Abstract
PurposeThe aim of this article is to examine how professionals within Dutch sports media give meaning to racial/ethnic diversity in the organization and reflect on the use of racial stereotypes in sports reporting.Design/methodology/approachTen in-depth interviews with Dutch sports media professionals have been conducted to obtain the data. Respondents had a variety of responsibilities within different media organizations in the Netherlands. The authors used thematic analysis supplemented with insights from critical discourse analysis to examine how sports media professionals give meaning to racial/ethnic diversity and the use of racial/ethnic stereotypes.FindingsThe following main themes emerged from the analysis of the interviews: (1) routines within the production process, (2) reflections on lack of diversity on the work floor and (3) racial/ethnic stereotyping not seen as an issue. Generally, journalists showed paradoxical views on the issue of racial/ethnic diversity within sport media production dismissing it as a non-issue on the one hand while also acknowledging there is a lack of racial diversity within sport media organizations. Results will be placed and discussed in a wider societal and theoretical perspective.Originality/valueBy focussing on the under-researched social group of sport media professionals in relation to meanings given to race and ethnicity in the production process, this research provides new insights into the role of sports media organizations in (re)producing discourses surrounding race/ethnicity in multi-ethnic society and the operation of whiteness in sports media.
Highlights
An extensive amount of research has been conducted on sports media representations of athletes of various racial and ethnic origins
Routines within the production process Our interviews show that the production process of Dutch sports media can roughly be divided into two different parts that we label here “sports news production” and “background stories and long reads”
The fact that there is a lack of diversity within Dutch sports media organizations
Summary
An extensive amount of research has been conducted on sports media representations of athletes of various racial and ethnic origins. These content analyses have focussed on print and broadcasting sports media within the USA and United Kingdom. Audience reception studies show that, in most cases, the same stereotypical bias of “the strong Black sportsman” is a common racist trope that surfaces among media consumers who discuss the abilities of Black and White athletes White athletes remain more invisible in sport media. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
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