Will a New Medium for Sports News Offer Less Trivialization of Female Athletes? Examining Descriptors and Traditional Stereotypes in Internet Articles on the NCAA Women’s and Men’s Basketball Tournaments. By

This study examined descriptors given to women’s and men’s basketball players, coaches, and teams during the 2006 NCAA Division I women’s and men’s tournaments by two online sport media outlets: ESPN Internet, CBS Sportsline. The primary purpose of this research was to determine if the gender-specific stereotypes that research has shown are reinforced through television and traditional print media coverage of female and male athletes were present in Internet sport journalism. This study included all 249 byline articles on March Madness published over a 26-day period during the spring of 2006 in the two outlets. Results contradicted the gender-specific stereotypes found in previous studies on sport media coverage of female and male athletes