"Man,That Was a Pretty Shot": An Analysis of Gendered Broadcast Commentary Surrounding the 2000 Men's and Women's NCAA Final Four Basketball Championships |
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| Abstract: | Current research on sports broadcast commentary indicates that the commentary type employed to evaluate athletic performance by men and women is implicated through the language of gendered assumptions about the respective athlete and the respective sport. This study analyzed the broadcast commentary surrounding the 2000 Men's and Women's National Collegiate Athletic Association Final Four tournament games to assess the prevalence and degree to which gender-based evaluations characterized athletic performance by men and women. A content analysis of 2,367 lines of broadcast commentary revealed significant differences that categorically accounted for male athletes primarily in terms of physicality and athleticism, whereas female athletes were categorically evaluated in terms of (a) positive consonance, (b) personality, (c) looks and appearance, and (d) background. Results also revealed that, irrespective of broadcast commentator sex, the men's games generated significantly more lines of broadcast commentary than did the women's games. Male broadcast commentators also significantly monopolized airtime, even in the presence of female sportscasters, across men's and women's games. The results have implications for future research in the domain of sports communication in particular, and the domain of synthesis scholarship (O'Sullivan, 1999) in the communication discipline in general. |
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