A Quarter Century of NBC's Prime-Time Summer Olympics: A Sex-Based Analysis of the Network's Coverage
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: The Olympics offer female athletes the opportunity to shine on the biggest stage, and media tend to cover women's sports more and better during those events. This report is a sex-based quantitative content analysis of NBC's U.S. prime-time broadcast coverage of the 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 Summer Olympic Games. It focuses on two main aspects: (1) coverage of men's and women's events and (2) the sex of sources and speakers featured. Results indicate that while NBC's coverage prominently features female athletes, men's sports were still overrepresented during the Tokyo 2020 coverage compared to American men's success in the competition, and the coverage of both the latest Summer Games in Japan and the previous six editions include hegemonic masculinity cues. Primarily, women's coverage became increasingly less diverse over time, focusing mostly on a few major sports, all deemed "socially acceptable" per stereotypical gender norms (gymnastics, track and field, beach volleyball, and swimming and diving). Meanwhile, women involved in physical-power or hard body-contact sports are almost never featured in prime time, despite their successes in competition. Regarding sources and speakers, men have almost always been seen and heard (either working for NBC or being interviewed) more often than women.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it