Dr. Molly Yanity
Sports Journalist & Associate Professor and Chair, Journalism, Quinnipiac University
Email: molly.yanity@qu.edu
Twitter: @MollyYanity
Section 2: Media Coverage & Representation
- Twitter conversations on Indian female athletes in Tokyo
- ”Unity in Diversity” – The varying media representations of female Olympic athletes
- The Olympic Channel: insights on its distinctive role in Tokyo 2020
- How do we truly interpret the Tokyo Olympic ratings?
- Between sexualization and de-sexualization: the representation of female athletes in Tokyo 2020
- Reshaping the Olympics media coverage through innovation
- An Olympic utopia: separating politics and sport. Primary notes after analyzing the opening ceremony media coverage of mainstream Spanish sport newspapers
- What place is this? Tokyo’s made-for-television Olympics
- The paradox of the parade of nations: A South Korean network’s coverage of the opening ceremony at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics
- Tokyo 2021: the TV Olympics
- Why we need to see the “ugly” in women’s sports
- “The gender-equal games” vs “The IOC is failing black women”: narratives of progress and failure of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics
- Ghana: Poor local organizing, and absence of football team dampens interest
- ‘A Games like no other’: The demise of FTA live Olympic sport?
- Temporality of emotionalizing athletes
- Fandom and digital media during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games: A Brazilian perspective using @TimeBrasil Twitter data
- Media wins medal for coverage of athletes as people, instead of entertainers
- Media frames and the ‘humanity’ of athletes
- Reporting at a distance. Stricter working conditions and demands on sports journalists during the Olympics
- New Olympic sports: the mediatization of action sports through the Olympic Games 2020 Tokyo
- Simone Biles, journalistic authority, and the ideology of sports news
- Representations of gender in the live broadcast of the Tokyo Olympics
- Americans on ideological left more engaged in Summer Olympics
- Nigeria: Olympic Games a mystery for rural dwellers in Lagos
- National hierarchy in Israeli Olympic discourses
- Equestrian sports in media through hundred Olympic years. A roundtrip from focus to shade and back again?
- Reshaping the superhuman to the super ordinary: The Tokyo Paralympics in Australian broadcasting media
- Is the Paralympic Games a second-class event?
- The fleeting nature of an Olympic meme: Virality and IOC TV rights
- Tokyo 2020: A look through the screen of Brazilian television
- Is the Paralympic Games a second-class event?
- How digital content creators are shaping meanings about world class para-athletes
- How digital content creators are shaping meanings about world class para-athletes
- The male and female sports journalists divide on the Twittersphere during Tokyo 2020
- Super heroes among us: A brief discussion of using the superhero genre to promote Paralympic Games and athletes
- “Everything seemed very complicated”: Journalist experiences of covering the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games
- Representing high performance: Brazilian sports journalists and mass communication professionals discuss their philosophies on producing progressive Paralympic coverage
- Representations of gender in media coverage of the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games
When British-Australian scholar Sara Ahmed published her 2004 book “The Cultural Politics of Emotion,” she likely could not comprehend the tidal wave of emotion that would crash upon advanced democratic societies through social media.
But Ahmed was on to something.
She presents a popular example from psychological literature about a child and a bear. The child sees the bear and becomes afraid. “It is not that the bear is fearsome, ‘on its own’…. It is fearsome to someone or somebody. So fear is not in the child, let alone the bear, but is a matter of how child and bear come into contact. This contact is shaped by past histories of contact, unavailable in the present, which allow the bear to be apprehended as fearsome,” Ahmed wrote.
So, how did U.S. women’s soccer star Megan Rapinoe become the scary bear for so many Americans?
The answer is sadly simple: Economics and identity politics.
Rapinoe became the public face of a group of 28 USWNT players to sue US Soccer, the national governing organization, to close the pay gap between the considerably more successful women’s team and men’s team.
In an open relationship with professional basketball star and Olympian Sue Bird, Rapinoe also became a highly visible LGBTQ activist.
When the USWNT advanced out of the group stage at the World Cup in France during the summer of 2019, comments recorded earlier in the year went viral as Rapinoe declared – with some colorful language – that she would not accept an invitation to the White House should the team win as she had publicly criticized then-U.S. president Donald Trump.
In the leadup to the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo in early 2021, the USWNT stopped kneeling for the anthem, but collectively took a knee on the field – usually to be joined by the opposing team — prior to the opening whistle to support Black activism on issues such as police violence, voting rights, and more.
No women’s side has ever won the World Cup and Olympics in successive years, but even with the Olympics delayed a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, expectations ran high. The USWNT went 22-0-1 after the World Cup under new coach Vlatko Andonovski. They strutted into Japan with a 502-minute streak of clean sheets.
When the Americans promptly got spanked, 3-0 to Sweden, in the first game of group play, soccer fans were shell-shocked. The USWNT emerged from pool play, but fell to Canada in the semifinal match.
The USWNT beat Australia in the bronze-medal game – a contest in which Rapinoe scored two goals. While the American athletes took solace then pride in their medal, many American citizens expressed glee over Rapinoe’s “failure.”
The vitriol on social media and the airwaves did not begin with a statement posted to Trump’s website with which he concluded: “The woman with purple hair played terribly and spends too much time thinking about Radical Left politics and not doing her job!” but it amplified from there.
A popular author tweeted he hoped the USWNT would lose. A right-wing U.S. newscaster from Newsmax claimed he “took pleasure” in the team’s defeat and “Megan Rapinoe and her merry band of America-hating female soccer players… a collection of whiny overpaid social justice warriors are very hard to root for.”
Comedian K-von, host of the podcast “The Right Show,” spent days during the Olympic soccer tournament to drub Rapinoe, who he dubbed “RapinHo” and “Karen Kaepernick,” on Facebook. One of his followers commented that Rapinoe was like “a new STD… Nobody wants her, people are stuck with her, and sadly we have no vaccines for her….”
Resentment, anger, and hatred color the language of modern American political discourse.
Anger can be politically productive, though the uptake of anger for democratic purposes is typically achieved by a member of a privileged group. But, resentment and hatred are dangerous in democracies. Resentment is an emotion that seethes and scapegoats. Hate comes from disgust, which requires a patrolling of social norms and ultimately undermines productive public discourse.
Rapinoe checks all the boxes when it comes to the politics of emotion; She is financially well off, but seeks more. She is politically-outspoken lesbian with a successful, attractive fiancée. She dives full force into issues of race and social justice and has the audience to influence.
Like the bear, Rapinoe strikes fear. As irrational as it may be – and emotions can be, after all, not rational – the purple-haired fire brand with the wicked bend makes a group of Americans feel vulnerable. (If she gets more, they must reason, they get less, maybe?)
Another group of Americans resents and hates her in a manner exclusive to Rapinoe among 2020 Olympians. Nothing productive that comes from that.
