About Travis R. Bell, Ph.D.: Travis R. Bell is an Associate Professor of Digital and Sports Media at the University of South Florida (USF), where he also serves as Director of Graduate Programs and Research in the Zimmerman School of Advertising & Mass Communications. Dr. Bell is an acclaimed scholar of sports communication whose work explores issues of framing and representation in sports media, with attention to the intersections between race, gender, and health.
Dr. Bell’s publications include the books CTE, Media, and the NFL: Framing a Public Health Crisis (2019, Lexington) and Gender Defenders of the Sport Binary: Mediating Discourses of Difference Against Intersex and Transgender Female Athletes (2025, Peter Lang), as well as articles in leading disciplinary journals such as Communication & Sport, Journal of Sports Media, and International Journal of Sports Communication. His contributions to sports communication research have been honored with the distinction of Scholar of the Year by the Florida Communication Association and the Lawrence Wenner Emerging Scholar Award from the Communication and Sport Division of the National Communication Association. In 2024, USF named Dr. Bell an Outstanding Graduate Faculty Mentor.
Documentary filmmaking is an important part of Dr. Bell’s scholarship, and his films include Objects in Motion, Tampa Technique: Rise, Demise, and Remembrance of Central Avenue, and Critical Race Theory: Roots and Myths. Alongside his academic career, Dr. Bell is a successful multimedia journalist, with experience as a reporter, videographer, photographer, anchor, and host. He received his Ph.D. in Communication and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of South Florida. He also received his M.S. in Sports Administration from Florida State University and holds a B.A. in Radio/TV Broadcasting and a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Central Florida.
Interview Questions
[MastersinCommunications.com] May we begin with an overview of your academic and professional background? How did you become interested in digital journalism and sports media, and, in particular, come to focus your scholarship on media representations of health, race, and gender?
[Dr. Travis Bell] I worked for 12 years in broadcast television, mostly as a multimedia sports journalist. For about 10 of those 12 years, I was specifically focused on the sports broadcasting space, and then I shifted into teaching news reporting classes as an adjunct at the University of South Florida (USF). I hit a fork in the road, where I was unsure if I should stay in television or pivot my career to teach about broadcast journalism. Ultimately, I made the decision to shift into academia. I went back to school part-time, and started my Ph.D. in Communication.
My teaching was centered on the application of broadcast journalism: how to shoot, write, edit, create content, and tell stories. I found that my doctoral studies quickly started impacting the way that I thought about making media and teaching media production. My coursework began to inform my thinking on how to frame stories, how to identify sources, and whom to consider talking to, which impacted how I taught the practice of broadcast and sport media journalism.
It took until about 2016 for my research on sport to take off. It seemed like the natural space for me to specialize in because of my knowledge of the field and industry. I was also beginning to identify the social issues that were central to sport. I became much more engaged in issues of representation — or the lack thereof — in sport media and the significance of media framing to those representations.
This evolved through my work on specific projects; my interest in gender representation, for example, was bolstered by work on the U.S. Women’s National Team winning the Women’s World Cup in 2015. My work on racial identity developed through my dissertation, which was not sport-related, but would lay the foundation for my subsequent work on race and sports. Finally, my interest in sports and its relation to health equity came from the emerging concern around chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), especially following the release of the movie Concussion. That provided the impetus for my book about CTE and media representation [CTE, Media, and the NFL: Framing a Public Health Crisis as a Football Epidemic].
[MastersinCommunications.com] As you just mentioned, your work at the boundaries of sports communication, media studies, and health communication includes your co-authored book CTE, Media, and the NFL: Framing a Public Health Crisis as a Football Epidemic. For those of our readers who might be less familiar with the concept, would you introduce us to the concept of media framing, which has been important to your work more broadly? How does this book diagnose the framing practiced by what you call the “sport/media complex,” as ultimately working to preserve football’s link to hegemonic masculinity at the expense of player safety?
[Dr. Travis Bell] Broadly, framing describes how media representations of issues and events can operate in ways that are persuasive, or influence how audiences understand those issues. Framing operates through selection, where certain topics are chosen for coverage while others are omitted or erased. Framing also describes the way media messages construct these topics as salient. Salience describes how audiences are encouraged to understand the importance of the issue being represented [e.g., coverage of a war could emphasize or deemphasize its humanitarian, security, or economic impacts, among other issues, making those areas more or less ‘salient’].
Academic scholarship on framing has both psychological and sociological roots. I would situate myself on the sociological side, especially in the tradition of Robert Entman’s work. I see value in work that attempts to measure the psychological influence of framing on audience understanding or perception, but, for my own part, I am more interested in critically engaging with the content of these messages and applying this to my own pedagogy in training future journalists and storytellers.
CTE, Media, and the NFL: Framing a Public Health Crisis as a Football Epidemic began as a paper in a health communication course that I took during my Ph.D. program, which happened to align with the release of the movie Concussion. For anyone who is not familiar, Concussion is the story of Bennet Omalu, who is the doctor credited with diagnosing the first case of CTE in a professional football player in American football. The movie tells the story of his journey and his struggle against the NFL’s attempt to repress his research.
My issue with the way framing worked in this film begins with the title. The movie is called Concussion, but Bennet Omalu discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy not concussions. This both misrepresents the work of the doctor and the nature of CTE. There is a public perception that concussions lead to CTE, which can be true. But CTE does not only result from concussions. CTE develops from repetitive blows to the head that cause traumatic brain injury. A number of different things can cause it; it can be sustained through sports or car collisions, and has been diagnosed in cases of domestic violence and injured veterans. The name of the movie displays a disconnect between media representations and the science of the disease.
As I was finishing my paper for this course, it just so happened that Bennet Omalu was participating in a speaker series in Tampa, and I had the opportunity to hear him speak. In his address, he pointed to issues that he saw in the way the media was framing CTE in their reporting. This began a long journey that developed my understanding of how and why words matter in the context of media coverage. I co-authored CTE, Media, and the NFL with my colleagues Janelle Applequist and Christian Dotson-Pierson. We examined nearly 12 years of news coverage, beginning in 2005 when Bennet Omalu diagnosed the first case of CTE in Mike Webster, and concluding in 2016, which is when the NFL first publicly acknowledged there was a connection between concussions and repeated blows to the head and long-term brain injuries.
This acknowledgement from the league was significant, but continued to distort and minimize the issue. In looking at these 12 years of media coverage, it became clear that media reporting was framing this predominantly as an American football problem, even though the science around concussions and brain injuries indicated that it could be caused by any contact sport, whether it was soccer, gymnastics, or lacrosse. People could develop this disease from playing any sport that puts them at risk of traumatic brain injuries. Our argument was that the media was amplifying the misleading perception that this was a football epidemic.
The most fascinating findings from our study, though, pertain to the way we saw the media framing this issue in relation to hegemonic masculinity. In the context of sport, this plays out in a valorization of the violence of athletics. We see this in the “pain principle”: the idea that succeeding in sport involves playing through pain. Athletes are not only expected to play through injury, they are expected to want to do so. The desire to play through pain works as a measure of both their athleticism and their masculinity.
This helps explain why, despite all the science behind CTE, 100 million people are watching the Super Bowl, and tens of millions of people are still playing high school football. Football symbolizes hegemonic masculinity in the sporting space, which helps create conditions where players and the audience both expect and accept that football is violent and may lead to injury. This may be why CTE has not dissuaded our culture from embracing the sport.
For students interested in graduate school, I think this book speaks to the long evolution of scholarly ideas. The project started as a paper for a course and turned into a full-length manuscript tracing the history of degenerative brain diseases, contact sport, and media framing. It also shows how, when you are doing research, there is often a moment where a lightbulb goes off, and you realize there is something more to what you are studying than you initially thought. What began with an interest in the misleading framing of a film’s title led us to a much deeper engagement with the ways in which these discourses connect to hegemonic masculinity.
[MastersinCommunications.com] While your work has been generally interested in dominant media frames, in a recent essay, “Mediating ‘Real Life’: Social Media as Metajournalism and a Narrative Rupture to Framing Theory,” you take up the event of Serena Williams’ inadvertent disclosure of her pregnancy and subsequent mental health advocacy to explore how social media has complicated traditional models of framing. Would you discuss this piece and its implications for understanding how social media can disrupt dominant media framings and foster spaces for agency and resistance?
[Dr. Travis Bell] That article was a commentary piece in Journalism & Communication Monographs. I was first invited by the editor of the journal to review the manuscript that Kimberly Bissell, SuYu Chou, and Emily Dirks wrote, “Elite but Struggling: Mediated Narratives of Women Athletes and Mental Health Disclosures,” which comprised the main part of the issue. That article was a deep dive into mental health and media coverage, and it focused on five prominent women athletes: Simone Biles, Serena Williams, Naomi Osaka, Chloe Kim, and Gracie Gold.
Dr. Kimberly Bissell is a friend and colleague. Her work explores the connection between mental health, women’s sport, and media framing. In this essay, Dr. Bissell and her co-authors are pointing to the ways that social media can offer an avenue for athletes to generate their own narratives, resist public representations of their mental health concerns, and explain why they are navigating sport the way that they are as professional athletes. I was invited to review the manuscript and asked if I would be willing to write a commentary in conjunction with the monograph. This was a very interesting process, and the first time I had done that.
In my commentary, I wanted to use one of the athletes considered in Bissell’s piece as a lens to consider the idea that social media can offer a meta-journalistic rupture or challenge to the broader concept of framing. Media framing has been studied since the rise of mass media in the 1950s and 1960s, when the media industry was made up of very narrow channels that made it easier to control the messaging and the narratives circulated by broadcast organizations, newspapers, and reporters. The case of Serena Williams illustrated how this ecology has changed significantly with the popularization of social media. She was able to offer a narrative about her challenges with her pregnancy and the implications it was having for her mental health in a way that challenged the stigma around mental health and the patriarchal expectations that organize how women athletes are expected to relate to having children. Her public account of her struggles on social media was open, honest, and authentic, and subsequently influenced and organized how media institutions began to frame these issues.
This ruptures the traditional dynamics of framing where the media aggregates information and then frames it in certain ways when it circulates that information to the public. Social media makes this a more circular process; the narrative is more co-constructed. Athletes and celebrities have a significant online following. Their narratives have enough authority to create their own media frames, which then gain traction with the public. More traditional media organizations still attempt to contribute to these discourses and shape how the public receives them, but media framing is a much more fractured and contested space than it was prior to the popularization of social media.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Another thread of your work examines “racial stacking” in different forms of media representing athletes, including “(Re)Coding the ‘Black Quarterback’: A 20-Year Critical Quantitative Analysis of Racial Stacking and the Mediated Dichotomy Between ‘Pro-Style’ and ‘Dual-Threat,’” and “HoopGurlz’s Biased Recruiting: Racial and Positional Stereotyping in Girls’ Basketball Scouting Reports.” Would you describe racial stacking and its relationship to stereotyping, as explored in these pieces, and the implications these practices have with respect to racial equity in athletics?
[Dr. Travis Bell] Racial stacking arose from the integration of sport in the United States. As more athletes of color started playing in professional sports leagues, especially baseball and football, research emerged documenting the stacking of players by race into central and peripheral positions. The idea was that the central positions would remain white, creating a racialized process that contained the integration of players of color and maintained white ownership over sport.
Key positions associated with leadership or deemed more “intellectual” positions were dominated by white athletes. In baseball, this was the pitcher, the catcher, and the center-fielder. These were the three perceived “intellectual leaders” on the field, because they needed to be aware of everything that was happening and had more control over decision-making. In football, it was the quarterback, the center, and the middle linebacker. These positions are the play-callers, and perform like coaches on the field. Non-white players would be moved to the periphery, where they were allowed to participate insofar as their movements could be controlled.
More recently, scholars have turned to investigate the mediation of racial stacking. What role might the media play in this practice? How might its discourses and practices maintain or reinforce some of these ideas? These questions drive both of the studies you mentioned in your question. “(Re)Coding the ‘Black Quarterback’” considers the macro-level structure of athletic recruiting. In football, there is only one quarterback on the field at a time, so the position is very competitive. We investigated recruitment media covering high school athletes with the potential to play in college.
In 2001, recruiting websites like rivals.com and 247sports.com introduced a classification system for quarterbacks consisting of a “pro-style” category and a “dual-threat” quarterback. Pro-style would be considered the prototypical “professional-ready” athlete in a recruiting sense, compared to dual-threat quarterback, who was distinguished by their athleticism in running the ball, as well as their passing potential as a quarterback. The idea behind the project was to see whether these categories were being applied to racialize quarterback recruits.
Our hypothesis, based on a brief review of the data, was that “dual-threat” would largely be applied to people of color, and “pro-style” would largely describe white players. We conducted a content analysis for reporting from 2001 to 2020 to see if that was actually happening and found that it was. Approximately 85% of pro-style quarterbacks were white players. Pro-style quarterbacks, in turn, made up two-thirds of the overall population of quarterbacks. This added up to a profound marginalization of non-white players in the quarterback position.
“HoopGurlz’s Biased Recruiting” looks at media reporting on high school girls’ basketball players being recruited to college. In basketball, there are five players on the court at a time, and each is coded by position. Recruitment media includes narratives that describe who the players are and their style of play, which are about 100-120 words long. We developed a codebook based on Andy Billings’ [Dr. Andrew C. Billings’] work on broadcast television coverage of the Olympics to analyze five years of these narratives to see if they used language that categorized certain positions, like point-guard, as intellectual or leadership positions, and other positions, like center, as more physical and aggressive. In turn, we examined whether, statistically, these positions were respectively associated with white and Black players. We found evidence of these tendencies across the 499 examples we considered.
In both of these articles, then, we found media discourse functions to reify the racial segregation of these positions, even in these mediated, online spaces where more resistance is possible. What is interesting is that these rankings are published on websites, but social media circulates these categories as micro-level forms of racialization. Resistance could potentially emerge in two ways. Most importantly, recruiting websites could take notice of our research findings to better inform the writers of stories and those who rank these athletes. Second, individuals could start to realize they are part of the problem by re-circulating these often unconscious acts of racialization and the consequences they have for high school athletes, and they could resist participating in this process.
[MastersinCommunications.com] How do racial stereotyping in sport and stacking manifest as significant equity issues for student athletes who are subjected to these stacking protocols, for example, with respect to their career success?
[Dr. Travis Bell] I see that as the next step in this research process. How can we extend these investigations to see whether these players ended up playing quarterback or their chosen position in college? There are indications that players classified as “dual-threat” quarterbacks often end up playing different positions in college or professionally.
I saw this happen when I worked in Tallahassee as a sports reporter and covered an athlete named Anquan Boldin. Boldin was an elite-level high school quarterback. He was recruited to Florida State University as a quarterback, but he almost immediately switched positions. I get the sense from his public comments this had to do with his realization he would never be afforded a real chance to play at quarterback. He became a great wide receiver, but, one year at the Sugar Bowl, the starting quarterback was suspended and the backup was injured. Boldin was put in as quarterback on the national stage, and he played phenomenally. This made me think critically about the equity concerns involved in this shift in position.
A valuable next step for this research would be to go back and trace the trajectory of the other quarterbacks who were part of the data we analyzed and ask if they maintained their playing position at quarterback. If not, did they switch positions? Did they transfer? Did they make it to the NFL? Did they complete their education? Each of these are significant concerns for the implications stacking and media framing have on equity. Their specific socioeconomic impacts may prove difficult to measure, but with football being such a high value sport, both in the hyper-economized space of college athletics and at the professional level, access to that space has obvious economic implications.
Right now, my sense of these impacts is anecdotal, drawn from my research and experience as a former sports reporter. There is still the need to quantitatively analyze whether, and to what degree, these trends are occurring. I also think it would be invaluable to conduct interviews with these quarterbacks to qualitatively grasp how stacking and their representation in media affect their identity as an athlete. I want to unearth their personal narratives to arrive at a better understanding of how the complex dynamics we have been discussing work together to influence how these athletes navigate their athletic careers.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Your recent book is Gender Defenders of the Sport Binary: Mediating Discourses of Difference Against Intersex and Transgender Female Athletes. Would you provide us with some background on this project and preview some of the key media discourses you consider here? Are there important connections between this book project and the critique of hegemonic masculinity in CTE, Media, and the NFL, discussed above?
[Dr. Travis Bell] This book also started as a paper in a class. As soon as I submitted my tenure packet, I started a Graduate Certificate program in Women’s and Gender Studies at USF. I was taking a course on transnational feminisms in the spring of 2022 and considering what to write about. Over the course of that winter, Lia Thomas, a transgender woman who had recently begun competing on the women’s swimming team at The University of Pennsylvania (Penn), became the focus of national media attention.
Thomas had competed on the men’s swimming team at Penn for three years, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. From what I have read, Thomas was beginning her medical gender transition when the pandemic hit. The swimming season ended up being cancelled for two years, which extended her eligibility to compete. When she returned, she had completed hormone replacement therapy, and met NCAA standards to compete on the women’s team.
To provide some background, the bifurcation of athletics into men and women’s sport was developed according to the gendered social perception of men as more athletic than women. It has a long history connected to Title IX legislation, where it was conceived as a way to get women athletes into college sports by carving out a space for them within the structures of collegiate sport and higher education. Beginning in 2010, the NCAA adopted a policy governing the participation of transgender athletes in college sports. This policy was based in the medical science on gender affirming care. Some medical disclosure was required of the athletes, but there were not nearly as many clinical requirements for participation when compared to the IOC [International Olympic Committee].
It is also important to stress the distinction between men and women’s sports with respect to the treatment of transgender athletes, which connects to our earlier discussion about hegemonic masculinity. Transgender men competing in men’s sports had not been the subject of nearly as much criticism. If they were medically transitioning, using testosterone or other hormones, there were some barriers to entry. But there was a public perception, tied to hegemonic masculinity, that transgender men were not going to be competitive in men’s sport. There was even Schuyler Bailar, a transgender man who competed as a men’s athlete for Harvard. The media’s reception of Baylor was positive, even celebratory, when compared to Thomas.
When Lia Thomas began to win in women’s swimming, it became a major social challenge to the binarized, gendered foundation that divided men and women’s sport. In response, as she was preparing to compete in the Ivy League Conference Championship, USA Swimming announced a change in policy that, if adopted by the NCAA, would have disallowed Thomas from competing. The University of Pennsylvania and the Ivy League Conference advocated for Thomas, and the NCAA ultimately decided not to adopt USA Swimming’s policy. This shocked me because the organizational structure of competitive swimming affords USA Swimming a great deal of influence over who can and cannot compete in international competition. Still, even though Thomas was ultimately able to compete, it is remarkable that USA Swimming and the NCAA reevaluated and changed their policies in the middle of a season as a reaction to one person winning.
A month after these events took place, I was at the International Association for Communication and Sport (IACS) conference. Currently, I am Vice Chair of the IACS, and I would recommend the conference we host to any graduate student interested in sport communication. That year, Chris Mosier, a competitive runner who was the first transgender man to compete in a men’s Olympic qualifying event, was giving the keynote. The timing of it made my head spin, and I knew there was more to the project than a course paper.
I reached out to a friend of mine who edits a sports communication book series. They put me in touch with Anne Osborne. She had been developing a project on transgender athletes for Peter Lang Publishing. We forged a great friendship and co-authored Gender Defenders of the Sport Binary together.
We examined roughly one hundred years of news coverage, looking at framing in the discourse constructing “non-feminized” female athletes. We were interested in exploring how media, sports policy, and medical and scientific discourses came together in this context to defend the gender binary. We also traced personal stories of athletes whose gender became an object of media commentary because they were perceived to not conform with the binary. Our study focused on intersex and transgender athletes who had diverse biological characteristics and gender identities, but had the shared experience of being marginalized within competitive sports for not fitting within the gender binary.
For me, this study brought to light how news media struggles to provide the necessary context to understanding current events and scientific information. Media coverage of these events has fueled controversy about transgender athletes that, in turn, has driven competitive sports organizations to adopt policies that exclude transgender athletes from organized sports. We hope this book provides some of the important, missing context that helps explain how we got here, to a place where sports organizations and media are working to police the gender binary in competitive sport.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Documentary filmmaking is another important part of your scholarly practice. Would you tell us a bit about your documentary work — for example, Critical Race Theory: Roots and Myths?
[Dr. Travis Bell] I have students who tell me they want to make a documentary, and my first question is always, “Why?” I think that the question one is trying to answer should dictate the form of one’s output — whether that is a journal article, a book, or a documentary. For example, I attended the National Communication Association Conference in 2024 and presented two completely different types of research: my film on critical race theory and a paper on parent-coach communication within fee-based youth sports. Those are very different topics, with the former lending itself much more to the documentary style than the latter, which is more suited to a paper. The documentaries I have worked on are either engaged with something that is inherently visual or aimed at visually amplifying the invisible by interviewing people.
My film on critical race theory (CRT) documents the political discourse of different elected officials at press conferences or mediated events in order to examine how they are representing this scholarship. It depicts how they are positioning it as a nebulous, threatening set of ideas. As a result, when you poll the U.S. population about CRT, they identify it as being racist, rather than a way of understanding and interpreting racism and other structural, institutionalized power inequities. For me, a film seemed to be a much more impactful way to tell this story. It is able to juxtapose the different narratives and perspectives on this issue to create a cohesive representation of the current public controversy over CRT.
I see my work in documentary, teaching, video production, academic writing, and public scholarship as equally informed by a focus on my audience. The form our work takes should respond to what we see as the most effective way of translating what we know to the people we are trying to educate. Academic scholarship has to be willing to adapt its communication to its audiences if it hopes to contribute to the development of a more informed society.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Based on your experience and expertise, do you have advice you would give to students interested in digital sports journalism, media representations of race and gender, or the connections between sports and health communication who are considering pursuing a graduate degree in communication or a related field like journalism?
[Dr. Travis Bell] When I am speaking with prospective graduate students who are interested in journalism, one of the first questions I ask is, “Why do you want to pursue graduate school?” Having a master’s degree in journalism is not necessarily a bad idea for someone who wants to be a practitioner, but journalism is a field where it is still standard to dive right into the industry with a bachelor’s degree.
At the same time, a master’s degree can be very helpful for practitioners to develop a deeper sense of applied practice, and that can make you a more informed participant in the field. I think journalism and communication practitioners, from public relations specialists to people working in strategic communications, would benefit from more deeply engaging with academic scholarship on communication and its social, political, and ethical implications.
If you are interested in researching journalism, then graduate school is more necessary, and a master’s program tends to be a steppingstone to a Ph.D. When you are researching programs, it is good to be aware that some may be more focused on developing practitioners in the industry, while others may be more research-intensive. There are many paths available to those interested in journalism, so I try to guide students to the one best suited to their objectives.
Thank you, Dr. Bell, for sharing your insight on race, gender, and health in sports and sports media, exploring your documentary film work, 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.
