| Previous research has found that television sports announcers in football and basketball games tend to use significantly different language to describe athletes of different races. This different language has generally been found to favor White players over African Americans. The current research examined whether this tendency exists among baseball writers for highly circulated newspapers.;A content analysis was performed on baseball stories from ten highly-circulated American newspapers. Three one-week periods from the 2003 season were chosen at random for inclusion in the sample. The unit of analysis was the comment, defined for the purposes of the current research as a single attribution about a player.;For each comment, coders recorded information about the source of the comment (including the newspaper from which the comment came and the name and race of the comment's author), the player about whom the comment was made (including that player's race and nationality), the nature of the comment itself (whether the comment referred to a player's physical aspects, cognitive aspects, personal aspects, or some combination thereof), and the valence of the comment (whether the comment was intended by the author to be positive, negative, or neutral).;Chi-square and ANOVA testing revealed that the racism so prevalent in previous research seemed not to be present in the current sample. Rather, what was revealed seems to be a pro-African American bias, with reporters apparently striving to avoid any characterizations of players that might confirm previously existing stereotypes. In addition, baseball writers appeared to show a nationalist bias, favoring American players over non-American players and showing a strong tendency to treat Latin and Asian players as objects of curiosity. |
