Exclusionary Practices in Sport Journalism

The relatively low percentage of women and minority sport journalists suggests dynamics of exclusion. We used J. Acker’s (1990, 1992) theory about gender and organizations to examine several interrelated processes in the construction of gender andethnicity in sport journalism. Acker named 4 processes that inform these constructions:division of labor, images and discourses, interactions, and identity work. We held semistructured interviews with 15 experienced journalists/editors who worked in the sport departments of either national newspapers, commercial television, or public television. The results indicate that, although the journalists asserted that the meanings given totheir ways of doing journalism are ideologically neutral, these 4 processes do construct gender and ethnicity in overlapping and interrelated ways. In the discussion, we place these results in their context and focus on this contradiction between desirable and actual neutrality.