New Media, Old Ways: An Analysis of Sports Media’s Depiction of Female Athletes on Instagram and Snapchat

Previous research has shown a discrepancy between the coverage of men’s and women’s sports (Cooky, Messner, & Hextrum, 2013; Duncan & Messner, 1994; Huffman, Tuggle, & Rosengard, 2004; Kian, Vincent, & Mondello, 2008). With the growth of social media, sports networks have new platforms to display content. Hopefully, with the rise of social media, women’s sports would receive more coverage (Street, Chen, Duncan, & Hesterburg, 2016). Past research has also shown that sports media frame female athletes as less combatant and less athletic than male athletes (Hardin, Chance, Dodd, & Hardin, 2002). The purpose of this study is to investigate the depiction of female athletes on the Instagram accounts of the four leading U.S. sports-media outlets (ESPN, CBS Sports, Fox Sports, and NBC Sports), along with ESPN’s SportsCenter and Snapchat’s Discover channel. Based on framing theory (Goffman, 1974) and social role theory (Eagly, 1987), this study analyzed 1,239 images and found that a large, significant discrepancy still exists between the coverage of male and female athletes. However, among the images of female athletes, the majority of images depicted them as competing. Furthermore, female athletes were not treated as sexual objects.