Representation of Athletes in the Media

There has been an abundance literature on the subject of the representation of female athletes in the media, from television coverage and newspapers to magazines and websites. From ancient Greece where it was not allowed for women to partake in or even watch the Olympic Games and the power and independence of the Amazonian tribal warrior woman, to present day and the struggles with underrepresentation and misrepresentation of female athletes in sport media (George, Hartley, Paris, 2001; Creedon, 1994; Bernstein, 2002). The mass media is a sociocultural machine that churns out influential images and articles about (sporting) issues that reflect ideologies, values and beliefs that shape societies attitudes towards that issue, such as the underrepresentation of female athletes and women’s sport causing society to believe that women’s sporting achievement and participation in sport is inferior or of little value or less exciting then male athletes and male sport (George, Hartly, Paris, 2001; Bernsein, 2002; Duncan, 1990; Sagas et al, 2000; Economos, C. D., Brownson, R. C., DeAngelis, M. A., Foerster, S. B., Foreman, C. T., Gregson, J., Kumanyika, S. K. and Pate, R. R., 2001). Harris (1999) puts it that the ‘attitudes towards the institution of sport generate and support sexist ideologies and beliefs about gender’ (; 98). The literature focusses its research analysis on two main underlying issues, these being the amount of coverage and secondly, the type of representation created in the mass media of female athletes and women’s sport. These issues can be broken down further into ‘sub-issues’ which focus on the representation of women in visual media - photos, verbal descriptors – commentary, contextual – articles (Alexander, 1994; Bernstein, 2002). The amount of coverage in all mass media forms in certain time frames are usually consisting of the analysis of media revolving around the largest sporting event in history – The Olympics. It has been proven that aside from