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What media coverage of the 1968 Olympic protests reveals about the deep structure of attitudes about athletic activism in the United States
Abstract
How do cultural norms, ideologies, and beliefs shape public opinion and media framing of race-based athletic activism? This paper uses media coverage of and commentary on the 1968 American ‘revolt of the Black athlete’ to explicate the deep cultural structures that help explain both support and opposition. The paper begins with a brief, schematic overview of the proposal for a Black Olympic boycott that was the centrepiece of 1968 organising and how it was reported by sports journalists and in the mainstream media. The second section identifies the reasons American reporters were, on the whole, so opposed to the proposed boycott: the inherent lack of support for the athletes’ racial change agenda and the far-more-familiar arguments that sports were not the proper venue for activism. The third section argues that a whole constellation of cultural norms and beliefs—about sport culture, colour-blind visions of racial justice, and liberal democratic ideals about politics and social change—coalesced to make race-based sport protest appear both unnecessary and inappropriate. The conclusion summarises the implications for understanding both public reception of and media responses to contemporary, race-based athletic activism as well as for tracking institutional changes and cultural shifts unfolding in the Black Lives Matter era.
... The discussion at the heart of this study involves the sports journalist discourse on X between the leaked draft and the final opinion. Due to several recent high-profile protests, sports journalists have become more likely to address societal issues, especially if they impact or involve athletes (Cooky & Antunovic, 2020;Hartmann, 2022;Schmidt, 2018). ...
... The U.S. is experiencing a level of athlete activism not seen since the 1960s (Cooky & Antunovic, 2020;Hartmann, 2022;Schmidt, 2018), and today's sports journalists are willing participants in this phenomenon. Athletes have been vocal in support of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the #MeToo movement, and gender wage inequality (Schmidt, 2018). ...
As athlete activism increases and social justice movements gain support and legitimacy, sports journalists have used Twitter (now the social platform X) to discuss off-field issues such as the gender pay gap, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo. This content analysis examines 880 tweets from sports journalists who tweeted about Roe v. Wade in the summer of 2022. Findings contribute to scholarship on the prevalence of sports journalists’ opinions when posting on social media and add to the literature on the symbolic annihilation of women athletes. The analysis also found that sports journalists working for large or elite news organizations were largely absent from the Roe v. Wade conversation on X and that the relationship between the role of the media professional (editors, reporters, broadcasters, and writers) and opinion posting was moderated by their influencer score.
... Research mentioning the power of athlete advocacy from a historical perspective has primarily described the athlete protest in the 1960s (Boykoff, 2017;Hartmann, 1996Hartmann, , 2022. Distinctive examples include protests by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics and the advocacy by Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. ...
Due to the prosperity of sports and continued growth of sports media, colleges and universities are offering an increasing number of courses and majors related to the sports media industry. Via a systematic analysis of 76 syllabi from courses under the sports media umbrella at 30 colleges and universities, this study reveals what is being communicated to students. It also scrutinizes how diversity, equity, and inclusion–related topics are incorporated into sports media course syllabi. Findings include three broad themes across all courses’ descriptions and calendars: targeted skill-based approaches, current events/trends, and experiential learning. Limitations and future implications are also discussed.
This article details three developments of the last decade that have had significant effects on the cultural status and sociopolitical functioning of sport in the United States: (1) an unprecedented wave of sport-based protest and athlete activism; (2) new norms and conventions in the sporting establishment for dealing with athletic protest and social issues, especially with respect to media coverage and commentary; and (3) recent Right-wing ethnonationalist engagements with sport, including targeted criticism of both activist athletes and sport as well as populist mobilizations around sport. I summarize these developments and argue that they have made social issues in, and the symbolic significance of, sport more explicit, contested, and polarized than in earlier eras. This new era of contestation and polarization, in turn, has destabilized longstanding cultural norms and ideals about sport and its relationship to politics and social change. While questions remain about how lasting these changes will be, I suggest these new conditions and the cultural politics that come with them call for a reinvigorated critical, dramaturgical theory of sport—one which sees sport as a site of ongoing social struggle that has public meaning and symbolic significance well beyond the boundaries of sport itself.
The goal of this study was to extend the contemporary athlete activism literature by (a) exploring athlete activism beyond a strictly North American context and (b) examining how athlete activism at an organizational/institutional level (i.e., sport organization) may be framed differently than activist efforts at an individual level (i.e., athlete). By examining two examples of activism in German soccer, we show that the framing of both athlete-enacted and organization-enacted examples of activism highlighted the importance of speaking up when human rights are violated, called for the display of solidarity, and discussed the broader political implications for such protests. Additionally, framing of both examples of activism included voices of criticism regarding the sport organizations governing global sport. As calls for accountability of sport organizations suppressing athlete expression are becoming increasingly common in global sport, this study adds to a shifting focus of activism research targeting the sport institutions that often perpetuate the various injustices individual athletes call attention to.
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