SOCIAL ANALYSIS IN THE MEDIA COVERAGE OF SPORT

1. INTRODUCTION

In recent decades, the journalistic coverage of sport has steadily expanded to include off-field subjects like economics, politics, and the internationalisation of sports. Nonetheless, beneath the surface of this expanded coverage, the media tend to address a relatively limited number of topics. For example, the public gets to know everything about the wealthiest sports and clubs, the transfer market, athletes supported by powerful sponsors, as well as gossip-worthy stories. What about the rest? Does media coverage fully capture the sporting phenomenon? It is neither surprising nor deontologically reprehensible to capitalise on the economic value embedded in sports and athletes. The emphasis on sport as entertainment is also justified: sport does provide a healthy distraction for both participants and spectators. The point is that sport is more than that. Sport reveals trends about questions that are apparently far from the game, relating for example to commerce, inequality, religion, digitalization and more.1 Through sport, people from different generations come together around a shared passion for the same team. Sport influences personal development, for it helps build discipline and perseverance, with role models contributing to the development of citizenship, especially in young people. Sport can also be a powerful tool for promoting health and social inclusion in developing countries. The fun aspect of sport, dismissed by some critics as superficial or of light impact, is what attracts people from diverse backgrounds and contributes to its social significance. The fact that sport is also recurrently exploited to spread negative values, like racism or violence, only further highlights its pervasive influence in contemporary society.

This paper argues that while today’s media coverage of sport is extensive and growing, it should broaden its scope to more frequently address the social impacts of sport. This claim involves regular reporting on the social matters of sport, rather than just feature articles or the occasional coverage of attention-grabbing scandals. Stories that describe the social dimension of sport hardly ever make the headlines, regardless of their relevance. The suggested approach implies a (re-)definition of what sports journalism is about, which does not necessarily entail a transformation but rather a reaffirmation of its essence. Journalism, including sports journalism, serves a social function or it is not journalism.

2. RESEARCH QUESTIONS

This paper raises three main research questions:

3. RELEVANT THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

This study is primarily grounded in classical gatekeeping theory applied to media studies, which serves as its primary interpretative framework. To assess the role of social analysis in press coverage of sport, we must first examine the topics that journalists allow through the metaphorical “gate.” As described by Shoemaker and Vos, gatekeeping is “the process of culling and crafting countless bits of information into the limited number of messages that reach people each day [and] the center of the media’s role in modern public life.”2

Additional paradigms that may serve as auxiliary explanatory frameworks include public journalism, i.e. the approach that emerged in the U.S. in the 1990s and started “where citizens start, allowing new coverage to reflect their concerns” – as this reflects this study’s concern with the social dimension in sports reporting.3 And the business-focused literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR), although CSR studies applied to the media industry are quite rare. In his book Social Responsibilities of the Businessman, which is widely considered the foundational work for CSR studies, Howard Bowen described CSR as “the obligations of businessmen to pursue those policies, to make those decisions, or to follow those lines of action which are desirable in terms of the objectives and values of our society”.4 According to Painter-Morland and Deslandes, most scholarly publications on the media’s CSR focus on how media organisations report on the corporate social responsibility of other organisations.5 In other words, based on Grayson’s categorisation, they focus on corporate responsibility in the media as opposed to the corporate responsibility of the media.6

4. A NEW TAXONOMY

Prior to examining the media coverage of the social dimension of sport, it is necessary to clearly define this dimension and its scope. The notion of “social dimension” can be utterly elusive unless we establish a distinctive analytical framework to circumscribe it. A new classification system, or taxonomy, was created to categorise potential areas for social analysis in media sport. In practical terms, the new taxonomy is a list of topics and subtopics that describe the sport’s social aspects. This broad analytical framework is meant to highlight as many socially relevant issues in sport reporting as possible. The taxonomy is intended for use to examine any type of media.

The first step towards the formation of this taxonomy was creating an inventory of the themes that occur most frequently in commonly used textbooks offering a sociological analysis of sport. The sport sociology textbooks were purposely chosen to include both recent books, published or revised after 2010, and classics in the sociology of sport. Furthermore, some of the selected books were written by single authors, while others were anthologies gathering contributions from different experts and perspectives. Both types of books were potentially relevant to the study.7 Anthologies, while lacking cohesion compared to textbooks, present the additional advantage of covering a wide range of themes, which is of particular interest when mapping out these themes.8

The 12 recent sport sociology textbooks are:

The two sport sociology classics are:

For the purposes of the inventory, “recurring themes” were those to which the respective author(s)/editor(s) had dedicated at least one specific section of their book – an entire chapter or part, clearly identified as such in the table of contents.

The recurring themes identified as such in the selected sport sociology textbooks formed a preliminary inventory. This inventory was then combined with themes from the European Union (EU)’s White Paper on Sport.10 Section 2 of the White Paper specifically describes “The societal role of sport.” The list obtained was further refined with elements from the author’s direct experience in the sports and journalism sectors.11

The resulting taxonomy (Table 1) comprises 21 sport-related Topics and 131 Subtopics of social relevance:

Table 1: Analytical categories for social analysis in the media coverage of sport

5. TESTING THE NEW TAXONOMY

The new taxonomy, or matrix, was immediately put to the test to analyse the social analysis of sport in a sample of Italian print newspapers. As pointed out by Horky et al., “in addition to live reporting and despite declining circulation over the past several years, sports reporting in newspapers remains one of the most relevant areas of sports communication.”15 The choice of print had no direct connection with the purposes of the study, which focused on the content (the message), not the medium.16 The focus on print newspapers obviously leaves a vast field of research unexplored for future studies. Italy provided an ideal case study due to the presence, unlike most other countries, of a strong and diversified specialised sports press: three national newspapers specifically devoted to sports. This feature allowed for the additional comparison of sport’s social analysis by type of press.

The data on the coverage of the social dimension of sport were collected through the content analysis of a corpus of newspapers covering five different artificial timeframes over a combined artificial period of 28 days, spanning from September 2018 to April 2020 (see Table 2). The total number of pages reviewed amounted to 6,501. The six sampled newspapers included Italy’s general-interest newspapers with the largest circulation when content analysis began, in February 2020 (Corriere della Sera, la Repubblica, and La Stampa), and all Italian sports newspapers (La Gazzetta dello Sport, Corriere dello Sport – Stadio, and Tuttosport).17 The five periods for content analysis were purposefully chosen to include: one so-called “neutral” period, characterised by the absence of major events, in sport or elsewhere, which would otherwise heavily interfere with the news selection process; and four periods when events did offer, in principle, a perfect reason for sport-related social analysis – for example the Special Olympics World Summer Games or sport during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the impossibility of examining the media coverage of any topic in its entirety, the choice of the five sampled periods aimed to obtain a “reasonably representative sample of material [meaning] a sample which is not skewed or biased by the personal preferences or hunches of the researcher, by the desire to ‘prove’ a particular preconceived point, or by insufficient knowledge of the media and their social context”.18

In content analysis, text is broken down or “coded” into categories. whose occurrence and frequency is then counted to draw tentative conclusions about the text itself in relation to the object of the study. The methodological tool used for the analysis was the new matrix presented in Table 1, namely a “codebook” of themes deemed relevant to assess social analysis in the press coverage of sport. The units of analysis, which in media content analysis means what is being counted, were the media items in the sampled newspapers that covered sport social aspects as defined in the matrix.

Table 2: Sampled dates for the newspaper content analysis

6. PRELIMINARY FINDINGS ON SOCIAL ANALYSIS IN MEDIA SPORT

The importance of the research endeavour laid more in the definition of the analytical tool (the taxonomy) than the results of the test from content analysis. The primary contribution of the study is the taxonomy itself, which can pave the way for multiple uses and further research, as later outlined in this paper. Meanwhile, the analysis of the selected corpus yielded a series of preliminary findings about social analysis in media sport.

The content analysis of the sampled newspapers showed that:

One of the artificial timeframes for content analysis – timeframe (5) in Table 2 – occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020. The taxonomy, devised before the outbreak of the pandemic, proved sufficiently complete to contemplate even an extraordinary event of that magnitude since it already comprised a pertinent subtopic: “Public health.” Content analysis for this specific period, which only involved La Gazzetta dello Sport, revealed that “Public health” issues, almost exclusively related to COVID-19 and how the world of sport was handling them, were by far the most recurrent subject in the newspaper’s coverage, accounting for nearly half (47.3%) of the media items of social relevance in the sample. The dramatic events of the pandemic helped pave the way for broader reporting on sport, or at least greater awareness of certain off-the-pitch issues. The pandemic dictated an abrupt shift in sports coverage towards health and safety issues. As dramatic as it was, the pandemic was an opportunity and a reminder for sports journalists that serious stories are also part of the job.23 The challenge now is to transform that expanded attention into ordinary practice.

7. TOWARDS A WIDER RANGE OF SPORTS NEWS?

Content analysis using the new taxonomy focused on legacy media, i.e. an industry with economic imperatives. To what extent can these media outlets be expected to regularly cover the social dimension of sport, considering the difficulties they are already encountering in a rapidly changing media landscape? (RQ3) According to McEnnis, the idea that “worthy journalism does not sell and is simply produced for reputation and prestige” is still mainstream among sports desks.24 In fact, multiple arguments support the business viability of social analysis in the press coverage of sport. In the highly competitive media landscape of the 21^st century, where sporting news is immediately available on hundreds of media platforms and largely for free, mainstream media need to differentiate themselves from other information sources. They could use social analysis to do so and ultimately, to continue to be needed.

Sports journalists are ideally positioned to examine the broader picture of sport and the range of social issues associated with it. Furthermore, there is an audience for this type of coverage. The London 2012 Paralympic Games, which benefited from unprecedented media attention, proved the existence of a larger-than-expected market for “sport at large.” In the United Kingdom, the host country of that edition, one in four TV viewers watched Paralympic coverage on Channel 4 every day during the Games, marking a 251% increase from the Beijing 2008 Paralympics.25 Incidentally, the role of the media is to raise public awareness of social issues regardless of, or especially when the public is not aware of them, rather than simply replicating what the public already gets and expects. Journalism cannot act as a mere marketing machine that caters to consumer surveys.

A more systematic coverage of the socially relevant aspects of sport could also help overcome the long-standing issue of sports journalism lacking credibility compared to other supposedly “more serious” types of journalism. Over time, derogatory epithets have been used to describe sports journalism and its actors, such as the “toy department” of the newsroom, “fans with typewriters”, “cheerleaders”, etc.26 An expanded focus on the social aspects of sport can positively influence how sports information is received within the profession and could attract a larger number of readers and advertisers.

8. RELEVANCE OF FINDINGS AND AVENUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

The new taxonomy is primarily designed for use by the academic community. Researchers in communication sciences, media literacy, sport sociology and other adjacent disciplines can use it to identify and investigate the social dimension of media sport. Meanwhile, other categories like journalists and media executives may also find it useful in their daily activities. Journalists could draw on it to expand the news coverage of sport as a broader social phenomenon. At the industrial level, media executives could use the taxonomy as a template to explore the wider business potential of sports coverage. In his seminal book Journalism and Society, British communication theorist Denis McQuail highlighted the coexistence of theory and practice in journalism and remarked that “some form of theory inevitably develops out of the wider interaction of journalists and their social environment, especially as journalism becomes more complex and more significant in its potential consequences”.27

The present study lays the foundations for further research in various directions. The new taxonomy can be used to examine the social analysis of sport in digital and audiovisual media, non-daily news reporting, local press, long-form journalism, citizen journalism, other journalistic ecosystems (beyond the Italian case study), and more. In addition, while content analysis was privileged over field work and ethnography in testing the new matrix, future research may complement this approach with methods including surveys and interviews.

9. AFTERWORD

The complete results of the study, condensed in this conference paper, can be further explored in a recently published book by the same author: Cuccoli, Rosarita. Sports Journalism in Society. Bologna: Bologna University Press, 2025. The approach of this study reflects the author’s fifteen-year journey examining the role and responsibility of sports journalism in society, within both professional and academic settings.28 As such, it combines academic expertise with professional experience beyond traditional academia. It is expected to contribute to both research and the practical application of knowledge, notably within a journalistic environment and the media industry at large.

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