Panel 3 – Issues in media coverage of sports I Outubro 28, 2010

The first panel of the day started with Rui Novais and Tatiane Figueiredo’s ‘Flags Online? Portuguese and Brazilian reporting of the 2010 World Cup qualifying group’, presented by professor Rui Novais. The researchers’ comparison between the media coverage of three Brazilian and three Portuguese newspapers during FIFA World Cup 2010 coverage concluded that there are vestiges of cultural bias on news coverage, but not always nationality interferes with editors choices.

Carlos Brás, from Universidade de Évora, presented his work ‘Olympic excellence, demographics and geography’ on the possible relation between these three factors. The investigation was based on the analysis of the 204 countries that took part in the Beijing Olympics. More populated nations have tendency to develop new talents in sports who reach significance in their areas, winning several medals. Further investigations would include economic factors in the formula to track what brings Olympic excellence. Some questions were raised concerning the explanation for small countries that reach good results in Olympics.

David Fernandes and Joana Coelho (Universidade do Porto) closed the panel with their work on ‘Gender and Sports: Barcelona 2010′. The analysis of news coverage of the European Athletics Championship of 2010, taken place in Barcelona, found out that countries tend to give further coverage of women sports due to having more good results in feminine sports than the ratio in other countries, as happened in Portugal. The analysis covered also French and Spanish newspapers, concluding that, in general, female athletes are discriminated when depicted by the media.