Campus newspaper coverage of varsity sports: Getting closer to equitable and sports-related representations of female athletes

Abstract

This study examined the coverage of women's and men's varsity sport teams in the English- and French-language student newspapers at the University of Ottawa, Canada, during three academic years from 2004 to 2007. The analysis revealed unique findings, considering that previous research on campus print media had shown an enduring disparity of coverage featuring female athletes. In contrast, our descriptive statistics exposed few differences in the number or length of published articles and photographs of male and female athletes. In fact, female athletes tended to receive more coverage. Men's sports, however, were featured more often on the front page of the newspapers. A textual analysis of the coverage shows that sportswomen were not sexualized and were rarely trivialized. In general, rather than representing sportswomen as gendered subjects, the student-run newspapers discursively constructed them as 'just athletes'.