Framing the space of performance enhancing drug use in sport: Nationalism bias in the Australian Media

ABSTRACT

Sports media regularly frames the issue of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) through the ideals of morality, nationalism and expected behaviours. This has provided an emergent focus for research studies and extensive and enlightening coverage. This study aims to identify how the Australian media frames PEDs across a diverse range of media sources through the selection of five print and online media publications. Using nationalism bias and media framing, the study researched the prevailing positions, language and framing each publication used to report on individuals associated with, linked to or found to be using, PEDs. The prevalent, ‘nationalism-based’ reporting emerged, glorifying anti-doping procedures in relation to international athletes and sporting programmes. In comparison, the guilt and severity of punishments given to Australian athletes was questioned. Thus, the reporting presents both a political and biased narrative that is explored further within this manuscript.

KEYWORDS:

• Doping
• nationalism
• journalism
• performance enhancing drugs
• sports ethics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For instance, Goh (2021) highlights the Code’s inability to appreciate natural or physiological differences between athletes prevents an ethical interpretation of illegitimate performance enhancers. Not only do all anti-doping rules violations (ADRV) receive the same negative social stigma, but there is also potential for all acts (intentional or not) to potentially receive the same ban (Loland and McNamee 2019).

2. The original plan was to collect data during the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, this specific time period was chosen after the 2020 Olympic Games were postponed. This study was a 12-month post graduate project completed in 2020 meaning data collection could only continue for three months. As a result, the collection period encompassed data available prior to the postponement of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games and retrospective data was collected via online media databases.