Journal of Sports Media

In sports broadcasting, a dichotomy exists between a network’s financial interests and its journalism responsibilities. Many sports networks enter contractual agreements into the billions of dollars for the rights to broadcast live sporting events as part of their network programming. Typically, these live events produce high ratings and generate significant profit for the networks. However, this conflict between a sports network’s business and journalistic affairs raises a compelling ethical debate. Working under the theoretical model of hybrid messages—the assumption that news networks include promotional themes in their journalism programming that aren’t easily recognizable to the viewer—this introductory study analyzed 168 broadcasts from the two most prominent nightly sports-news programs, SportsCenter and FOX Sports Live, to examine whether sports networks more heavily promote leagues with which they are contractually affiliated. The study yielded the existence of hybrid messaging in newscasts, specifically finding that sports networks self-promote by showing more in-depth coverage of games and leagues with which they have a financial interest, while also filling a significant portion of the news program’s most prominent block with programming that serves their interests. However, the relationship extant between sports networks and sports leagues makes it difficult to ascertain whether the sports networks are self-promoting in their journalism programming or simply following journalistic practices.