Unmasking Title IX on its 40th birthday: The operation of women’s voices, women’s spaces, and sporting mythnarratives in the commemorative coverage of Title IX

Abstract

As society’s storytellers, journalists often draw upon a standard set of archetypal forms to convey all of the day’s news to their readers. This study considers the practice of commemorative sports journalism, in particular how (and by whom) the stories surrounding Title IX’s 40th anniversary were constructed at two of the nation’s leading sports news outlets. Drawing from a combination of narrative and critical discourse analysis grounded in hegemonic theory, we contend that ESPN and Sports Illustrated shifted away from the traditional battle-of-the-sexes narrative; the end result was a celebratory women-centric model, one that offered progressive ways of understanding Title IX but sometimes fell prey to flaws associated with what White has called the ‘content of the form’.