Jeremy Lin, Race, and Sport: The Prevalence of Racial Frames in Written Sports Content

The following is a post by WVU Communication Studies M.A. student Gregory A. Cranmer

Jeremy Lin, an NBA point guard and former undrafted free agent, has been thrust into the national spotlight after taking a sub-par New York Knicks team on a 7-0 run earlier this month. While the storylines of an undrafted free agent or former Ivy Leaguer selling out the “Garden” seems interesting, the majority of media coverage regarding Lin is racially focused. ESPN’s “A chink in the armor” headline regarding Lin’s first loss took the coverage of the first American-born NBA player of Chinese decent to another level. The headline featured a picture of a distraught Lin and was available on ESPN’s website for mobile devices for nearly 30 minutes before it was removed. The headline clearly had racial undertones, and the use of a racial slur in a headline for an athlete of another race does not seem as likely.

As a researcher with an interest in mediated sports coverage this story not only interested me greatly, but also parallels some of the main points of my thesis. First, the coverage of Lin demonstrates that the coverage of athletes is framed around their race. In my thesis, I focus on the use of brawn and brain frames to describe the successes of Black and White Heisman finalists and expect the established trend of Black athletes being framed as brawny and White athletes framed as brainy to continue.

Second, while there has been extensive research completed on racialized coverage of athletes in verbal commentary, written context has not been studied as often. The most likely explanation is that racialized coverage is easier to find in verbal commentary because it is live and requires commentators to continually fill air time under stress. However, that does not mean that written coverage isn’t racialized, as demonstrated by the Lin story. My thesis will also examine written content, specifically newspaper coverage. I decided to examine newspapers because written content is more powerful than verbal because in it is filtered through many channels (e.g., editors, unlike verbal commentary). This means for a piece of written content to reach the public it needs to be approved by many people who all support the content. The Lin coverage demonstrates that written context represents not just an author but a whole media outlet because ESPN and not the author of the story are being held responsible for the racist headline. Framing research supports the notion that racially based coverage is not individualized because frames are social shared and consistent over time. Mecurio and Filak (2010) suggested the mechanism behind such an idea is that younger reporters learn journalist practices from older reporters who are in positions of power. In essence, the younger generation learns to mimic the older generation in order to get more publishings, more interesting topics, and better locations in newspapers. Additionally, my thesis considers numerous other factors and antecedent conditions of frames including reporter race.

As technology allows for the media to communicate quicker, I believe the trend of seeing racially framed content will increase. Sports coverage provides a unique test of this belief because sites like ESPN are producing written content immediately after the conclusion of events, and even during the games themselves. The pressure to get this content out will likely hurry the process of coverage and reveal more racialized content similar to verbal commentary.