Framing disability in sport journalism: A cross-national automated framing analysis of Paralympic news (2012-2024)

Understanding how news media frame disability is critical for building inclusive public narratives, yet cross-national, longitudinal evidence remains limited. Building on previous framing research, this study applied a ternary framework of Masculinity , Physicality , and Sexuality (MPS) to 8,124 Paralympic news items from the U.K., Canada, and China (2012-2024). Using manual coding, supervised machine learning, and autoregressive modeling, we traced MPS frames across time, countries, and hosting contexts. Findings showed both stability and dynamics: journalists drew on established framing routines, yet emphasized different frames over time. Masculine and heroic portrayals ( Masculinity ) were highly visible and persistent, while impairment features ( Physicality ) and gender/sexual minorities ( Sexuality ) did not have a clear time trend. All frames appeared more frequently in the U.K. and Canada than in China, linking with distinct orientations between individualism and collectivism. Hosting the Paralympics did not temporarily boost any framing strategy, Masculinity decreased immediately after hosting the event, this decrease did not recover even after the game ended. By extending framing theory with a replicable framework and an automated method, this study shows how disability coverage follows path-dependent routines while being shaped by media ownership and regulation.