ABSTRACT
The Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) and South Korea were leaders in sport’s return during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was added to the television landscape through ESPN beginning in May 2020. The intersection of Korean sport and American media provides a unique gap to examine the globalization of sports media and its impact on identity. A thematic analysis was conducted across a one-week, stratified sample (six broadcasts) of KBO games during the first thirty games televised on ESPN between May 4 and June 13, 2020, which allowed time for “tracking discourse” to explore how terminology and perspective on KBO traveled across borders. Broadly, KBO was framed as quality professional baseball and heralded for a style centered on fundamentals. Rather than offered as a standalone, KBO player identity formation was largely contextualized alongside a comparison to a successful American Major League Baseball (MLB) player. The consistent overlapping MLB discourse was constructed as the Americanization of all global professional baseball leagues to follow their lead. Lastly, the altered reality for KBO within the context of the coronavirus pandemic was positioned as a litmus test for the return of professional sports. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
When COVID-19 enveloped sport, it presented SportsCenter, ESPN's primary news vehicle, with an unexpected and ironic form of "MarchMadness," with basketball as the sporting epicenter for a pandemic. This case study applied an ethnographic content analysis to examine how the cancellation or postponement of sport as a result of COVID-19 was framed across 22 episodes of SportsCenter from March 8 to 14, 2020. More than 134 min of coveragewas devoted toCOVID-19-related stories, and 268 unique types of stories were produced. Descriptive statistics suggested that COVID-19 was framed as having a direct impact on U.S. men's professional sports leagues and the National Collegiate Athletic Association men's basketball tournament. When considering news format characteristics, SportsCenter produced its coverage through convenience and relevance to ESPN, not sport. Even during a "breaking news" pandemic, SportsCenter retained its long-standing news process of gender bias and nationalistic favoritism. The visual difficulty of how to "show" coronavirus also presented a production challenge, but the messages and cues embedded in the visuals depicted a rapid shift in discourse that focused on basic reporting without health or global context. Instead, SportsCenter overwhelmed viewers with how sport was ripped away from (U.S.) American society.