The United States of Sport

The intersection of sport and politics in America has become more visible lately, mainly due to the “feud” between President Donald Trump and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick over Kaepernick’s displays of protest during the national anthem. However, you can link the connection between sport and politics back even further. Many people will think back to the 60s and 70s for this validation, with the Olympic Black Power protests at the 1968 Summer Olympics or Muhammad Ali’s protest of the Vietnam War that led to him being stripped of the heavyweight boxing title (Bailey, 2020). The connection between sports and politics can be linked even further than this, however, with sporting events being used to increase voter turnout in the 1750s, and horse racing being a stage for divisive political debates over the state of South Carolina’s refusal to acknowledge a federal import tax put in place by then-President Andrew Jackson (Cohen, 2018). In fact, it wasn’t until African Americans began using sports to make political standings after the Civil War that the “stick to sports” crowd began to grow larger and louder (Cohen, 2018).

Speaking specifically of social protest, the sport stage has been used for more stances than just racial justice. The United States Women’s National Soccer Team has been at the center of the larger debate of equal pay for women (Depta, 2016). Sporting events were moved from North Carolina and Georgia for controversial political actions. The transgender-focused “bathroom bill” in North Carolina prompted the NBA to move its 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte to New Orleans (Depta, 2016) and Major League Baseball (MLB) moved the 2021 All-Star game from Atlanta due to Georgia’s newly-passed voting restrictions (Romo, 2021).

This intersection of American culture and sport extends into public health as well. The most recent example is the COVID-19 pandemic and how the threat to America was felt not after months of warning from public health officials, but the cancellation of the 2020 NBA season, which sent a ripple effect throughout the nation (Aschburner, 2020). The rise of mental health awareness in America has been amplified by major athletes like NBA player Kevin Love and Olympians Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka, and it has helped erase the stigma behind mental health (Gavin, 2021). Thirty years later, after his decision to retire from basketball following his HIV diagnosis, Magic Johnson is still working through his foundation to advocate for HIV awareness, prevention and treatment (Herring, 2021).

Indeed, the symbiotic relationship between sport, politics and American culture is irrefutable. In his 2006 book chapter “Sports and Media through the Super Glass Mirror: Placing Blame, Breast-Beating, and a Gaze into the Future,” Lawrence Wenner asserted that “sport continues to play a pivotal role in the identities that form nationalism” (p. 49). Using the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast as a basis for examination of the intersection of culture and mediated sports, Wenner delves into the areas, or “super themes,” of pop and hip-hop, sex and gender, race and ethnicity, celebrity and hero, technology and activity, and national and global, among others. In his discussion on the implications of mediated sport in the national and global landscape, Wenner states the following:

Framing Theory as the Lens of Intersection

Framing theory was not developed in the realm of communication, as it was originally rooted in sociology and psychology. Coming from a sociological, or macro-level perspective, framing was founded based on attribution theory (Heider, 1959; Heider & Simmel, 1944). Heider (1959) demonstrates that humans process complex information throughout their everyday practices by alleviating social perception to judgments in regard to attribution. Attribution, as defined by Heider (1959), is the perceived connection between an observed behavior and a possible cause of that behavior. This idea was extended by Iyengar (1991) when he developed episodic and thematic framing to help explain what attributes to the caused behaviors. Additionally contributing to the creation of framing theory is frames of reference, developed by Goffman (1974). He asserts that instead of simple attributions of causality, people adopt broader interpretive mental frameworks coined “primary frameworks” (Goffman, 1974, p. 24). These frameworks suggest that humans have shared social categories that we use to organize new information (Tewksbury & Scheufele, 2020).

For psychology, or the micro-level, framing was founded on “frames of reference” (Sherif, 1967) and prospect theory (Kahneman, 2003; Kahneman & Tversky, 1984). Sherif (1967) explains that individual judgment and perceptions happen within one’s frames of reference. Because individuals already have preconceived notions about certain topics, it is possible to create situations that reflect the perceptions and judgments of an individual. This essentially means that one can mold a situation to mirror one’s ideas and values. The idea of references assumes that the information assigned will be interpreted in a certain way based on individual preferences. Therefore, framing works best when it is understood what the audience’s inclinations are (Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007; Tewksbury & Scheufele, 2020).

The communication field later took these perspectives and adopted it as “framing” (Tewksbury & Scheufele, 2009). No matter which field created framing, its main function is to offer support for how audiences interpret an issue or event, mainly from the news.

Framing in the media is when journalists and other members of the media choose images and words that can influence how audiences understand and evaluate issues, policies, or events (Tewksbury & Scheufele, 2009). Each frame has what Gamson and Modigliani (1989) call “packages.” These packages have lots of information wrapped in one frame. For instance, they contain things like arguments, information, symbols, metaphors, and images. The packages impact how people comprehend, understand, and react to the information being disseminated. At the core of each package is an argument in the information it gives about an issue the creators of the message intend to use to elicit a certain response from the intended audience (Tewksbury & Scheufele, 2020). The act of framing is meant to “select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described” (Entman, 1993, p. 52). Frames define problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgments, and offer suggestions for topics. Frames are also salient, which Entman (1993) describes as making a certain piece of information more noticeable, meaningful, or memorable to those processing the information. Gitlin (1980) contends that the elements of a communicated text are emphasized or excluded by the sender. This outlook is a similar understanding to Goffman’s (1974) perspective of framing, where it is a method in which individuals use their interpretive schemas to classify and interpret messages. These interpretive schemas can influence how the audience perceives and views a topic.

According to Gross (2008), frames are meant to highlight certain aspects of an event, to guide the audience’s thoughts on a subject, and to draw predictable conclusions. Additionally, framing can elicit emotions in the audience from individual and situational factors, which aligns with appraisal theories of emotion (Gross, 2008). There are two common types of framing and each is used for different purposes. Thematic frames focus on events and political issues in a broader context that presents collective, abstract, and general evidence. They weave stories to where they are situated in larger societal contexts. Episodic frames, in contrast, describe specific events and isolated cases (Iyengar, 1990). Iyengar (1991) argues that episodic frames focus more on individual’s attributions, while thematic frames produce more societal attributions. In the context of sport, episodic frames would be specific stories about a game that may include the box score, player statistics, and specific details from the game. On the other hand, thematic frames present stories and issues in a broader context (Gross, 2008). Thematic frames would amplify sports stories that connect to a larger social idea, such as racial equality and social change.

The United States of Sport

Referring again to the Kaepernick-Trump debate, the commentary from both local and national outlets was significant in shaping the conversation about the conflict, so it would be beneficial to media scholars to put the event into context by investigating the themes that were discussed, while also comparing the event to similar instances in American culture. That is precisely what The United States of Sport seeks to do. This book examines the relationship between sports, politics and culture in America through the lens of media framing, highlighting several instances of this intersection throughout American history through the eyes of the outlets charged with providing news. The book features chapters on sports in relation to values that represent the American identity related to organizational action, moral order, citizenship, pop culture, commercialization, and education, among other themes, and the resulting casebook adds to previous research on the intersection of politics, culture and sports in three ways.

First, this project expands historical research to cover more recent political and cultural influence. The late 20^th century and early 21^st century have had many significant events happen in the sports world that have shaped American culture. This book provides a historical commentary of some of these events through the lens of media framing. Second, the book focuses on the role of politics and culture in the creation and evolution of sport tradition, image and regulation in the United States. This introduction has briefly discussed the way that American culture is reflective in sports, and vice versa. Each chapter in this book takes one aspect of this intersection and dives deeper into the societal implications. Finally, this book discusses how the American mass media played a role in shaping the national conversation on the intersections of politics, pop culture, and sports. This book does not seek to provide 14 theoretically-driven chapters that provide extensions of framing theory. Rather, this book uses framing theory as a lens to provide context to the topics discussed.

The second section of this book looks at more modern examples of sport’s influence on social issues. Chapter 4 covers the aforementioned conflict between Kaepernick and Trump. This chapter looks at the coverage of the conflict of thought between Kaepernick and Trump in media outlets, particularly presenting the difference in news coverage between primarily liberal and conservative outlets. Chapter 5 looks at the rise of American feminism with the success of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team. Using the team as a case study, this chapter explores the roles of patriarchal systems and feminism in the fight for equal pay and treatment in sport through the media coverage of the team’s fight for equal pay and the lawsuit against U.S. Soccer. Chapter 6 looks at the decaying of the social and cultural stigma around mental health, and the role that athletes have played in increasing mental health awareness. This chapter discusses the framing of the national discussion on mental health issues and compare it to the way athletes have called attention to mental health issues in the media. Chapter 7 looks at the use of performance-enhancing drugs in two different sports: Major League Baseball (MLB) and World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). The chapter compares the coverage of the “steroid era” in both leagues, noting the differences in national sentiment for a legitimate sport and a “sport” that garners much criticism for its legitimacy. Chapter 8 discusses the recent COVID-19 pandemic and how the fight for social justice was heightened during 2020 by racially-motivated deaths at the peak of a public health concern. The chapter looks at the fight for racial equality and how it the pandemic impacted college football and professional basketball.

By looking at some of the same themes Wenner (2006) explored, the goal of this book’s fourteen chapters is to highlight the many ways that sport is a microcosm of American culture and society. While not an exhaustive examination, this book analyzes common themes that illustrate this intersection. The authors hope that through this, the question “why are you studying sports?” becomes much easier for current and future sport scholars and enthusiasts to answer.

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