The Vancouver ‘big six’ gender-framed: NBC's prime-time coverage of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics

Abstract

This study represents the first attempt to content-analyse on-air commentary surrounding the six ‘major’ Winter Olympic sports, operationalized as any event receiving at least three hours of aggregate prime-time coverage on the NBC broadcast network. Analysis of all 64 hours of NBC's prime-time coverage of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games revealed 26 significantly different dialogue trends between male and female athletes. Gendered differences in the attribution of athletic success and failure were found in figure skating, alpine skiing and short-track speed skating, but not in bobsledding, freestyle skiing and snowboarding. Gendered differences in personality/physicality descriptors were found in alpine skiing, bobsled, figure skating, freestyle skiing and snowboarding, but not in short-track speed skating. Overall, figure skating generated the most gendered differences in commentary, while snowboarding and freestyle skiing had the fewest differences.