Routine coverage of women’s sports in Brazilian media outlets

Abstract

This article analyses 402 articles on women’s sports published in seven Brazilian media outlets in 2022. Although several studies have already analysed the ways in which female athletes are represented in the media, our work seeks to fill two important gaps: analysing regular coverage of these sports, thus avoiding focusing on mega-events when it is known that the level of visibility of women's sports is uncommon; and analysing journalism based on categories typical of journalism studies, which are often overlooked when researchers from other fields analyse sports media. We adopted a proportional stratified sampling strategy based on a collection of 3,695 articles published in the first six months of 2022. We used content analysis techniques and present in this article the results found for seven categories that specifically address journalistic texts. Some of our findings include increased attention and a convergence of coverage characteristics with those of men’s sports, including themes, framing, and use of sources. This approach is paradoxical because it reveals a daily effort by media outlets to monitor female sports, but also a dynamic of depoliticisation. Another important finding is that female sports journalists are losing ground in the routine coverage of women’s sports. The analysis presented here is part of a historical series aimed at monitoring and comparing how journalism in Brazil has covered women in sports over the years. The 2022 data is contrasted with data from the same 2020 survey and with other similar studies already published.