Biased Voices of Sports: Racial and Gender Stereotyping in College ...

Biased Voices of Sports: Racial and Gender Stereotyping in College Basketball Announcing Susan Tyler Eastman Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana, USA

Andrew C. Billings Clemson University Clemson, South Carolina, USA The words of sportscasters —repeated hundreds, even thousands, of times by different announcers in similar ways—provide a conceptual frame for the sports experience, and that mental frame has particular importance because fans often apply it to nonathletic situations. Contrary to assertions by some critics, analysis of 1,156 descriptors in sportscaster commentary during 66 televised men’s and women’s college basketball games showed no significant difference between the proportions of commentary and proportions of participatin g Black and White men players, but showed some overemphasis in comments about White women players. Predictably, Black men players tended to be stereotyped as naturally athletic, quick, and powerful, while White men players continued to be touted for their hard work, effort, and mental skill. The same racial stereotypes also appeared in the commentary about women basketball players, but few gender stereotypes emerged. Thus, increases in the numbers of Black and women game announcers may have lent balance to quantities of coverage by race and gender, but traditional racial stereotypes continue to pervade sports commentary even when gender stereotypes appear to be diminishing. KEYWORDS bias, Blacks, basketball announcing, gender stereotypes, racial stereotypes, sports

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t a town hall meeting to discuss racial division in sports, President Clinton claimed, `Ì think it’s obvious that athletics is leading America toward a more harmonious, united society, but we still have more work to do’’ (Graczyk, 1998, N.P.). Shogren

Address correspondence to Susan T. Eastman, 2005 East Arden Drive, Bloomington, IN 47401. E-mail: [email protected] The HowardJournal of Communications,12:1837201, 2001 Copyright # 2001 Taylor & Francis 1064-6175/01 $12.00 + .00

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(1998) reports that Clinton urged more racial balance in sports as a way to enter the twenty-first century.Yet, what kind of balance should be the goal? Wickham (1998) writes that the sheer number of Black athletes in professional sports is more than balanced in proportion to their percentage in the U.S. population. The problem, according to Wickham, is the way in which the athletes are portrayed in the media. He notes that ``Black athletes are generally thought of as naturally talented, while the accomplishments of White sports stars are very often attributed to their intelligence and hard work’’ (p. 15a). Childs (1998) argues that negative racial stereotyping is prevalent in the media, specifically with sports reporters and editors. Denver Post executive sports editor Neil Scarborough asserted at a National Association of Black Journalists convention that ``We don’t dig deep enough into the stereotypes’’ (Childs, p.10). While the era of overt racism and sexism in most major sports may largely have passed by the end of the twentieth century, covert messages continue to slip by conscious guards in the media, thus constructing televised events that differ markedly in their messages from the live events. Sabo andJansen (1994) and Eastman and Billings (1999) have suggested that the producers of sports at the highest network levels are becoming increasingly aware of insidious bias in production techniques, athlete profiling, program scheduling, and studio announcing. In some cases, the networks have instituted policies to foster balance. For example, in NBC’s coverage of the1996 Atlanta Olympics, the number of televised events and on-air promotions for events was exactly balanced by gender (Eastman & Billings,1999; Tuggle & Owen, 1999). Although the network’s purpose may have been commercialöto attract and hold women viewersöit nonetheless fostered a widespread perception of gender balance in those games. However, Eastman and Billings went on to demonstrate the inadequacy of the network’s high-level policies in controlling the bias toward men athletes in on-site reporter commentary. Similarly, Tuggle and Owen showed how differently Olympic athletes of the two sexes were treated by television: Prime coverage was given to the more traditionally feminine individual women’s sports (gymnastics, swimming), while the physical contact team sports received little or no air time. Racial and gender bias (or prejudice) arises from overgeneralizatio n about the characteristics or behaviors of whole groups of people applied wholesale to individuals within those groups (see Sage, 1990). According to Davis and Harris,`À stereotype is a generalization about a category of people that is negative and=or misleading’’ that is `ùsed to predict and explain the behavior’’ of a group of people (1998, p. 157). Renewed controversy arising from the lack of minority and women sports coaches (Jackson,1999) and the racial bias perceived in the NCAA’s Proposition 16 (Tucker, 1999) and its long-delayed enforcement of Title IX (Kane, 1989) center the heartbeat of America’s racial and gender concerns in sports. Covert prejudice for or against certain groups is endemic in sports (see Daddario, 1994; Davis & Harris, 1998; McCarthy & Jones, 1997), and as several studies have shown (see Eastman & Billings, 1999; Higgs & Weiller, 1994; Sabo, Jansen, Tate, Duncan, & Leggett, 1996), game announcers and commentary are a crucial source of biased messages and thus important for scholars to study and practitioners to understand. As one scholar put it, As events transpire in front of them at a machine-gun pace, announcers are caught up in the ``heat of the battle.’’ Having to inform and entertain in this environment, often without the time to choose words carefully, causes announcers to dredge up comments that reflect subconscious beliefs, images, attitudes, and values. (Rada,1996, p. 232)

Biased Voices of Sports

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From a theoretical perspective, biases residing in those subconscious attitudes provide frames for particular content that may operate below the threshold of recognition for many media producers and consumers (see McCombs,1992). Because sports announcing occurs within an emotionally laden context, and its messages are repeated hundreds of times, hidden biases are likely to be stored in long-term memory without attachment to any particular source (see Baddeley,1990; Squires, Knowlton, & Musen,1993; Zillmann, 1991). This means that the conceptual frames adopted by announcers readily get transferred to many fans. And the impact goes beyond sports: Ways of thinking that are endemic in sports can frame unconscious thinking about racial and gender groups in nonathletic situations, such as hiring and promoting in the business and educational worlds, and utilizing inappropriate stereotypes can have a pernicious impact on largescale and small-scale social relations (Childs,1998; Wenner,1989). Four reasons for this impact appear in the literature: The frame was probably unconscious and unacknowledged by the sportscaster (Gamson, 1989); the frame was probably unrecognized by fans (Eastman & Riggs,1994); the covert message was repeated so many times by so many media voices that it took on the aura of ``fact’’ (Entman, 1993); or the frame became part of the currency of casual, social exchange among peers who share an interest in sports (Eastman & Land,1997). If much of the shorthand of sports talk contains hidden racial=ethnic and gender biases, making such covert practices salient may, it is hoped, influence public policy, journalist mores, and social pressure to eliminate such unwitting prejudice.

Announcers and Commentary Sports announcers have long been overwhelmingly White and male (Sabo et al., 1996). Nonetheless, the number of Blacks and women who announce on national television has grown rapidly in recent years.1 Black commentators are increasingly evident in both men’s and women’s basketball, and a few women even have been color commentators for men’s basketball games. Sabo and colleagues (1996) have suggested that the presence of more minority and women sportscasters may lead to a heightened sensitivity to racial stereotyping. Generally speaking, the theories held by proponents of racial and gender integration imply that wider representation is likely to result in fewer negative stereotypes. When applied to sports announcing, the obvious question for this study becomes whether analysis of present-day practices would reveal as much racial bias as was demonstrated in studies conducted in past years. A second research question, without precedent in the literature, relates to announcing of women’s games and whether the same stereotypes of physicality versus intelligenceöidentified by previous researchers for men’s sportsöhave been applied to Black and non-Black women athletes. A third research question is whether assumptions about player behavior and motivationsöthat are inherently negative gender stereotypesöunderlie Black sportscasters’ commentary as much as White sportscasters’ commentary. How minority professional athletes are treated by the media may be a greater problem today than their representation in sports.2 Muwakkil (1998) reports that although Blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population, Blacks constitute more than 80% of the National Basketball Association and 67% of the National Football League. Indeed, a significant number of Black athletes have become media icons. Two concerns about treatment are very real, however: First, according to Hall of Fame athletes LeeRoy Selmon and

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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the Black athlete may be overemphasized in the media (Dozier, 1998). Second, because of media portrayals of so-called Black athlete machines, people tend to stereotype Blacks in general as being athletic and nothing more. Selmon protests that ``We need to tell [society] that Blacks are more than just great athletes’’ (Dozier,1998, p. 7). In a study of network football announcing in 1992, Rada (1996) found that the announcers focused on the physical characteristics of the Black players and the cognitive characteristics of theWhite players. Other scholars have argued that, although White athletes receive more than their fair share of commentary, this commentary is full of excuses for their failures (see Vande Berg, 1998). Rainville and McCormick (1977) have claimed that announcers talk quantitatively more about the White players and praise them more, despite their smaller numbers in professional football games. Davis and Harris (1998) suggested that announcing commentary may be replete with reasons why a White basketball player did not perform as expected (``missed that pass,’’ ``shot a bomb,’’ etc.), and those reasons are typically external to the player (`òut of his control’’) and rarely attribute a failure to a White player’s poor effort or insufficient work. The idea is that, unconsciously, announcers try to build a positive reputation for White players because they feel more ``sympathy’’ toward White players, according to Rainville and McCormick (1977, p. 22). Whether this bias continues to hold when announcers have mixed ethnicity is a question research can answer. These views of announcing suggest that the kind of commentary may be even more crucial to the engendering of bias than the quantity of coverage.

Previous Findings about Racial and Gender Bias Racial bias in sports announcing has been consistently shown to operate against Black athletes in several ways (see Whannel, 2000). To the extent that it persists in major sports such as basketball and football, it may be largely unwitting, given the large number of contemporary superstars who are of African American ancestry. But Whannel (1992) suggested nearly a decade ago that the success of Black athletes tends to be characterized as a result of supposedly innate ``natural athletic ability,’’ while the success of White athletes is commonly attributed to intelligence or mental effort (Sage, 1990) and=or hard work (McCarthy & Jones,1997).Thus, as McCarthy andJones point out, an apparently positive comment, such as saying a Black athlete is athletically gifted, may in reality reflect ``the negative stereotype of the lazy Black athlete in that he or she does not have to work hard to obtain athletic excellence’’ (p. 349). According to Dewar (1993), attributions of natural sports ability to Blacks provide a covert excuse for the lack of success of Whites, but at the same time, exalt the supposed intelligence of their play, thus upholding a constructed balance in stereotypes between the physically powerful Black athlete and the intellectually powerful White athlete (see Birrell, 1989). According to McCarthy and Jones (1997), as long ago as 1964, Ellison ``made the interesting observation that the object of the stereotype . . . is not so much to crush the Black man as it is to console theWhite man’’ (p.351). Scholars who have examined racial bias in mediated sports coverage have tended to focus on Black versus White participants because of the topic’s greater salience in recent years, although meaningful questions also have been raised about parity for Asians, Latins, and other racial or ethnic groups (Davis & Harris,1998; Sabo & Jansen, 1998).


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Gender bias on television, unlike racial prejudice, appears to be a game played to a receptive male viewership. Daddario (1994) and Halbert and Lattimer (1994) have argued that many techniques of sports announcing marginalize and denigrate women athletes and women’s sports. Hallmark and Armstrong (1999) showed how, even in the NCAA championship telecasts, women’s games are treated in somewhat less exciting fashion by directors and producers. Eastman and Billings (1999) marshaled evidence of overwhelming favoritism toward men’s over women’s sports in televised commentary in the 1994 and 1996 Olympics, a bias that accelerated in the 1998 Olympics. Similarly, Tuggle and Owen (1999) also found that women’s Olympic team sports were massively underreported compared with men’s team sports by television producers who concentrated on those individual women’s sports that revealed physically attractive bodies.While Duncan and Messner’s (1998) research into local sports newscasts revealed a diminution of overt media stereotyping, their analyses showed continued differences in how the media accounted for the success of women versus men athletes, how the two genders were described and named by the media, and how televised men’s and women’s sports were produced (1998). In a study comparing the reporting on ESPN and CNN about men’s and women’s sports,Tuggle (1997) found that women got far less coverage in both quantity and salience, despite the introduction of women sports reporters. Eastman and Billings (2000) also compared sportscasts on ESPN’s Sports Center and CNN’s Sports Tonight and sports reporting in the New YorkTimes and USAToday, and found an overwhelmingly greater bias in coverage of men’s sports at all times and in all four media, including at the times when women’s sporting events peaked in newsworthiness (such as during the finals of major international women’s tennis and golf matches and championship basketball games). Their analyses showed a marked consistency in favoritism toward men’s sports and deprecation of women’s sports in both the print and electronic media.3 A common gender-related stereotype discussed in several studies has to do with the speed of games and players (see Daddario, 1997; Halbert & Lattimer,1994; Tuggle,1997). Women’s basketball, as a game, has been stigmatized as ``too slow’’ compared with the men’s game, and this negative stereotype may surface in excessive numbers of comments about the speed of individual players, even when not overtly attributed to the women’s game. Such a hidden gender bias in sports announcing, if demonstrated, can be seen as contributing to the smaller audiences for women’s sports and thus as having a negative impact on sponsor support, endorsements, advertiser revenues, and media attention, ultimately impacting the growth of all long-squelched women’s sports. As a variety of studies have clearly shown (see Whannel, 2000), embedded racism and sexism are particularly reflected in sports announcing, making the words of announcers a particularly fruitful area of investigation. The issues of hidden racism and sexism in mediated sports announcing are important especially because they very likely affect the attitudes of the next generation of fans. They can be expected to impact the Nielsen ratings for televised sporting events and the listening and viewing patterns of the audience. For example, until the virtuoso achievements of TigerWoods, few Black viewers watched golf on television; golf was widely perceived as a ``White’’ (or Asian) sport. Male fans who are indoctrinated with the prejudice that women’s basketball is not as interesting as men’s are unlikely to tune in to women’s games, keeping the ratings=salaries lower than for men’s games.4 In addition, the embedded habits of one generation of sports journalists set the standards for the next generation. The next waves of sportscasters and sports writers are very likely to emulate their models’


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patterns of speaking and writing, including aspects that have a negative impact on the participants in the sports the journalists purport to love. One generation unconsciously teaches prejudice to the next as part of the culture of sport. And most important, attitudes and value taught as an unthinking part of sports extend far outside sports.They reach into the business world, education, and social life. Embedded racism and sexism hold down the aspirations and achievements of ethnic and social groups worldwide.These historical facts make exposing and rooting out negative stereotyping of racial and gender groups of great social significance.

Hypotheses Because findings of egregiously overt racism or sexism in analysis of play-by-play and color commentary were not likely, this study was planned to allow for the emergence of covert differences in treatment by race and gender if present in the unscripted commentary of game announcers. The object of the study was to find out whether the traditional racial and gender stereotypes of sports announcers persist in spite of many more Black and female announcers. Based on previous research findings, the following hypotheses were tested for men’s and women’s college basketball: Hypothesis 1: Collectively, men’s basketball games will receive significantly more attention in descriptive commentary than women’s games. Hypothesis 2 : Collectively, White players will receive a significantly greater proportion of commentary than their proportion of the participants. Hypothesis 3 : Black men and women players will be racially stereotyped as more naturally athletic and physically adept and as making less effort, demonstrating less leadership, and showing less teamwork thanWhite players. Hypothesis 4 : Women players will be gender stereotyped by attributions of slower speed and cooperative and team goals rather than individual effort and dependence on men figures. Hypothesis 5 : Announcers will use fewer stereotypical descriptors about players of their own race than about players of the other racial group. Hypothesis 6 : For those commentators announcing more than one men’s game, the proportion and type of descriptive comments per racial group will remain consistent from game to game.

Method College basketball is one of very few sports in which separate but more-or-less equivalent participation occurs. This study focused on college basketbal l because of the large number of both men’s and women’s games that could be videotaped for analysis, and because basketball is a game where announcing is considered crucial to most fans’enjoyment of games. The concurrence of the rise of vivid and personalized sportscasting, as epitomized by Dick Vitale, along with the increased popularity of televised games, implies a strong connection between the character of the announcing and the size and enthusiasm of the attending and viewing audiences.


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Sample and Coding An attempt was made to videotape all network-broadcast college basketball games carried on ABC, CBS, NBC, ESPN, and ESPN2 during the months of February and March 1999, the peak basketball season. Some of these games were regionally rather than nationally distributed, but all reached large portions of the United States during weeknight or weekend hours. Inevitably, isolated games were missed or inadequately recorded because of technical errors, but data collection had no apparent systematic error that would influence the results. For each videotaped game, trained coders recorded the gender and race of the two announcers and the10 starters in each game on a pretested form, identifying each announcer and player as male or female and as Black,White, Latin, Asian, or other=don’t know.5 It was presumed that the racial proportions of the starters would be an adequate representation of the proportions of playing time allotted to each racial group. Coders were instructed to record every adjectival descriptor and phrase=sentence, along with the race and gender of both the particular announcer speaking and the player spoken about. As in previous studies (see Eastman & Billings, 1999, 2000),`àdjectival descriptors’’ were defined as words, phrases, or sentences referring to individual players that the coders thought were not factual or neutral and thus might, in an overall analysis, reveal the presence or absence of some kind of bias or pattern. As is usual in research using this method, factual or neutral items were defined as those where the substitution of another person’s name (differing in race or gender) would make no difference to the meaning or implication of the comment. For instance, the play-by-play description of who controlled or passed the ball, how many points a player had scored, a player’s shooting average, and so onöthe meat of most game broadcastsöwas considered probably factual unless additional adjectives characterizing a player were included. Assertions about size, on the other hand, can be more complex:``He’s just over 6 feet tall’’clearly carries no positive or negative valence, although``He’s barely over 6 feet and can’t get around so-and-so’’ implies that his size is inadequate, but still has no noticeable racial implication. However,``This undersized inner-city player just can’t compete with that Midwestern farm boy ’’ implies a racial distinction embedded in geography and is not neutral. References to such attributes as physical appearance and personality and such athletic abilities such as quick or slow speed, great or little effort, natural ability, mental effort, and hard work, including comments on shooting, passing, jumping, ball handling, floor vision, intelligence or game smarts, and other remarks that distinguished between individual players, were to be coded, without concern for whether they had noticeable racial or gender overtones. The mere quantity of such comments can have implications about gender or race=ethnicity because large quantities draw attention, while small quantities make the characteristic conceptually invisible. Comments about teams, coaches, and players not present were not recorded. When the same tapes were recoded by a second coder, the exact number of adjectival descriptors recorded varied somewhat, but the variation almost always occurred primarily in the number of neutral or factual items included, not the meaningful items.6 No other systematic variance in omissions or inclusion was identified. Item-by-item comparison of two codings of five randomly selected games demonstrated 91% intercoder reliability using Holsti’s (1969) basic formula (2M=N1 ‡ N2 ). Because the sample size was large,


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and because most inclusions=omissions occurred in irrelevant items, variation was assumed not to impact the general conclusions.

Method of Analysis Analysis of the recorded comments involved, first, separating factual=neutral comments from biased comments about individual players.7 Second, after a pilot analysis to establish the categories, the remaining comments were tallied by race of announcer as in one of the following categories, as either positive or negative for Black or White=male or female players: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

physicality=athleticism (``good athlete,’’ ``springs off the floor’’) intelligence=mental skill (``thinks on her feet’’) hard work=effort (`òne of the hardest workers’’) determination=motivation (``X got the best of her in the last game, so she is pushing here’’) speed (``fast,’’ ``quick on his feet’’) physical power (``strong man’’) mental power (``toughness off the bench’’) positive consonance (`àll of a sudden, she’s firing on all cylinders’’) negative consonance (``not in his rhythm’’) leadership (``senior leader’’) versatility (``not a scorer’’) team orientation (``giving everything for the team’’) personality (``patient’’) looks=appearance (``he’s much taller than X,’’ ``she’s changed her hair style’’) background (challenges, hardships, advantages; ``her father coached her. . .’’) other

Most references were readily accommodate d by the coding scheme, although calling a player `èxplosive’’ may have been categorized as ``speed’’ (5) or ``jumping ability’’ (1), depending on context. This sorting method utilizes the process of grounded inductive analysis favored by Glaser and Strauss (1967), and it incorporates what previous research has shown. At the same time, it is flexible because a large group of `òther’’ comments would have necessitated the development of further categories in a second stage of analysis. All content classification was done by a single researcher per gender group (all men’s games, all women’s games) to preserve consistency in analysis. Moreover, recoding of the first 50 items from 10 randomly selected coding sheets by the other researcher produced an interresearcher reliability estimate of 98% at this stage. Chi-square tests of proportions were then applied to the numbers of comments about Black and White and men and women players in relation to their racial and gender percentages as starters. Because accurately tallying the race of all participants in a particular game was found to be difficult, the racial proportions of starters were utilized as a surrogate for the actual players. To be significant, the proportion of comments about Black or White (or men or women) players had to significantly exceed the proportion of the group in the study. In an additional analysis, the totals were crosstabulated by the percentages of


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announcers in each racial group. In addition, the pattern of announcing was compared for announcers with multiple games in the database.

Results Overall, 1,486 comments about individual players were distinguished in 66 videotaped college basketball games. The total time recorded was about 140 hours, because many games went into overtime. Comments (single words or phrases or whole sentences) were applied to nearly 1,000 players by more than 50 different play-by-play and color commentator s (several announced multiple games). Nearly two-thirds of the games were men’s basketball (N ˆ 42, 64%), and just over one-third women’s basketball (N ˆ 24, 36%).

Quantities of Commentary To test the first and second hypotheses, the total quantity of commentary about men players and women players was compared by gender and race. AsTable 1 shows, there was no significant difference between the overall proportions of commentar y in men’s (66%) and women’s (34%) games in relation to the proportions of men (63%) and women starter athletes (37%). In other words, announcers do not ``talk less’’about women players than they do about men players, at least not in college basketball games, which contradicts the gender portion of the first hypothesis. As Figure 1 and Table 1 show, three-quarters of the 416 men’s basketball starters were Black=minority (75%) and one-quarter wereWhite (25%). (Because only a tiny fraction [1%] were identified as `òther racial or ethnic group or unknown,’’ this last group was included in the Black=minority group.) The percentage of comments about Black and White players (72% and 28%) were not significantly different from the proportions of players. The similarity in these percentages means that each group of men players got

Table 1

A Comparison of Commentary by the Gender and Race of the Players

Players ˆ 656 Comments ˆ 1,156

Men N=%

Women N=%

Black N=%

White N=%

416=63

240=37

474=72

182=28

763=66

393=34

782=68

374=32

Comparison of Comments by Gender and Race=Ethnicity (N = 656) Players Comments

Black Men*

White Men

Black Women

White Women

311=75

105=25

163=68

77=32**

552=72

211=28

230=58

163=42**

*Includes 1% of ‘‘other race=ethnicity.’’ **Significantly different, X2 ˆ 22.1, df ˆ 1, p ˆ .01.

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Figure 1.

Proportions of men players and comments about men players.

Figure 2.

Proportions of women players and comments about women players.

exactly the proportion of non-play-by-play commentary that should be expected, challenging part of the second hypothesis. Announcers are not ``paying more attention to the Whites,’’ as some have claimed. This result is also counter to the accusation that Blacks are the disproportionate focus of comments (although the latter may still be the case for some individuals, such as the superstars). However, this even-handedness was not the case with women’s basketball. As both the pie chart in Figure 2 and Table 1 show, more than two-thirds of the 236 women starters were Black (68%) and nearly one-third White (32%) (none were classified as of another or unknown race).WhileWhite women were just 32% of the sample, they received 42% of


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the non-play-by-play commentary (a significant difference at the .01 level), and, as follows, Black women players got proportionately less of the commentary. Thus, it is in women’s college basketball that White players are favored. This finding provides strong support for Hypothesis 2, but only in the condition of women’s sports.

Racial Stereotyping Altogether, 330 of the 1,486 descriptive comments were judged neutral and irrelevant to the study and dropped from further analysis, leaving a sample of 1,156 comments. The most startling overall finding was that only the expected stereotypes appeared.The method of data collection (via minimally primed coders) and method of analysis (by sorting into open-ended categories including `òther’’) amply allowed for fresh categories of nonneutral descriptors to emerge. In fact, all the descriptors fell within the stereotypical boundaries suggested by previous studies. There were virtually no outlying `òthers’’ to analyze.8 AsTable 2 shows, almost all the 1,156 descriptors fell into two major groups according to whether they represented a stereotyp e commonly attributed in previous research to Black basketball players (showing athleticism, being physically powerful or looking strong, having consonance,9 having unusual speed, lacking consonance, lacking intelligence in a play, showing leaping ability) or to White basketball players (being a shooter, revealing effort=hard work, demonstrating intelligence or mental skill or mental power, effort or hard work, lacking sufficient athleticism, showing concentration or determination, demonstrating leadership or the necessary force of personality, showing versatility, being a team player). The first thing that the table shows is that the expected patterns of stereotyping did appear. Since the coders were not primed in detail, they recorded any word, phrase, or sentence that seemed to them to be an adjectival descriptor of any kind, and, when analyzed, the recorded comments easily fell into the predicted categories. There were no unclassified comments that were not clearly neutral about race. Thus, these results strongly support the third hypothesisöthat basketball game commentary is heavily imbued with the conventional racial stereotypes, disadvantaging minority athletes. As with the previous table and figures,Table 2 should be interpreted by comparing the percentage of a type of comment about players in a racial group with the proportion of that group in the total sample of games. In other words, Black players (men and women combined) were 72% of the participants, so proportions of comments that are close to 72 mean that the announcers were utilizing the expected (although perhaps undesirable) stereotyp e about Black athletes. Similarly, proportions of comments about White men and women players that are close to the 28% of their proportion in the games show that announcers were applying the expected (although perhaps undesirable) stereotypes to them. As Table 2 also shows, in some cases the proportion of comments about one racial group is either significantly greater or lesser than their group’s representation in the database (more or less than 72% when about Black players, more or less than 28% when about White athletes), and then the findings are of particular interest. The specific kinds of stereotyping have important implications. In the case of descriptors about speed, for example, the findings reveal an overwhelming attribution of quickness to Black players by


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Table 2.

Analysis of All Stereotypical Descriptors by Race of Player Discussed N ˆ 1,156 Nonneutral Comments Player Discussed Black Athletes White Athletes Proportion ˆ 72% Proportion ˆ 28% N=% N=%

Common Black stereotypes (total comments) Athleticism (199) Physically powerful (124) Consonance (88) Speed (78) Lacking consonance (56) Lacking intelligence (26) Leaper (23) Common White stereotypes (total comments) Shooter (150) Effort=hard work (97) Intelligence=mental skill (74) Lacking athleticism (65) Determination= concentration (39) Leadership=personality (68) Versatility (32) Team player (24) Common gender stereotypes (total comments) Personal background (13)

140 88 59 66 40 18 18

70 71 67 85* 71 69 78

59 36 29 12 16 8 5

30 29 33 15* 29 31 22

91 66 43

61* 68 58*

59 31 31

39* 32 42*

43 24

66 62

22 15

34 38

41 23 14

60 72 58

27 9 10

40 28 42

13

100*

0

0*

* ˆ Significantly different from the proportion of players of that racial group, p < :05.

announcers and a lack thereof to White players (X 2 ˆ 3:88, df ˆ 1, p ˆ :04), a significant exaggeration of the usual stereotype. Equivalently, White players were seen overwhelmingly as shooters by announcers (X 2 ˆ 5:35, df ˆ 1, p ˆ :03), as exercising significantly more mental skill or intelligence (X 2 ˆ 3:98, df ˆ 1, p ˆ :04). These attributions occurred in significantly greater proportions than the percentage of the participants in these games. Such findings are fodder for concerns about racial stereotyping because they show the excessiveness of the practice and that it generally favors theWhite players by including complimentary attributions aboutWhite players. As has been discussed in the literature, it is not wholly complimentary to call a Black player highly athletic if, by contrast, a White player is referred to as showing a high level of mental skill. Thus, further analysis only continues to support the third hypothesis and shows the damaging types of attention that Black players receive.


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Gender Stereotyping When the comments were analyzed separately for men’s games and women’s games (not shown in the table), the patterns of stereotyping were identical except that women’s games contained 13 comments (see the bottom of Table 2) about players’ backgroundsö their fathers, coaches, and familiesöthat did not turn up in commentary about men players Interestingly, the analysis did not reveal the common supposition that announcers would refer to women’s games as ``slower’’ or more ``cooperative’’ than men’s games. Still, the results provide partial support for the fourth hypothesis because the women’s basketball announcing contained at least one gender-based stereotype.

Source of Commentary The next set of hypotheses concerns the race of the sources of the commentary. Not surprisingly,94 of the announcers were men (71%) and only 38 were women (29%), but as Figure 3 shows, one-fifth of the announcers were Black (20%)ömost commenting on men’s games. None of the announcers were identified as non-White=non-Black or ``race unknown.’’ The next step in analysis was to compare the kinds of racial attributions by the race of the announcer making the comment.Table 3 lists the percentages of illustrative comments about Black and White men players by both Black and White announcers. It shows that Black announcers’ comments did not display any significant difference in attributions to Black and White men athletes. They talked the same way about all men players. In contrast, White announcers tended to emphasize that White men were shooters (X 2 ˆ 4:82, df ˆ 1, p ˆ :03). A similar analysis of the announcers’ comments about women’s games (not shown in the table) also only turned up one area of significant difference, but a different one than appeared in relation to the men’s games: White announcers tended to attribute athletic consonance to White women players (X 2 ˆ 4:38, df ˆ 1, p ˆ :04), at the expense of Black women players. Overall then, these findings, with two minor exceptions, support the fifth hypothesis that Black announcers do not exaggerate racial stereotypes of players of their own or other races, but showed thatWhite announcers had some tendency to amplify someWhite player attributes. The final analysis focused on those announcers who commented on multiple games in the sample. The three announcers analyzed in Table 4öDick Vitale, Billy Packer, and Mike Patricköeach participated in four or more games. The table lists the announcer, the percentage of Black starters in a particular game, the number and percent of comments about Black players, followed by the percent of White starters and the number and percent of comments about White players made by that announcer in that game. As is clear from the table, most commentary was distributed in the same proportions as the race of the players. Vitale announced six games, and in every case, there was no significant difference between the quantity of comments he made about Black or White players. On average, he made 77% of his comments about Blacks (who make up, on average, 74% of men players and 68% of women players), and 23% of his comments about Whites (who make up 26% of men players and 32% of women players). Similarly, Packer and Patrick generally balanced their commentary, with only two significant exceptions, and those are based on so very few descriptive comments that they have


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Figure 3

Distribution of announcers by race and gender.

little import. What may be more interesting is that the totals of nonneutral=nonfactual comments is actually so small. GivenVitale’s reputation for near-constant talk, these findings mean that most of what he has to say is factual and implies little about possible biases.

Discussion The object of this study was to find out whether sports announcers persist in applying traditional racial and gender stereotypes to college basketball players in spite of


Table 3.

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A Comparison of Comments about Men Players by Race of Announcer Source of Comments Black Men Players White Men Players N=75% N=25%

Comments from Black announcers Athleticism (25) Intelligence=mental skill (16) Hard work=effort (23) Physically powerful (11) Consonance (14) Shooter (15) Comments from White announcers Athleticism (77) Intelligence=mental skill (30) Hard work=effort (59) Physically powerful (42) Consonance (51) Shooter (87)

18=72 10=63 16=70 8=73 12=86 9=60

7=28 6=37 7=30 3=27 2=14 6=40

55=71 17=57 41=69 31=73 37=73 57*=66

22=29 13=43 18=31 11=26 14=27 30*=34

*Significantly different only for White announcers, X2 ˆ 4.82, df ˆ 1, p ˆ .03.

Table 4. Announcers

Dick Vitale

Total Billy Packer

Total Mike Patrick

Total

A Comparison of Game Comments by Multigame Announcers N ˆ 3 Announcers Who Participated in Four or More Games % Black Comments about Starters Black Players N=%

1 2 3 4 5 6

70 90 60 70 70 80

1 2 3 4

60 80 80 70

1 2 3 4 5

100 60 70 70 80

43 14 13 9 18 14 111 15 7* 22 10 54 18 4 7 11 8** 48

70 88 81 90 82 70 65 50 73 67 95 67 78 79 62

% White Comments about Starters White Players N=% 30 10 40 30 30 20 34 40 20 20 30 28 0‡ 40 30 30 20 13

18 2 3 1 4 6

30 12 19 10 18 30

8 7* 8 5

35 50 27 33

1 2 2 3 5**

5 33 22 21 38

‡All starters were Black, but one comment was made about a White bench player. *X2 ˆ 12.6, df ˆ 1, p ˆ .001. **X2 ˆ 4.11, df ˆ 1, p ˆ .004.

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substantial increases in the numbers of minority and women sports announcers. Analysis of 1,156 announcer comments reflective of the relationships between the race and gender of announcers and players in 66 men’s and women’s college basketball games supported most hypotheses. Indeed, the results of this study led to five main conclusions. First, the traditional prejudices about Black players and concomitant flattering of White players persist, despite changing times and an increased number of minority and women announcers in college basketball. Stereotypes seem to be the language of sport, at least in college basketball, and few sportscasters make an effort to break out of the patterns of speech used by their predecessors. Second, gross exaggeration s favoring one or the other racial group are relatively rare and probably are outdated reflections of earlier times or are overstate d in the literature. This finding appears to corroborate the view of those researchers who have perceived a modest diminution in racism in media coverage (see Sabo et al., 1996). Nonetheless, it is in the combination of race and gender that an interesting finding occurred:White women basketball players generated more commentary by announcers than Black women players, revealing a kind of favoritism not exhibited nowadays in men’s basketball announcing. Third, women basketball players are treated as well (or as badly) by sports announcers as men basketball players. The only area of marked bias was that White women were favored over Black women in athletic consonance, and that was not an overwhelming difference. This implies that the imbalance in descriptors spreads across gender categories and is a pervasive practice by both Black and White announcers in both men’s and women’s games. Fourth, hiring minority announcers somewhat mitigates the impact of racially loaded speech coming from White announcers. Thus minority broadcasters are part of the solution, whileWhite broadcasters are the primary problem. Fifth, the most famed of the college basketball announcers are balanced in their coverage of Black and White players and do not demonstrate favoritism by race. This finding suggests that particular attention should go to the commentary of the less well known announcers. While the classification scheme used in the analysis was quite reductionist, it clearly showed that embedded stereotypes persisted throughout college basketball announcing. The commentary of the announcers consistently reinforced the formulaic notion that Blacks are naturally athletic, whileWhites are less so and thus need to work especially hard to keep up, and it reinforced the unfortunate notion that Whites have more mental ability and leadership qualities, while Blacks lack those characteristics. However, the study did not concern itself with play-by-play comments (the neutral=factual part of commentary), and it is possible that other patterns might emerge there. A relative weakness of the method was that it did not reveal some more subtle tilting of the language, such as comparisons of the ``natural skills’’of some players (largely Black) to the ``fundamental skills’’of others (largelyWhite), but such distinctions enhance rather than contradict the findings. Moreover, whether a particular stereotype appears to be superficially positive or negative may not be as important as whether it surfaces at all. Applying generalizations to a group is a thoughtless practice with unfortunate ramifications for sport and for society. At the same time, questions about fair treatment of women athletes are of increasing significance to colleges and the professional sports world.What happens in college basketball may be ammunition in the push toward national stature for professional leagues for women athletes in many sports. The development of the Women’s National Basketball


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Association (WNBA)öreaching16 teams in 2000 with most games televised nationallyö shows that basketball is the trend-setter in gender equity among American sports. Moreover, what happens on television, and to a lesser extent in the print media, reflects the status of women in the most economically advanced nations and may have impact on women’s roles in the less developed and more repressive countries. Bias based on stereotypesöwhether race or gender basedöhas significant implications for sport and for society. On the theoretical level, the findings in this study illuminate the importance of understanding how hidden concepts frame social thinking. As Rainville and McCormick (1977) pointed out long ago, negative attitudes embedded in conceptual frames probably have more impact on the audience than positive attitudes in commentary. Those researchers theorized that the racial group receiving the positive (sympathetic) frame is more commonly perceived as the ``causal agent’’ (p. 25), whereas the racial group receiving the pejorative (inferior) frame is more likely to be perceived as `àn externally moved object’’ (p. 25) and thus of less status and less social importance. Generalization of such buried assumptions does great social ill, especially because it gets transported to situations with economic ramifications. As a practical matter, advertisers and the television and radio networks, major newspapers, and national sports producers want college basketball to be a highly marketable product, and marketing success is often linked to the promotion of individual star players (as well as to other factors like team win=loss records). At any rate, players who are disparaged by the sportscasters who cover their games, however inadvertently, are unlikely to attract fans. Even an unconscious racial bias hurts the game as well as the players it denigrates. While the leagues, conferences, and owners are quick to fire those who publicly commit the sin of seemingly overt racism, they have historically paid much less attention to covert racial and gender stereotyping. Author Kenneth Shropshire has suggested that athletes have a powerful economic tool they could use to spur change: They could use their economic leverage to demand greater participation for minorities behind the scenes by saying they would not play for teams or go to cities that do not have ample minorities in administration, stadium construction, and other positions related to sports (Hooper, 1998). Athletes could also exercise more leverage over media bias by insisting on the inclusion of minorities and women among the commentators. Such steps should, in the short run, lead to more equitable treatment of players by announcers and more importantly, over the long haul, foster less stereotypical attitudes among fans.

Notes 1 Although the preferred terms are African American, Caucasian, Hispanic American or Latin, Asian American, and so on, for the sake of brevity, because the racial groups were referenced hundreds of times in this research, the abbreviated forms of ``Black’’and ``White’’and `òther’’ were utilized. The undoubted inadequacy of such terms in the face of variations in actual skin color are beside the point here since the study focused on perceptions of race (as well as perceptions of gender). The authors readily acknowledge the undeniable prejudice that arises from classifying a wide range of skin colors and facial features as if they were alike. 2 Blacks athletes dominate in some sports but are virtually invisible in others, and their scarcity in higher management is certainly a significant issue. 3 The authors share the view that gender is constructed and maintained and that it occurs along a continuum rather than being a binary distribution. This study focuses on the media’s role in the maintenance of perceived differences between the two major gender groupings recognized by the college sports authorities.


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4 Moreover, double jeopardy operates in television: Programs with lower ratings tend to have less committed viewers (Adams & Eastman, 2002). Thus sporting events with fewer viewers will have more fickle viewers, compounding the problem of building ratings. 5 Pilot testing showed that few other groups typically part of census records could be identified visually and accurately (Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, etc.) and were insignificant in number. 6 In two cases where far fewer descriptors were recorded during an initial coding, the tapes were recoded by a researcher and the larger database retained for analysis. 7 Had any been included, comments about teams, coaches, or other topics would have been discarded, but coders followed instructions, and none were included. 8 Three references to ``junior college player’’and ``transfer’’ were problematic and possibly biasing, but were far too few for a separate classification and thus included among the neutral descriptors. 9 Consonance is the term used to summarize such phrases as ``his act is together’’or``she is totally coordinated tonight.’’

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