Since the 1990s, the growing importance of sport, its impact as a global business and the huge amounts of money involved from sponsorship and in the staging of the Olympic Games and football World Cups, has also attracted the attention of well-known investigative journalists.

The sensitive nature of the relationships between sports journalists and the subject’s journalism that reports on sports topics and events.

While the sports department within some reporting, as well as declining budgets experienced by most Fleet Street newspapers, has meant that such long-term projects have often emanated from television documentary makers.

Tom Bower, with his 2003 sports book of the year Broken Dreams, which analyzed British football, followed in the tradition established a decade earlier by Andrew Jennings and Vyv Simson with their controversial investigation of corruption within the International Olympic Committee.

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Jennings and Simson’s The Lords of the Rings in many ways predicted the scandals that were to emerge around the staging of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City; Jennings would follow-up with two further books on the Olympics and one on FIFA, the world football body.

Likewise, award-winning writers Duncan Mackay, of The Guardian, and Steven Downes unravelled many scandals involving doping, fixed races and bribery in international athletics in their 1996 book, Running Scared.

But the writing of such exposes referred to as “spitting in the soup” by Paul Kimmage, the former Tour de France professional cyclist, who now writes for the Sunday Times often requires the view of an outsider who is not compromised by the need of day-to-day dealings with sportsmen and officials, as required by “beat” correspondents.

The stakes can be high when upsetting sport’s powers: when in 2007, the English FA opted to switch its multi-million pound contract for UK coverage rights of the FA Cup and England international matches from the BBC to rival broadcasters ITV, one of the reasons cited was that the BBC had been too critical of the performances of the England football team.

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In 1916, a young woman wrote to The New York Sun to ask where she could go to learn how to be a woman reporter. In reply to the aspiring newswoman, a journalist identified only as Miss Gilbert informed the young woman that “The School of Journalism, Columbia University and at New York University is open to women as well as to men.”

Miss Gilbert saw journalism as a calling that demanded a special type of person. “You can never ‘learn’ to be a woman reporter as you could learn dressmaking or stenography, because reporting is a type of work requiring exceptional abilities,” she wrote.

What Miss Gilbert did not tell the young seeker of career counseling was that the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism limited its enrollment of women to 10% of the class, a quota that stayed in place until the late 1960s (Lafky, 1993, p. 93).

Journalism as an occupation is a skewed profession, that is, most journalists are White men. Approximately one third of the journalists in the USA and Europe are women (Deuze, 2000). Lafky (1993) has documented the status of women and ethnic minorities in the journalistic workforce between 1962 and 1992 and the barriers they experience.

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The percentage of journalists who are women increased from 20 to 34% between 1971 and 1982 and changed little between 1982 and 1992; in the latter time period, the percentage of journalists who are ethnic minorities increased from 4 to 8% (Lafky, 1993). Currently, 34% of the journalists in the Netherlands are women and 8% are ethnic minorities (Deuze, 2000).

Female graduates currently outnumber male graduates at the Dutch academy of journalism, and the percentage of women among journalists with less than 4 years experience is relatively high (45%). In other words, increasingly more women are entering the field of journalism.

It is surprising, therefore, that the percentage of women and ethnic minorities who work in the sport media tends to be much smaller than in other types of journalism. In the Netherlands, for example, women and ethnic minorities make up 7 and 1.6%, respectively, of the sport journalists.

The percentage of ethnic minorities active in sport journalism is not representative of the percentage (10%) of ethnic minorities living in the Netherlands (CBS, 2002). The percentage of women in the Dutch sport media does not reflect the percentage of women in the paid workforce, as a little more than one half of Dutch women work more than 12 hr per week (Portegijs, Boelens, & Keuzenkamp, 2002).

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In other words, the profession of sport journalism is skewed for reasons that may have more to do with the job itself than with the diversification of the workforce. The purpose of the present study was to explore explanations used by sport journalists to explain this, skewness.

Such explanations indicate how they construct gender and ethnicity and how together these processes work to include some and exclude others.

We first review the literature about gender and ethnicity in sport journalism and explain the theoretical perspectives we used in our study, followed by a brief account of the methodology. Subsequently we present and discuss our results.

The social skewness in the journalist profession has been explained in several ways. Lafky (1993) attributed the skewness to exclusion from professional networks. She found that women journalists have less access to professional networking organizations than their male colleagues.

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As these networks tend to consist of White men, it is conceivable that ethnic minorities also have relatively little access to them (Deuze, 2000). These networks serve as important sources for career enhancement and news.

This means that those who are excluded from them may therefore also be excluded from making professional connections that are necessary to do the required work. Exclusion of women and ethnic minorities from networks is not the only reason for this skewness in (sport) journalism; however, family responsibilities may also play a role.

As is the practice in many organizations, the work of newspaper and television journalists has been designed for those who have few, if any, childrearing responsibilities (Lowes, 1999). It is not surprising then that most male journalists have a female partner who carries the larger share of the household and child-rearing responsibilities.

Women journalists are more likely than men journalists to be single, and they are less likely than men to have children (Lafky, 1993). Women journalists who do have children and/or who have a partner who does not share equally in child rearing and household responsibilities may, therefore, have difficulty in working in this profession.

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Other explanations for the ethnic and gender skewness in (sport) media departments include sexual and ethnic harassment by colleagues, by supervisors, and by news sources.

Together these explanations suggest that various social forces may influence hiring and promotion practices in the field and the choices that women and ethnic minorities make to enter or leave sport journalism as a profession.

Concerns about skewness in a profession often focus more on employment statistics than on the broader effects of the exclusion of women and ethnic minorities. In contrast, Gist (1993) conducted research to explore effects of social skewness in media organizations.

She focused on the impact of journalistic practices at three television stations, a radio station, and a metropolitan daily newspaper on society at large and on those members of society for whom power and access are traditionally marginalized.

The results indicate that women and minorities are underrepresented as quoted sources in news stories and that coverage of issues considered important to them is minimal. In addition, the impact that a “neutral” event, such as earthquakes, has on White people tends to dominate stories.

Minorities tend to be visible in the news primarily in negative stories or in stereotypically positive ones, but not in the many kinds of neutral or positive stories in which Whites are typically featured.

Gist not only concluded that media coverage tends to be biased, but she also linked this bias to the underrepresentation of women and ethnic minorities in the newsrooms.

Journalists do not always see themselves as biased, however. Sport journalists, for example, tend to see their coverage as unbiased and objective. Knoppers and Elling (2004) found that Dutch sport journalists attribute the underre­presentation of women athletes and their sports to the professional use of criteria of objectivity and human interest.

They insisted that the skewness in coverage has little to do with the gender and ethnicity of the journalists themselves. In other words, according to them, skewness in coverage is not related to skewness in the profession. This causal relationship has not been fully explored, but there is indirect evidence that their perceptions are inaccurate.

Sport plays an increasingly significant role in the cultural history of Western nations, and it is receiving increasingly more media attention (Coakley, 2004).

The number of sport broadcasting hours on Dutch television, for example, has more than doubled, from 1,020 in the year 1990 to 2,673 in 1996. Sixty-five percent of the adult Dutch population watches sports programs on television or listens to sports programs on the radio at least once a month.

It is not surprising, then, that the media are a commonly used avenue through which people experience (professional) sport. However, consumers of the sport media receive journalists’ interpretation of sporting events. A considerable amount of research has shown that most of the sport coverage is of White male athletes and their events.

Although women and ethnic minorities, like all taxpaying citizens, contribute to the financing of Dutch public service television, White male journalists are usually the reporters, presenters, interviewers, and editors.

They decide what the audience sees or read, what to portray as “normal” or as common sense, which sports and athletes are seen as newsworthy, and which societal stereotypes are reinforced and challenged.

As such, the interests of women and ethnic minorities are often not represented, and coverage is stereotypically gendered and ethnicized/racialized.

Gist (1993), who explored connections between social group representations at all levels in an organization to the acceptance of meanings, argued that no medium is likely to achieve objectivity in its product without broad representation among its staff and its decision makers.

Thus, skewness in the gender and ethnic ratios among sport journalists may have a broad impact. Research that explores the dynamics of exclusionary employment practices in the sport media is, therefore, increasingly important.

We used a social constructionist approach to examine the ways in which sport journalists challenge and justify this disproportional representation or skewness in their profession. We assume that their experiences with and reactions to skewness are informed by how they give meaning to activities, to people, and to their own context.

Acker (1990, 1992) has shown how organizations and their members give meaning to gender and ethnicity in four ways: through the division of labor; through the creation of images, through symbols and metaphors; through interactions; and through identity work. These processes occur simultaneously and overlap. We briefly explain each of these below.