To win or to enjoy: A comparative discourse analysis of masculinity in de Telegraaf and USA Today.

Abstract

This study introduces Hofstede’s cultural masculinity dimension to cross-cultural representation of sport news by conducting a comparative discourse analysis of news articles reporting matches on the Olympics in the Netherlands and the United States. These articles are analysed to determine how masculinity is represented in the articles of both countries. The quotes are retrieved from the Dutch newspaper de Telegraaf and the American newspaper USA Today discussing the Beijing Winter Olympics 2022. Within three different categories (Belief, Attitude, Rhetoric), 31 masculine or feminine signifiers are defined and a corpus of nine articles from U and eleven articles from the USA Today is analyzed. Differences between the two countries are found in terms of the presence of masculine signifiers in all categories. The findings from the quotations show a difference in the extent to which sport news has the tendency representing sport to be assertive, tough, and focused on material success (‘wanting to be the best’) or supposed to be more modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life (‘liking what you do’) between the Netherlands and the US. The implication of the difference in representation of masculinity is explained in terms of cultural context.

Keywords: Masculinity; sport news; comparative quotation analysis; Dutch newspaper; American newspaper