Basketball Coverage

Paper Summary:

This paper compares the newspaper coverage of two college basketball games, one involving the men's basketball team at UCLA, the other involving the women's basketball team. The paper covered is be the Daily Bruin, published and distributed on the campus of UCLA. It evaluates how the message sent by the newspaper and received by the reader is that the women's basketball game is simply not as important a sporting event as the men's basketball game. Through a literature review, it also examines how social theories support the view that male sports dominate female sports in the mind of the public and that dominance inevitably is expressed in the media coverage of men's and women's sports in the country.

From the Paper:

"One might argue that some of the differences between the coverage of the two games is due to the simple fact that the men's team won their game (and was an upset over a highly-ranked team) while the women's team lost. If the outcomes had been reversed, perhaps the coverage would have been reversed as well, with the coach of the men's team and the reporter both complaining about bad refereeing. Such arguments would be fair, but they would ignore the more important differences between the two stories. There is no doubt whatsoever that the men's game was seen by the editors of the paper as deserving of greater coverage than the woman's game, not only in its place at the top of sports stories in the Daily Bruin, but also in terms of length, with the story on the men's game being almost twice as long as the story on the women's game. The story on the women's game was given short shrift in comparison."

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