About Guy Harrison, Ph.D.: Guy Harrison is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Media at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Dr. Harrison’s scholarship explores issues related to race and gender equity in sports media and the sports broadcasting industry. Dr. Harrison’s publications have appeared in acclaimed journals such as Communication and Sport, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Social Media and Society, and the Howard Journal of Communications. His book, On the Sidelines: Gendered Neoliberalism and the American Female Sportscaster was honored with the Outstanding Book Award from the National Communication Association’s Communication and Sport Division.
At The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Dr. Harrison serves as Director of the Alan and Wendy Wilson Communication and Leadership Academy, which works to provide the university’s communication students with opportunities to build business and leadership skills, while offering communication training to business students. His experience also includes service on the executive boards of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport and the International Association for Communication and Sport.
Dr. Harrison received his Ph.D. in Journalism and Mass Communication from Arizona State University, an M.S. in Business Leadership from Nova Southeastern University, and his B.A. in Broadcast Communication from Barry University.
Interview Questions
[MastersinCommunications.com] May we begin with an overview of your academic and professional background? How did you become interested in the racial and gendered politics of sports media and journalism and invested in working to advance diversity, equity, and representation in the sports media industry and more broadly?
[Dr. Guy Harrison] My interest in this area actually dates back to my childhood. I have always been an enthusiastic consumer of sports media, but have also always been aware of the gendered division of labor within sports media, especially as it pertains to men’s sports. When I was growing up, that was all that was really on TV. With a few exceptions, women’s sports were not as widely available as they are now. There was a division of labor in the industry where women would occasionally give a brief report on the sidelines, but it was really men who were talking the whole time and providing the in-depth analysis of what was happening on the field or the court.
I carried that knowledge with me through my undergraduate degree, which was in broadcast communications. I wanted to be a sportscaster, but at some point I realized that I did not want the grind. It just was not for me. As much as I enjoy watching and talking about sports, that lifestyle did not appeal to me. An internship that I had my very last semester of college solidified how I felt about the grind, but it also reminded me of the gendered division of labor in the industry. I was working in a local news station in the sports department, and there were no women working in that department in any capacity. All the producers and anchors were men. It was your run-of-the-mill locker room talk almost every day that I was there. I had become accustomed to hearing that sort of language when I went to an all-boys high school, but I did not want that to be the professional culture I was working in.
Instead, I moved into collegiate athletics and media relations. There was still some of that locker room talk, but, because the university offered women’s sports, the athletes themselves, their families, and their friends expected us to provide publicity equal to what we provided to men’s events. Still, I realized that, even though our mission was to provide equal coverage and publicity, we were not doing that. I was typically assigned to the women’s sports teams, and saw the way that men’s teams were getting publicity and access to facilities that the women’s teams were not getting.
From the earliest days of my professional career, I have been keenly aware of the gendered division of labor and the gender politics surrounding sports, media, and how sport and media come together in the sports media industry. Still, I did not think of myself as an aspiring academic until about a decade later, when, by chance, I got to teach a class at a community college in Arizona. It was an introductory course on mass communication. I fell in love with teaching then, and I decided to pursue my Ph.D. at Arizona State.
As I was entering Arizona State, I had two paths in mind for myself as a scholar. I thought I would either research popular culture or study sports media and gender and race therein. My main hesitancy to study sports media was that question of, “Is this work serious enough? Is it serious enough that people are going to want to hire me? Is it serious enough to do a dissertation on it?” If I was more immersed in the scholarship when I was applying to graduate school, I would have realized the answer to that question was, “Yes, there is a huge field of scholarly work in the area of sports media, especially with gender and race.” After having a few conversations with faculty members, that is the path I quickly chose.
At that time in the mid-2010s, there was a lot of popular and media discourse surrounding women in sports broadcasting. This discourse encompassed how they looked, what jobs they held, and reactions to the fact that these broadcasters were suddenly giving their opinions, not only on sports, but also on issues like domestic violence. This was around the time that Ray Rice was suspended from the NFL for assaulting Janay Palmer. Many women in sports media were given a platform to provide their opinions that they did not have access to before. This felt like an important moment to me and has informed my work as a scholar since.
[MastersinCommunications.com] You are the author of On the Sidelines: Gendered Neoliberalism and the American Female Sportscaster, which won the 2022 Outstanding Book Award from the Communication and Sport Division of the National Communication Association. Would you introduce us to the concept of “gendered neoliberalism” and what it helps us understand about how women navigate racism and sexism in the sports media industry?
[Dr. Guy Harrison] Gendered neoliberalism is a concept born from contemporary feminisms and important to feminist media studies. This book developed from my dissertation, where it began as a study of women sportscasters in a “post-feminist” context. After finishing my dissertation, I continued to follow a trio of scholars who write in this area, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg. In a scholarly conversation between them, “Postfeminism, Popular Feminism and Neoliberal Feminism?,” Gill suggested what had been understood as post-feminism is better understood as “gendered neoliberalism.”
Gendered neoliberalism is an ideology that acknowledges that sexism exists, but denies that it can be addressed on a structural level; it is simply a reality that women will have to overcome on their own as individuals. Gendered neoliberalism says, “Boys will be boys, men will be men, and women are going to have to grapple with that.”
In talking to the women I interviewed for my book, I heard echoes of this in almost everything they said. Things like: “You have to have a thick skin to work in this industry,” or “I learned very early on to hide my emotions,” or “I learned that I can’t let them see that I’m struggling with my treatment, or they’ll think I’m weak.” Those are all examples of the way, as I argue in the book, the sports broadcasting and sports media industry requires women entering the field to take on a gendered neoliberal approach to surviving and thriving in the industry.
The really insidious part of it is those women who decide, “I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to hide my emotions or kowtow to men who want me to behave a certain way,” and leave the industry end up — through no fault of their own — fueling the myth of gendered neoliberalism. They become examples for gendered neoliberalism to claim that, because you did not survive, you were not cut out for the industry to begin with. At the same time, those who thrive — often because they have refused to give in to the industry’s expectations of women — are examples that the sports media can use to claim that its version of gendered neoliberalism is equitable.
[MastersinCommunications.com] In this book, and more recent work like “‘Compose Yourself, like Michelle or Oprah’: a Focus Group Study of the Social Identity of Black Women Newscasters in the US,” what has your scholarship revealed about the ways in which race and gender intersect in media and journalism industries to uniquely affect the experiences of women of color?
[Dr. Guy Harrison] One criticism of scholarship on gendered neoliberalism is that, given its roots in feminist media studies, it does not afford sufficient attention to race and its intersections with gender. It is critical that, no matter who the study population is — even if you are interviewing all white women — you cannot have a discussion of gender or the psychosocial impact of gender on people in certain contexts without devoting significant attention to the role of race within that. As it pertains to women working in sports media or even news media, as focused on in “Compose Yourself,” white femininity is the baseline or standard for all women working in those industries. Everyone, regardless of their race, has to conform to that or come as close as possible.
When I talk about white femininity, I am talking about a very specific definition thereof. Partly, it pertains to appearance. We know that, on television, being blonde is helpful, and straight hair, thinness, and youth are valued. That is a big part of the equation. Further, how one comports themselves can also be racialized and subject to stereotyping. This is also mapped onto a normative understanding of power: white femininity describes women who are deferential to, and work to please and appeal to, men.
Any woman, white, Black, or another race, who does not conform to that standard is going to struggle in these industries. While that is often represented as a behavioral or attitudinal issue, it is really a racialized issue. We, as a society, have come to expect white women in particular to be docile and deferential to men in specific, racially coded ways.
An entire book chapter, if not more, could be written about examples of men in sports media who have gotten angry or have started crying on air. These are often received as really powerful moments, where people say, “I can’t believe that happened.” I am thinking of Kirk Herbstreit, the college football analyst. In 2020, Herbstreit spoke in the early weeks of the college football season about the police officers murdering George Floyd. Herbstreit spoke about how he, as a white man, could not fully understand or know what it was like to be fearful of the police at a traffic stop, and he broke down in tears.
Stephen A. Smith is well known, in a contrasting example, to be confrontational and express anger in his on-air interactions. However, when you see that from a woman in any kind of context, it takes many people aback. “Compose Yourself” was especially eye-opening in this regard, because we found that news directors were asking Black women newscasters to compose themselves as they were covering racial protests in 2020.
We allow men to have an emotional reaction on the air to anything that really resonates with them. For women, and Black women in particular, that was frowned upon and discouraged, even in a moment when white men were being praised for their emotional responses.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Another of your recent publications is “The Curious Case of Karen Carney: The Argument for Equity Over Equality in Curbing the Online Abuse of Women in Sports Media.” Would you reflect on what this article reveals about the complex media ecology informing the experiences of women in sports media, and your recommendation that this creates an imperative for sports organizations to pursue equity rather than equality when it comes to engaging women working in sports journalism?
[Dr. Guy Harrison] Ten years ago, when I started my research in this area, many people were taking the position that, if you were a woman and you work in a very public-facing industry, it was likely best that you did not go online to see the response there. Women were advised not to read the comments on their online media and not to see what people were saying about them on Twitter.
It has never been that simple because, nowadays and even 10 years ago when this took place, you need to have some kind of online presence to establish yourself. The days of someone building a career purely through legacy media institutions have gone completely by the wayside. You need to have a digital presence in order to advance, survive, and thrive in this industry. For women, this becomes a double-edged sword, because they need that digital engagement to make a name for themselves, but society and men in particular treat women in vicious and abusive ways online.
Karen Carney gave one opinion about a men’s soccer team. That soccer team retweeted it and made a humorous remark that was innocent enough. Still, the reply invited a social media pile-on that led to Karen Carney leaving Twitter and deleting her account. I think the big takeaway from that particular case study of Karen Carney is that it demonstrates that we cannot just say, “This is a woman working in a male-dominated industry covering men’s sports, so she has to be open to being treated like a man.” Being former captain of the English women’s national team, Carney was a high-profile woman. Further, she was covering a men’s sport in reporting on English Premier League soccer. This was a popular defense of the way she was treated at the time.
Our argument in that chapter is that, in this age, it is impossible to be unaware of the difference in treatment between men and women online. We called upon sports organizations and sports media organizations to account for that.
In many ways, this is the classic equity instead of equality argument. In order for women to feel safe in this industry and have somewhat of a level playing field as it pertains to the emotional or affective labor involved in their work, we need to generate equitable conditions that consider the context of how different people are treated on and offline rather than insist on a blanket “equal” treatment. Until those conditions exist, a sports media organization critically retweeting the work of a woman sports broadcaster does not function simply as disagreement or debate: it makes them a target for abuse.
[MastersinCommunications.com] This piece has connections to other work where you turn to consider esports and digital gaming, such as “Trolligans: Conceptual Links Between Trolling and Hooliganism in Sports and Esports.” What has exploring digital gaming helped you understand about the relationship between sexism, racism, and sports communities, both analog and digital?
[Dr. Guy Harrison] My interest in social media as it relates to gender and race in sports media came about early on in my career. I embarked on the scholarly journey of exploring the issues surrounding women in sports media when Gamergate [an online, targeted harassment campaign of women in the videogame industry, including in design, gaming journalism, and academic criticism] was in the news. This generated a huge amount of conversation surrounding the treatment of women on social media in general, especially in public-facing industries, whether gaming or sports journalism.
My work in that space led to an invitation to collaborate with the group of scholars with whom I wrote the article on hooliganism in esports. There is some overlap between the behavior we see online and traditional sports fan behavior. In the case of that article, we found esports has similarities to the in-person “hooliganism” that we have seen over the years, especially in Western Europe. Much of the anti-social behavior we see in esports stems from toxic masculinity, as is often the case in online interactions and real-life fan behavior. We also argue those behaviors are also importantly different given the space in which they occur. One key difference with esports is that a lot of the anti-social behavior, or trolling, comes from the players themselves.
[MastersinCommunications.com] You have also published pieces critiquing the representation of athletes of color in a number of contexts, from recruitment media to player profiles. What have been some of your key findings regarding racial representation in these forms of sports media, and are there interventions you have suggested that would help cultivate more nuanced and equitable representations of athletes?
[Dr. Guy Harrison] One of the most robust areas of research at the intersection of sports communication and race has focused on the racial representation of athletes, particularly athletes as prospects: either high schoolers who are being recruited by colleges or collegiate athletes who are in line to be drafted. Much has been written about the stereotypical framing of athletes based on their race, where white athletes have often been framed as smarter and having a much better work ethic. They are portrayed as great leaders. They are also represented as less athletic, and if they are, they are often coded as being “sneaky athletic,” because their athleticism does not align with our stereotypes that associate athleticism with Blackness.
Black athletes, in contrast, are typically framed as physical specimens who have uncanny athletic ability, perpetuating biological racial stereotypes that Black people have a different muscle structure that allows them to be more athletic. That kind of framing has persisted over the years. It cuts both ways, too, because it implies Black athletes are incapable of leading teams and being intelligent players, while also introducing a skepticism that white players could compete in the best leagues because they may not be as athletic.
My collaborative research in this area has demonstrated that, today, there is a greater awareness among professionals in sports media of the problem of stereotypical framing. The issue is they do not know what to do about it. In my research about college football recruiting media, there were those professionals who would deny that form of framing was used, while others admitted that they were aware of it, but did not know how to change it. This was partly because they were being fed information by coaches and recruiters around the country who often participated in that stereotypical framing.
I am currently working on a project on the framing of NFL draft prospects. The initial findings indicate that there is less racial framing going on, but it is still happening. I am exploring the connections between these frames and the practice of “stacking,” or the process of segregating athletes by position, which is a process enacted by coaches and executives at all levels of sport.
For example, white football players were often discouraged by coaches, and society at large, from playing running back or defensive back and instead were pushed toward other positions like quarterback, tight end, or linebacker. I think we are still feeling the impacts of that now. I think the framing that we are seeing may result from media professionals relying on lazy stereotypes, but may have a deeper connection to how the entire football industrial complex is still being impacted by the deeply rooted, racialized assumptions that were established by the longstanding practice of stacking.
[MastersinCommunications.com] You currently serve as Director of the Alan and Wendy Wilson Communication and Leadership Academy at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Would you tell us about this initiative and highlight some of your main goals for the institution under your leadership?
[Dr. Guy Harrison] I never would have thought a position like this would be a possibility for me when I embarked on my academic journey, even though it is also very much the kind of role I aspired to before I got into academia. There was a point in time when I wanted to start a nonprofit that would support young leaders by connecting them with industry mentors and opportunities to travel outside the country to develop professionally, personally, and with respect to cultural competency. That is very consistent with the objectives of the Wilson Academy, which plans to provide all of these resources.
We were fortunate enough to get a donation of four-and-a-half million dollars from an alumnus of our College of Communication and Information, Alan Wilson. He is a graduate of our journalism school and the former CEO of McCormick & Company. His vision, as someone who graduated from a communications field and ended up having a very successful business career, was to help communication students graduate with business training and students from our business college graduate with specific communication training. That is the mission of the academy.
We have selected our inaugural student cohort and recently cut the ribbon on the Academy. The twenty students who were selected will receive a scholarship, mentorship from faculty or industry professionals, and an immersive travel experience to Japan. I chose Japan because we have several study abroad programs in our college located in Europe, so I wanted to go somewhere that was completely different that would also garner some interest from our business students.
My interest in this position overlaps with my educational background too. Before I got my Ph.D. in Journalism and Mass Communication, I got a Master’s degree in Business Leadership. When I heard that our college was looking to internally hire a faculty member to lead this initiative, it just made perfect sense for me. I feel exceptionally lucky to be in this position and to have been in the right place at the right time to take on this role.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Based on your experience and expertise, do you have advice you would give to scholars who are interested in race and gender in media and sports journalism, as well as prospective students who are considering a graduate degree in communication studies or a related field like journalism?
[Dr. Guy Harrison] First, I would remind students interested in the field that this is a serious area of study. Any university or department where you are considering pursuing your Ph.D. that does not take sports media or sports communication seriously is not the place for you. There is a pressing need for this research and areas that remain understudied. We need more work, for example, on podcasting and other forms of digital media communication.
More broadly, I would follow Cheryl Cooky and Dunja Antunovic’s Serving Equality: Feminism, Media, and Women’s Sports in suggesting that new scholars should consider the need to rethink or reframe how we examine gender and sports. We, myself included, have tended to look at things from a very negative or deficit-based point of view. Justifiably so — there is a lot that we need to be critical of. Still, I believe we often think too narrowly about gender equity in sports media, with respect to the obstacles women working in or covering men’s sports face. Of course, this remains important, but it is worth expanding that focus and examining how women may be thriving working in and covering women’s sports, especially as they continue to become more popular and widely available. That can change the field as well.
At this point, we know a great deal about why men’s sports is a difficult, challenging field for women to work in. We do not know what organizational racism and misogyny look like for women who cover women’s sports. Are the challenges the same? Are they significantly mitigated? Or, are there challenges, but they are just completely different? This will be a significant area of research in sports communication moving forward.
Thank you, Dr. Harrison, for sharing your insight on gendered neoliberalism in sportscasting, the racial politics of framing and stacking in recruitment media, and more!
Please note: Our interview series aims to represent the diverse research being pursued by scholars in the field of communication, which is often socially and politically engaged. As a result, all readers may not agree with the views and opinions expressed in this interview, which are independent of the views of MastersinCommunications.com, its parent company, partners, and affiliates.
