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Comparing Sports Reporting: United States vs. United Kingdom


Part 1: Agenda Setting


As can be expected with our neighbors across the pond, the sports section of the BBC is lacking in American football news. In fact, there is no mention anywhere on the homepage of BBC Sports. Their homepage was dominated by live streams of their latest soccer matches. I was able to get live text updates on what was happening across the ocean and gain insight into the fierce competition between Southampton and Manchester United. The BBC sports page is mostly devoid of any American sports news, which makes sense, accounting for the vast change of demographics and overall consumption of sports between our two cultures. For example, the legendary soccer player Diego Maradona just died a few days ago and it was a devastating blow to the soccer fandom. Yet police have raided his doctor’s clinic and home, a man by the name of Leopoldo Luque, after allegations of negligence of his treatment of the late legend. Maradona’s daughters’ have demanded what kinds of medications were being used to treat their father, indicating that there might be foul play. The BBC article doesn’t get into the police raid, the potential foul play that could be involved, or too much of Maradona’s history with drugs. The article does bring up his cocaine addiction, but that is just to provide the context of his career, which the article spends most of its time doing. This article is essentially a history lesson on a late great soccer icon, mixed in with some relevant crime news. The image used in this article is one of Maradona’s funerals, in which thousands took to the streets to see his casket.

After discussing our British neighbors, it’s time to look at American sports pages. Obviously, sports are a major spectacle in the United States, and one of the biggest proponents of sports in America is Fox. On their homepage, they have the latest game scores on their header and have almost taken a social media approach to their top stories. They are positioned in little tablets, that you can scroll through and each of the links to a recent sports story. There are tablets on who won in the Alabama and Auburn game, who will be the Bronco’s Quarterback in the upcoming season, and a biography on a female football player. Fox’s presentation is simple and sleek, but it still falls victim to some ads within their top tablet stories. In a headline, it explains how NFL fans could win $100,000, yet it’s through fantasy football, a less regulated form of gambling. In fact, ESPN’s very first story is about fantasy football and the team rankings for Week 12. I know I’m not a sport’s person, but the concept of fantasy football or any kind of fantasy league seems trivial and it shouldn’t be the top headline in a culture dominated by actual sports.


Part 2: Sports News Framing


Most of the front page of BBC sport is dedicated to the UK’s fanbase of their native sports, yet there is one American story that has made headlines in the UK, as well as on ESPN and Fox’s pages. The exhibition fight between Roy Jones Junior and Mike Tyson happened captivated headlines this morning, although the fight itself was somewhat lacking. Fox Sports didn’t want to touch this story in their headlines, and ESPN gave us a single minute of footage from the fight. BBC, on the other hand, gave us a full written review, taking cracks at both Tyson and Jones Jr. for their fighting styles throughout the match. The article gave props and slight encouragement to both fighters while offering a critique of Tyson’s absence from the ring and how that could affect him in this fight. The match came to a draw, with BBC reporting on what both fighters thought of their challenger. The BBC also included Snoop Doggs’ reaction to the fight from Twitter citing “It looks like two of my uncles fighting at the BBQ” (Reddy, BBC).

Fox, on the other hand, went a different route. They provided a couple of sentences about the match between Tyson and Jones, it shows the endgame footage where the judges are calling it a draw, but then it quickly shifts its focus to the other fight of the night. The fight between human trash YouTuber Jake Paul and Nate Robinson was apparently good enough to justify almost no coverage on it from FOX. Instead, they added a couple of context sentences to do the heavy lifting while they provided a barrage of tweets to gauge audience reactions. What’s interesting about Fox’s reporting, is that they relied on the community and secondary sources to write their story, and not on a single perception, like BBC’s reporting. By doing this, they cast a wider net of community involvement, along with essentially a free article that you don’t have to write. On the other hand, the BBC provided a full breakdown of the fight and even Tyson’s potential earnings, along with a few tweets to gauge community response. Interestingly, the BBC didn’t even mention the fight between Paul and Robinson, to which I didn’t even know it was happening I saw the Fox article.


Part 3: Visual Elements


BBC’s visual design could use a little work. It looks like a Yahoo! Page from 2011 with lots of little boxes holding links to articles, spaced about to fit into different categories as you scroll down the page. It’s not fancy, but it certainly gets the job done. However, if you don’t know what you’re looking for, it could take your time to search through the tiny headlines. Fox’s is much cleaner, as mentioned before, with a more social media approach. The top headlines that the site decided are placed on a scrollable icon line, complete with edited and flashy pictures to compliment them, something the BBC page lacked. ESPN also has a refined homepage. Even though it doesn’t have the top stories presented like Fox, it does have a clean scrollable headline list. To the left side are all of ESPN’s quick link features. They have all of their affiliates linked, different sports that fall under the ESPN umbrella, their social links, and more. They even have the ability to customize your homepage if you create an account. Of all of the sites, Fox’s was the most visually appealing and easier to read with ESPN coming in at a close second.


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