Form or Function? An Examination of ESPN Magazine’s “Body Issue” Article Summary

Form or Function? An Examination of ESPN Magazine’s “Body Issue” Article Summary

The article reviews photograph as well as other written content originating from the annual ESPN. The Magazine’s Body Issue during its initial five years of publication. The review aims at comparing the framing changes between male and female athletes. The article illustrated that the majority of athletes were framed passively and that the manner of their framing had nothing to do with their sports. However, I think the conclusion is misleading since the athletes are real people, and hence they might opt to take photos of more personality other than actively representing their sports.

The context of the past research outcomes addressing the coverage quantity as well as the quality of men against women athletes provided a vast literature. The latter comprised the following hypothesis and research questions (Hull, Smith & Schmittel, 2015). Since the introduction of Title IX, the number of female athletes has increased dramatically, although the media coverage of the sports activities associated with women has not increased comparatively.

Hypothesis 1: Generally, men will be framed more effectively as opposed to women.

Research question one: Will there be a notable distinction on how individual sports will frame men and women?

Research Question two: In the past five years, how has the framing of the respective groups changed?

Hypothesis two: Men athletes will adopt masculine language to demonstrate their experience, thus posing for “The Body Issue” as opposed to their female counterparts.

The researchers employed the concept of content analysis to analyse photographs as well as captions in the five issues. However, the authors noted that the limitations of this method would be a failure to provide background information regarding the intentions of the image producers (Hull, Smith & Schmittel, 2015). However, they argued that content analysis was the most appropriate method to quantify this kind of data — the technique comprised of categorizing elements contained in the images, such as image angle (Hull, Smith & Schmittel, 2015). Additionally, caption descriptors like talent, attractiveness, and experience were classified into various groups. Later, the Chi-Square methods of analysis, as well as distribution tables, were used to demonstrate possible differences between male and female sportspersons with changes in time (Hull, Smith & Schmittel, 2015).

From the study, 32 distinct sporting activities were identified for the past five years of the Magazine’s issue. Water polo was determined to have the most occurrences totalling 13 pictures. The second was track, which had 12 images, while basketball was third, having 11 photos. The analyses included 139 images, where 63 were male, and 76 were females (Hull, Smith & Schmittel, 2015).  Additionally, the reports indicated that about 86 percent of image angles were straight; around 62 percent demonstrated the players in a passive pose. In contrast, nearly 90 percent of players’ images were captured entirely nude (Hull, Smith & Schmittel, 2015). This factor indicated that there did not exist a significant difference between men being framed more effectively as opposed to women.

In answering the first and the second research questions, the analysis demonstrated that there was no significant difference in gender framing based on sports (Hull, Smith & Schmittel, 2015). Additionally, the study indicated that the percentage of active against passive images varied without a particular notable pattern from one year to another. Moreover, the second hypothesis was disproved since there was no difference in masculinity as well as the femininity of the caption language between the genders (Hull, Smith & Schmittel, 2015). Conversely, it was concluded that the number of female athletes featured in the Magazine tended to increase dramatically during the years when Olympic Games were held. The researches argued that the number of female players might be driven by Olympic sports, a period that might have led to female athletes catching the most attention from the media (Hull, Smith & Schmittel, 2015).

In conclusion, ESPN performed an excellent task of demonstrating a variety of sports, as well as a variety of non-mainstream games. However, most of the findings are articulated towards demonstrating mutual respect between men and female players, a factor that is offensive to the expression of tasteful nudity in the images. Hence, the researchers need to continue evaluating the Magazine’s issues in the future and use the outcomes to start a discussion regarding gender equality in sports.