Most fans will tell you they form their own opinions about athletes. Most fans are wrong, or at least incomplete. The way a player is described on TV, in a headline and in a thousand little clips shapes what you think before you’ve watched a minute of tape. Sports media doesn’t just report the story. It picks the story, picks the lighting, and decides who’s the hero.
The Power to Pick the Story
Media researchers call it agenda setting: the press can’t always tell you what to think, but it’s remarkably good at telling you what to think about. The classic evidence comes from Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw’s study of 100 voters in Chapel Hill during the 1968 election, published in Public Opinion Quarterly in 1972. As summarized here, they compared the issues residents rated most important with the issues the local news emphasized, and found a strong correlation. That was politics, not sports, but the mechanism travels. If a network spends three hours of airtime on one team’s drama and ten minutes on a better team down the road, guess which one fans think matters more.
Sports makes this easy to see. Whose off-field controversy is the lead story, and whose is a footnote? Which quarterback is “a leader” and which is “a distraction”? That’s framing, the choice of how to present the same facts. A game-winning shot can be a star’s brilliance or a defense’s collapse, depending on the sentence. The scoreboard is neutral. The telling never is.
How Commentary Shapes the Way We See Players
Sometimes the framing is so baked in that nobody notices until somebody counts. A team of researchers including Mohit Iyyer at UMass Amherst ran a computational analysis of 1,455 football broadcasts from 1960 to 2019, covering 267,778 mentions of 4,668 players, almost two-thirds of them nonwhite. Per the report, quarterbacks were referred to by first name in 18.1% of mentions of nonwhite quarterbacks versus 8.3% for white quarterbacks. The positive words differed too. White quarterbacks were more often described as “cool” or “smart,” while the praise for nonwhite players leaned toward athletic terms like “gifted” and “natural.”
Nobody in a broadcast booth sat down and wrote a script like that. That’s the point. Habits of language are invisible to the person speaking and obvious to the person listening, and fans absorb them for decades. Whether it’s race, gender, nationality or just a franchise’s reputation, the labels stick to athletes long after the evidence has changed.
When Athletes Go Around the Filter
Social media changed the balance. Athletes can now post directly, skip the interview and tell their own story. That’s a win for transparency, and also a headache for the people who used to control the mic. The 2021 French Open showed how nervous that makes the system. Before the tournament, Naomi Osaka said she wouldn’t do post-match press conferences, citing her mental health. After her first-round win she skipped the mandatory one and was fined $15,000, and the four Grand Slam organizers warned in a joint statement that continued refusal could mean further Code of Conduct consequences, including possible default. On May 31, she withdrew, citing long bouts of depression since the 2018 US Open, and acknowledged that her timing wasn’t ideal and her message could have been clearer.
Argue about whether she handled it well, and people did. The more interesting question is what the episode revealed: press access is part of the sports business model, and the people inside it expect it to keep flowing. When an athlete says no, the story becomes about the refusal, and then the media has to cover its own role in the fight. Read those stories with that in mind.
The Cost to Athletes and Teams
Coverage has real consequences. A glowing narrative can mean endorsement deals and a long leash from fans. A bad one can follow a player into free agency, a contract negotiation or a hostile arena. Teams know it, which is why they hire people whose full-time job is shaping the story. Nobody is a passive subject here. Every outlet, team and athlete is playing for a narrative, and the audience is the prize.
How to Watch With Your Eyes Open
You can’t read sports media without being influenced by it, but you can read it with a better filter. Notice what’s emphasized and what’s missing. Notice the adjectives, especially the ones that get attached to some players and not others. Compare a story with another outlet’s version of the same game. Ask whose interests a framing serves. And if a narrative makes you feel certain very quickly, that’s the moment to check the tape.
Final Thoughts
Sports media isn’t a window. It’s a lens, and lenses can be focused, tinted and pointed. That doesn’t mean everything you read is a lie. It means you’re getting somebody’s version, and the smartest fans know whose.