Research Roundup: Framing in sports media

Studies about legalizing gambling, mental health, and Colin Kaepernick

Welcome to our monthly Research Roundup. One of the main purposes of this newsletter is to talk about the interesting research into sports journalism and sports media that’s come across my screen.

I’ve got three studies this month, and there’s a common thread connecting them. 

The first comes from my friend Brian Petrotta at the University of Nebraska, who sent it after my piece about legal and accessible sports gambling a few weeks ago. The study, which was published in 2023 in Communication and Sport, looks at how the legalization of sports gambling in the U.S. has been covered over a nearly 30-year span. 

The other two studies come from a 2023 issue of the International Journal of Sport Communication. The first comes from a team of researchers at Bournemouth University, led by Dr. Keith Parry, which examined the framing of athletes in the UK who publicly discussed mental health struggles. The second is a study from Ronald Bishop and Amanda Milo at Drexel University looking at how sports journalists framed Colin Kaepernick’s potential return to the NFL years after he was released by the 49ers and effectively blackballed by the league. 

All three of these studies use framing as one of the primary theoretical lenses. 

I typed “Framing Journalism” into Substack’s generate tool. I mean … sure?

Framing is one of the first theoretical concepts¹ you learn in grad school. It’s one of those ideas that gets used a lot colloquially in online discussions and critiques of journalism but does have a specific definition in this space.² 

This is one of those cases where the popular understanding of an idea generally matches the literature. Framing, as defined by Robert Entman’s seminal study back in 1993, is the study of how stories are presented in the media, or how individual elements within stories are presented to increase the salience of the topic. In the same way that an actual frame shapes how we see a painting or photograph, a journalistic frame shapes how we see and understand a story. 

What’s important to know about framing is that it is a theory that underscores the power and influence of news media. The idea at the root of framing theory is that the words and images used to cover a story have a real impact on how readers will understand a story. There’s also nothing inherent in framing theory about any intentionality on the part of the media. Frames are often found after the fact and are not necessarily deployed in real time by journalists with any ill intent. Honestly, most days, reporters are just doing their jobs, trying to get a story done by deadline.

Let’s start with Petrotta’s study about gambling coverage. He did a thematic analysis of 291 articles between 1991 (when Congress began debating the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act which outlawed sports gambling in states where it wasn’t already legal) and 2018 (when the Supreme Court ruled PAPSA unconstitutional in Murphy v. NCAA).

Petrotta found four dominant frames in media coverage of gambling over the years — economic, law/policy, moral/social, and integrity. What stands out to me is that the moral/social frame had the fewest stories of the four over the study’s span. That’s notable given the tenor of concern over sports gambling in the post-Murphy era. He also found that the “integrity of the game” frame dramatically shifted over the years, going from the primary argument against legalizing gambling to one where legal gambling was, in fact, a way to preserve the integrity of games.

He also found that elected officials and league representatives were, by far, the most quoted sources in these stories. 

The most significant finding of this research is that the economic frame shifted over time to help legitimize sports betting as a promising source of tax revenue and business opportunities. Further, emphasis on the economic frame came at the expense of the moral/social and integrity frames, both of which were more prominent in earlier periods. Findings also reveal that official sources flexed considerable narrative power by lending “attention and affirmation” to frames surrounding sports betting legalization in the U.S. 

The team from Bournemouth found 75 elite athletes (60 men, 15 women) in the UK who received attention for what it called “mental ill health.” They found that over a 20-year span, coverage went from what they termed “superficial awareness” to “enlightened openness.” Overall, the researchers found that more precise language was being used to describe athletes’ mental health struggles, and that stories acknowledged both the need for greater education about mental health and the need for sports culture to change.

We also conclude that reporting on this topic has become more responsible, which has the potential to increase understanding of mental ill health within the wider population, and in turn, reduce stigmatisation. This shift is reflective of a society that is moving away from hegemonic masculine ideals which previously meant that athletes had to endure any suffering and be in denial of mental health concerns

In Bishop and Milo’s study, they found that the media created a series of episodic frames around Kaepernick’s potential return, glossing over the harsh realities and larger issues this story created. 

Kaepernick’s exile now reads like a one-off, an outlier, rather than a glaring example of the systemic racism that still infects the league. Frames affirm that the NFL—with help from the nation’s sports writers and commentators—has taken control of the narrative with which fans process an athlete’s activism. They have legitimized the narrow space provided by the league for player protest.

Questions? Thoughts? Ideas? Have a study you’d like me to write about? Let’s hear it from you down below.

1.  There’s debate in the literature about whether framing is a theory or a theoretical concept, due to (among other things) a lack of consistency in what constitutes a frame and the open question about whether or not frames actually influence people’s opinions. But as with any sentence that begins with “There’s a debate in the literature,” that is a deep nerd rabbit hole that goes beyond our purposes today.

2. Agenda setting is another example of this.