Newspaper coverage of women’s sports: Special Sports Event in Sri Lanka

Abstract

There has been a recent interest in research into national media coverage of female sport, particularly single events, but ongoing sporting activities by women are rarely reported. In general, women are well represented among sports participants and sports audience but not in the media. Data show that woman’s sport is greatly underreported and trivialized in newspapers. Therefore’ the purpose of this study was to measure press coverage during the sports events in the Sri Lanka Sunday newspapers. By: a) number of articles, b) size, c) page placement, d) accompanying photographs and e) photographs size. Qualitative methods were used to collect data and also used AQUAD software. The researcher used sequence analysis to identify the article size and page placements and photograph size. The coding analysis was used to analyze accompanying photographs. Although only 29.3% of the articles and 38% of photos were on women’s sports, the newspaper coverage was not similar to the distribution of events. There is a significant gender difference were found with respect to article size, page placement, accompanying photographs and photo size. In conclusion, there was a trend to overcome gender inequities in media coverage during the sports events.