Abstract
On April 19, 2017, Serena Williams “accidentally” announced on Snapchat that she was 20 weeks pregnant. The post was quickly deleted, but The New York Times confirmed its originality later that day. Even the very limited time Williams’ words were accessible was enough to cement the realm of social media as a long-term space for her to spark public discourse about body politics, her own motherhood journey, and mental health. Williams selectively used Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (later renamed X) to announce the birth of her first daughter, Olympia, to reveal details of medical complications following her pregnancy including her personal struggles with postpartum depression and to thank her fans for their on-going support. Media translations of these social media posts moved beyond sports media to the pages of Marie Claire, Self Magazine, and Vanity Fair. In so doing, Williams created a rupture to the ideological process of media framing and the social structure of journalism; her skillful and timely use of contemporary media platforms enabled her to control her mediated pregnancy and the subsequent physical and mental health concerns.
This commentary considers the impact of athletes’ deployment of mental health narratives through social media as a form of metajournalism that requires a recalibration of framing theory and metajournalistic discourse on mental health in sports. While the opening example considered Williams’ pregnancy as the “breaking news” moment, the longevity of her use of social media focused significantly on postpartum effects, being a new mom, and returning as an elite athlete with that extra “mom” title generating unexpected mental health hurdles.
As Kim Bissell, SuYu Chou, and Emily Dirks outlined in their monograph, Williams and other prominent female athletes shepherded an avenue to disclose mental health issues through various social media channels to impact legacy media coverage. As the authors accurately assessed, these revelations of mental health struggles generated metajournalism, which they define as self-reflective journalistic practice intended to improve news reporting. Thus, it becomes important to engage with journalism’s simultaneous reliance on social media as a vehicle to first-sourced material from athletes surrounding mental health and how the careful curation of information presented in these social spaces co-construct a mediated capacity for legacy media to share, interpret, and shape mental health narratives in a journalistic context (e.g., see Chloe Kim and Naomi Osaka sharing their stories in Time). When considering these intersecting athlete/media discourses, it is crucial to contemplate the long-term influence of metajournalism on framing theory.
Media reporting of mental health historically centered on medicalization and sensationalism. Media served as a social agent to perpetuate negative stigmas and violent outcomes, as I noted in the chapter “Media Framing, Sport, and Public Health” co-authored with Janelle Applequist for Health Communication and Sport: Connections, Applications, and Opportunities. However, Williams and Osaka, especially, disrupted that media control with each new social media post that demanded immediate journalistic attention. Both athletes pointed to concerns with legacy journalists’ misinterpretations of mental health, thereby taking charge of their own narrative prior to legacy media “breaking” the news story. This created temporary fissures in journalistic practice.
Framing theory stipulates that media filter information through a process of selection and salience. Equally important, as Helen Fulton and others suggested in their 2005 book Narrative and Media, omitting information discursively privileges sources by including them in media reporting; this subsequently frames a dominant narrative and delegitimizes opportunities for counter-narratives to arise in media discourse.
Social media presents a new transmission model of framing that flips the top-down structure of legacy media to an interactive bottom-up form of conceptualizing a story. Athletes exemplify active contributors and commentators on mental health concerns that outline how “new possibilities and new demands arise for framing research and its professional applications” (p. 75) as Matthew Nisbet explained in his 2009 chapter “Knowledge into Action” in Doing News Framing Analysis. Because of their social status, the elite women athletes featured in the monograph drive a counter-narrative to mental health stigma; they are credible sources whom legacy media cannot ignore.
These distinct social media spaces enabled Williams and others to self-represent their own health narratives and bypass traditional media, thereby, as Bissell et al. suggest, minimizing the risks of mischaracterization. Despite their careful and calculated method of storytelling, however, athletes must recognize that by sharing their personal stories, these messages will ultimately be reframed by both legacy media and thousands of social media users. This can turn nasty, as countless research studies about dispassionate sports fans outline. In this way, athlete narratives of mental health can become propagandized to support growing evidence of mental health needs and of counter arguments that athletes are becoming too pampered and “soft” (e.g., Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka) compared to those “tough enough” entrenched in the masculinized history of sports.
Regardless of the re-framing potential, athletes have positioned mental health closer to the forefront of a public agenda on health initiatives. Their success in doing this elucidates a mechanized control of information that distinctly situates the capacity of social media as a newly formed, salient function that framing theorists must take seriously. Without athletes providing information on social media accounts, legacy media risk losing “direct” contact previously reserved for or restricted to journalistic admittance to locker rooms and press conferences. Social media enables athletes to foster a mediated boundary of access; this undermines the previously restricted and privileged communication model that went in a linear way from athlete to journalist to public. This was illustrated by Osaka’s refusal to participate in these constructed media spaces and instead taking to social media to outline her self-justified cause to avoid them. These threats to journalistic access and practice exemplify how and why social media must be considered a metajournalistic catalyst that challenges traditional framing tropes. As a result, scholars using framing studies must consider best practices for how to understand social media content within the context of developing stories. This is especially important around complex topics such as mental health that are not a one-size-fits-all category but instead must account for type of sport, gender, race, ethnicity, and cultural contexts.
While the potential for engaging mental health narratives is clear for the elite women athletes discussed here by Bissell et al., it must be acknowledged that the social media presence and reach of these five is unlike the majority of athletes in professional sports. Consider their social media following as something akin to a Q rating that recognized the gravitas of who they are; this amplifies their voice and agency to speak out on such topics — and be heard. Social media produce spaces of “mediated voyeurism” that can resemble reality television: It is scripted yet engaging. Arguably more important, this voyeuristic opportunity is exactly why these athletes capitalized on an audience who desired to know about their mental health struggles. Thus, as Brian Moritz suggested on the website Global Sport Matters, their salient presence exemplified how social media wrestles away some autonomous gatekeeping power previously monopolized by legacy media to drive an agenda that repositions female athletes within a sports media landscape that historically omitted them. But it is also a vehicle to introduce new narratives beyond the sports fields and courts where these athletes originally achieved their social status to speak out.
Let’s return to Williams as an exemplary case who combines multiple identities—tennis GOAT, two-time mom, advertising and media mogul. Williams’ use of contemporary media opportunities revealed the constitutive potential of social media to afford athletes agency and control over their mediated narratives. This is especially true when considering how, before the emergence of social media, the revelation of her postpartum mental health struggles would have been filtered through legacy media. Thus, Williams created a media continuum unlike any ever seen in sports: Given how her social media narrative could not be omitted, this new structure positioned her as a powerful and resilient role model alongside a vulnerable and at-risk mother. Her social media content was reframed by legacy media within a context of control over one’s own health embedded in the “experience of real-life women whose political consciousness is bent on changing the institutions of power in our society” (p. 61) as described by Rosi Braidotti in her 1997 chapter “Mothers, Monsters, and Machines” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Understanding how Williams positioned her desire for mental health and how media reframed it can lead to greater examination of how—through her dominant tennis success—she successfully inhabited a sporting borderland between femininity (as a woman athlete and mom) and masculinity (within a sport context that demands mental toughness to win). How she presented her mental health challenges exemplifies a successful metajournalistic re-framing that illustrates the power dynamic afforded through social media.