographs (in cm²) of female (f), male (m) and all athletes from 2000 to 2016 and in total, n = 3384, Gender effect: Mann–Whitney U-test: G2012: z = −2,484, p = .013. Time effect: Kruskal–Wallis test: T: H(3) = 13,451, p = .004, T♂ : H(3) = 11,573, p = .009.

Notes

1 All these social institutions disseminate information through means such as newspapers, broadcasting, new media and magazines as they generate large quantities of products for specific target groups.

2 Agenda setting has its roots in political analyses on the relationship between the central topics covered by print media and recipients’ perceptions of the covered topics’ relevance.

3 For daily newspapers, see, e.g. Dunne (2017), Godoy-Pressland (2014), Hartmann-Tews and Braumüller (2019) and Horky and Nieland (2013). For sport magazines, see, e.g. Lumpkin (2009) and Weber and Carini (2013). For broadcast media, see, e.g. Cooky et al. (2015). For new media, see, e.g. Clavio and Eagleman (2011) and Hovden and von der Lippe (2019).

4 Pictures showing only coaches, fans, former athletes, officials and sport venues were excluded.

5 The variable of picture size was not normally distributed with the Kolmogorow–Smirnow test displaying p = .000 for each year.

6 Reflecting track and field disciplines.

7 Gender differences within the most depicted sports for the German Olympic team are presented in section 3.3 to determine the relevance of success in agenda setting.