Cultivating Audiences: The Role of Framing and Scripting during Sport Broadcasts

Abstract

A strong historical relationship exists between sport and the media. Mediated sport began in the printed press in the United Kingdom and United States of America with horse racing and boxing previews and recaps. This symbiotic connection evolved to the current interactive and on-demand technologies. A key business focus of the media is the creation of interest in sport; thus, fostering audience interest to sustain viewership for the duration of mega-events, league seasons, finals series, or sport matches. As such, the study of announcer discourse is important as these individuals shape the consumption of commercial MediaSport (Wenner, 1998), which seeks to increase ratings of sport programmes toward generating both audiences and additional revenues from sponsors and advertisers. This study analysed how a commercial sport media outlet, the American Broadcasting Company, framed the live coverage of the National Basketball Association (NBA) finals series in 2007 and 2008 to uncover how announcers embedded vertical (each game) and horizontal (series of games) scripts to foster sustained NBA viewership. Goffman’s (1986) primary frameworks were applied through a textual analysis of commentator discourses revealing the encoded messages or scripts. Further, an additional primary framework was found through the grounded theory approach of grouping themes into categories; this new framework was labelled hybrid. These studies were guided by a new conceptual model developed for the analysis of MediaSport event texts. This model allowed both more scrutiny and further uncovering of how announcer discourses were utilised to mediate television viewers. Through commentator discourse, viewers were provided with communication that guided the viewing of NBA telecasts. Moreover, announcer comments included many different types of sponsored vignettes. These vignettes served to increase the value of advertising and sponsorship, as these marketing messages occurred during the event, rather than during advertising breaks, leading to greater audience viewership of the vignettes.