Olympic coverage raises role model concerns
massey-university
Thu May 07 2009 12:00:00 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)
Olympic coverage raises role model concerns
Thursday, 7 May 2009, 11:59 am
Press Release: Massey University
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Olympic coverage raises role model concerns
Women competitors received only a third of the photographic coverage at the Beijing Olympics in two of New Zealand's largest daily newspapers, a Massey research project has found.
Associate Professor Sarah Leberman and Dr Farah Palmer, who led the study, say male Olympians were twice as likely as their female counterparts to feature in the pages of The Press (published in Christchurch) and The New Zealand Herald (Auckland).
From 432 photographs of Olympic athletes from all countries published August 7-25 last year, 65 per cent were of men, 34.3 per cent featured women and 0.7 were mixed.
The researchers say this means girls see fewer of the role models they need to inspire them to be successful in sport.
Dr Leberman and Dr Palmer, both in the Department of Management, carried out the study with researcher Paola Mosca-Barberis. They now plan to do a similar analysis of television coverage.
“When you do not see many female athletes in the media, young girls who are physically active do not have the role models to aspire to. Equally, if there are not many photographs of female sports coaches, girls might not consider it as a career,” Dr Leberman says.
“We know the media has a high impact on people – either consciously or subconsciously. Positioning in the paper contributes to that and we found men were on the front page more often than women."
Men won 532 medals and women won 396 medals in the overall tally. In New Zealand, two women and one man won gold medals, but men also won five bronze and one silver.
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The researchers also interviewed 25 children from a primary school in Palmerston North to gain an understanding of how children perceived sports images in the newspaper during the Olympics.
Prior to the Olympics, they asked the nine and ten-year-olds what information they gleaned from a range of sport photos. Then each child selected an athlete of each gender to follow through the Olympics and was asked to select their favourite photographs. “We want to get children’s perspectives on this to test the role model theory. This will hopefully give us a greater insight,” says Dr Leberman.
The researchers scrutinised the photographic coverage in 12 newspapers from China, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States.
The Italian media used the most images – 34 per cent of all the photographs in the study. The gender divide was clearest in South Africa where men featured in 72.8 per cent of the photos, while in China the split was nearly equal.
“This was a real anomaly,” says Dr Leberman. “Even the coverage of the Chinese athletes in other countries reflected this balance. Maybe because China is a communist country men and women have the same opportunities and this is echoed in the way the media covers sport.”
The study will continue with analysis of television coverage from the 6pm news bulletins on TV1 and TV3, and from the interviews with children. It is hoped the findings will help organisations that want to promote sport.
Table of gender split in media coverage across five countries
Country Male Female Mixed Total number photos
China 49.9% 48.5% 1.6% 699
11.7% 11.4% .4% 23% of all photos
Italy 62.6% 36.5% .9% 1013
21.3% 12.4% .3% 34% of all photos
New Zealand 65% 34.3% .7% 432
9.5% 5% .1% 14.5% of all photos
South Africa 72.8% 26.1% 1.1% 180
4.4% 1.6% .1% 6.1% of all photos
USA 60.2% 39.6% .2% 649
13.2% 8.6% 0% 21.8% of all photos
ALL 60.1% 39.1% .9% 2973
ends
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