“An equal opportunity to watch, read about, meet and hear from”: An Analysis of CBC’s Gender Balance in Sport Programming Commitment

Abstract

On International Women’s Day 2020, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) announced that it had made a commitment to gender-balanced coverage of sport and athlete stories in its original content. The purpose of this case study of CBC’s gender balance in sport programming commitment was to 1) understand CBC’s process of developing their gender balance in sport coverage commitment; and 2) analyze CBC Sports’ televised and web-based sport coverage for evidence of both quantitative and qualitative gender balance. This primarily qualitative research study was based in a feminist approach and all data were analyzed utilizing Braun and Clarke’s (2006) Reflexive Thematic Analysis. To collect data about CBC’s process, two semi-structured interviews were conducted with a CBC Sports’ senior executive and organizational documents were collected via an Access to Information request. CBC took a pragmatic approach in the process of developing the commitment. Specifically, the commitment to gender-balanced sport media coverage served multiple purposes; it was an attempt to address the demands of their corporate strategic plan, while simultaneously demonstrating their interest in supporting women’s sport, and responding to the need to differentiate CBC Sports in the Canadian sport media marketplace. To identify evidence of gender balance, CBC’s online print and Road to the Olympic Games broadcast coverage was recorded during the four weeks preceding the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games, and the four weeks after the Games. Relative to the findings of previous studies of gender representation in sport media, CBC’s coverage was divided more numerically equally between men’s and women’s sport, and qualitatively, did not include many of the production strategies that have been identified as minimizing, trivializing, or sexualizing women athletes and women’s sport. Notably, there were differences between CBC’s online print coverage and its broadcast coverage: there was more evidence of using previous patterns of coverage – both less coverage of women’s sport and different ways of presenting women athletes and women’s sport – in the print coverage, while CBC’s broadcast content more often differed from previously observed patterns and presented women’s sport more frequently and more equivalently to men’s sport. The findings of this study demonstrate the complexity involved in a national public broadcaster’s attempt to address persistent inequality in sport media coverage of men’s and women’s sport.