U.S. Olympian Simone Biles returned to the 2024 Olympic stage in Paris after withdrawing from the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo due to mental health issues. This return drew considerable international attention to Biles from a variety of sources, including traditional media sources. Given the breadth of attention paid to Biles’ return, an important question arises around how her return was framed. Understanding this question has value in a psychological context because the ways in which a story is framed by news outlets have a tremendous influence on how audiences process and recall a given story, and further provide audiences with heuristic cues that may be used to make sense of a story (e.g., Entman, 2007).

In this study, we examined the issue frames employed in ten articles published during the 2024 Olympics in the top newspapers in the US (i.e., The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal) We used the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count Analysis Program (LIWC), a software used to analyze word use (Boyd et al., 2022) to examine five common frames used in media coverage: (1) Morality; (2) Human interest; (3) Economics; (4) Conflict; and (5) Agent of Responsibility (e.g., Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000). Results indicate that conflict and morality were used most when covering Biles during the Olympics. No differences in framing type were identified between publications. Results are discussed regarding their implications for discourse surrounding mental health, framing, and audience processing.

Authors:
Emily Dolan, Slippery Rock University, United States
Brittany Fleming, Slippery Rock University, United States
Jessica Covert, Singapore Institute of Management, Singapore

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Emily Dolan is a University Assistant Professor/Lecturer at Slippery Rock University in United States

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