Gender Discourse Differences In Sports Journalism

In recent years,with the enthusiastic development of the national fitness movement,Olympic competitions,male and female athletes have become hot topics on social media.And gender awareness in sports reporting has become the focus of academic attention.Traditionally,male athletes tend to dominate the stadium,while female athletes become marginalized.As the mainstream media in our country,People’s Daily has also been used as a bellwether for other media to present gender discourse in sports reporting.Taking People’s Daily as the research object,this paper selects the reports of male and female athletes from the 2008 to 2021 Summer Olympic Games as a research sample,and analyzes the gender discourse differences in the reports of male and female athletes in People’s Daily based on gender theory and critical discourse analysis,and content analysis as the main research method.The study conducts a descriptive analysis of People’s Daily’s reports on male and female athletes during the 2008-2021 Summer Olympic Games,and studies news reports in terms of number,length,genre,theme,and tendencies.The study finds that since 2008,female athletes have reported more than male athletes,but female athletes still have lower exposure than men.As of 2021,the exposure of male athletes is still more than double that of female athletes.In addition,female athletes are more reported than male athletes in off-field situations,but mainly in the private sphere.This study uses Fairclough’s three-dimensional discourse analysis theory as an analytical framework to conduct an in-depth study of People’s Daily’s coverage of male and female athletes at the Summer Olympics from 2008 to 2021.The study finds that at the textual level,mainstream media pay more attention to sports and athletes with remarkable achievements,but also pays more attention to the roles and affairs of female star athletes in the private sphere;at the level of discourse practice,the image of the discovered athlete and the presentation of the content of the report is subject to the choice of citations,the preassumptions of the media,and the distribution of the coverage space;at the level of social practice,mainstream media is influenced by national policies,economic conditions,and gender consciousness to change the reporting framework and discourse choices of female athletes.