| Abstract [eng] |
Quantative equality covering both men and women sports in the media will never be 50/50 because of objective issues. Sport has naturally shaped agenda – men are dominating in sports and the vast majority of audience are masculine. Therefore, the main object in this master‘s thesis is the qualitative representation of athletes, which occurs in any news report or article. The researches have shown that media representations of sport pointed to the dominance of gender as a framing device. Most of them are related to stereotyped gender roles that are highlighted when creating a story for an article, tendentious questions during interviews that are exclusively related to the interviewee gender. Quite frequently the feminine issues are highlighted by the visual representation – their beauty is emphasized and their professionalism is hidden in the second plot. How is this reflected in Lithuanian sport journalism? The relevance of this topic is with contextual information of Tokyo 2020 Olympic games in which organisators were highlighting their efforts to reach the gender equality for the first time in history. Defining a niche that has not been researched yet, the the main thesis question that arises is: what is the Lithuanian sports journalists approach about women representation in sports media and how is it related to their work? The main goal of this thesis is to find out what approach do Lithuanian sports journalists have about the representation of women in sports journalism and how it is related to the principles of their work – the content created for their media. Research is made of semi-structured in-depth interviews with 12 Lithuanian sports journalists. One of the main theoretical basis in this thesis is about the key techniques that have long been employed to the media to suggest appropriate feminity, written by Emma H. Wensing ir Toni Bruce. Also the theoretical framework includes mass communication effects such as agenda setting and framing. The research results have shown that there have been significant changes in the portrayal of athletes. Though, the situation regarding gender equality in sport in Lithuania is assessed as very good comparing to the experience of other countries. Manifestations of sexism or stereotypical depictions have significantly reduced, especially in conveying the gender dimension of women through illustrations. Though, it seems that the society‘s approach have hardly changed and any bitter remarks about can provoke negative public reactions – this contributes in a way to the control and work of the journalists themselves, who need to be more careful while searching for the epithets to cover their story. It is noticeable that not only the issue of gender is sensitive, but also racial and sexual views - the naming of an athlete's race live on air can be treated as racism by society as well. Furthermore, it is noticeable that nowadays there is a clear difference between professional sports journalism, where the stories of athletes are told from a technical point of view, and the boulevard press-type topics are exclusively distinguished by the headlines of entertainment journalism. So, there seem to be a huge qualitative change regarding the sports journalism. There are cases where the epithets are picked not only about to highlight the story of an athlete, but also, for example, framing the story of victory by telling it even with poetic motives. Thus, journalists themselves also see some kind of an impact of the gender on the content they create. This thesis may be interesting for researchers who are interested in media‘s tendencies, those who are making researches about gender representation in media. Also this topic could be important for sports journalists, sports federations and other organizations which are related to this sphere. |
