‘We Do Not Engage in Promotional Journalism’

Abstract

Although the results of content analyses of television and newspaper sport coverage have shown quantitative and qualitative gender differences, such analyses do not reveal why some texts are selected and others not. Although this selection process is constrained by structural factors, there is room for agency since journalists decide what to include and how to write about that. Little scholarly attention has been paid to the ways in which agency is used in the discourses of sport journalists to describe the gendering of the selection process. The purpose of this study is to explore the discursive strategies and their gendered subtexts employed by Dutch sports journalists in explaining the selection process, especially the exclusion of women’s sports coverage. The results show that the journalists conceal issues of gendered dynamics of power by using an ideology of neutrality. This strategy allows them to be misogynist and resistant to the coverage of women’s sport while simultaneously allowing them to claim neutrality and fairness for themselves. We explore how their discourse is linked to a broader societal discourse and how it simultaneously strengthens that discourse.