Stories of Sports

This book centralizes media, sports, and athlete identity while providing an in-depth evaluation of the role that media play in how society views and discusses sports and athletes, highlighting several types of intertextuality and intersectionality while doing so.

Stories of Sports: Critical Literacy in Media Production, Consumption, and Dissemination discusses how media demonstrates privilege, policing, stereotypes, confirmation bias, and objectification in a world where the role of athletics in Western society speaks to privilege and power. Contributors use a critical media lens to analyze texts, including newspapers, magazines, film, television, social media, and sportscasts to demonstrate to readers the ways in which sports stories reinforce or disrupt patterns of power and the ways that power is enacted. This book questions the role of the sports-industrial complex in our society and argues that, while healthy competition and physical health can come from bodily exertion, corruption can contaminate these benefits with the wielding of influence and the acquisition of cultural and financial capital. Contributors examine how the ways that resources are allocated, the coverage of certain sports and athletes, and how viewers view competitive arenas speak to power and privilege in ways that can affect both athletes and athletic stakeholders, highlighting the importance of critically examining sports media. Scholars of media studies and sports will find this book particularly useful.

Foreword

Andraya N. Carter

Introduction

Katie Dredger, Crystal L. Beach, Katherin Garland, and Cathy Leogrande

Chapter 1: Using Critical Media Literacy Pedagogy to Analyze Colin Kaepernick’s Athletic Activism

Katherin Garland

Chapter 2: Selling Patriotism On and Off the Field: Media Connections Between Baseball, the Military, and the Government

Brian Sheehy

Chapter 3: Relationships Between Youth-Sports Coaches and Athletes: Messages from the “Best” Sports-Related Films

Luke Rodesiler, Mark A. Lewis, and Alan Brown

Chapter 4: Truth Be Told: The Mutual Responsibilities of Artists and Consumers

Mark A. Fabrizi

Chapter 5: Telling the Story of Youth, Sports, and Disability in Friday Night Lights

Ewa McGrail, J. Patrick McGrail, and Alicja Rieger

Chapter 6: Transforming Diabetes Stigma: The Role of Counternarrative in Sports Media

Cynthia Martin

Chapter 7: Languaging Actions in Sports Media and Students’ Writing About Sports

Richard Beach and Limarys Caraballo

Chapter 8: Performance, Style, and Substance: The Female Athlete

Crystal L. Beach and Katie Dredger

Chapter 9: Booth, Sidelines or Studio: How Place Defines Women Sports Broadcasters on Television

Cathy Leogrande

About the Contributors