ABSTRACT
News framing is a routine journalism practice. From business to entertainment to sports, media coverage is filled with journalists’ attempts to organize information in a way that will help people understand and evaluate an issue or event. News framing constructs specific views of the world, helping individuals to evaluate and interpret messages found in news. Framing is grounded in media studies surrounding political messages but the ubiquity of news framing has spread across the communication research field. This chapter explores the rich opportunities to use framing theory and analysis to understand the intersection of news framing and sports fandom. Questions persist in framing effects research, such as whether frames activate emotional reactions that mediate cognitive processes of framing effects and whether there are limits of framing effects and what factors impose those limits. This article lays out how these questions and others might be further applied in context of the world of sports.
