Co-framing the 2024 WNBA Playoffs: ESPN’s Deferential Approach to Selling Misogynoir

Abstract

As the 2024 Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) season drew record viewership, it also became a site of intense media discourse about race, racism, and rivalry. This article examines ESPN’s broadcast commentary during the 2024 WNBA playoffs, a period marked by heightened racial harassment of players, to explore how, under economic and political constraints, sports broadcasters enlist engaged audiences as co-authors of meaning. I theorize this rhetorical practice as co-framing—a process through which broadcasters invite and incorporate audience engagement in narrating conflict, rivalry, and controversy. Through close analysis of broadcast discourse, this study demonstrates how racial conflict is rendered legible as entertainment and how narratives surrounding gender, race, and responsibility are negotiated, amplified, or muted. By tracing these dynamics, this research contributes to ongoing debates about power, agency, and authority in an evolving sports media ecosystem.

Introduction

In 2024, following a first-round Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) playoff game between the Indiana Fever and Connecticut Sun, a single play eclipsed the game itself. After Sun guard DiJonai Carrington (who is Black) poked Fever rookie Caitlin Clark (who is white) in the eye while contesting a shot, social media erupted. While both Carrington and Clark later described the contact as unintentional, Carrington became the subject of public racial harassment and personal threats of violence (Young 2024). Following the incident, a widely circulated image on X transposed Carrington and Clark’s faces onto an image of Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd. Although originating from a single account, the image gained traction through reposting and commentary, elicited a public response from Carrington, and was referenced in subsequent media reporting and ESPN broadcast discourse. Right-wing commentators framed the poking incident as an “assault,” fixating on Carrington’s fingernails and physique (Leitner 2024). Across the 2024 season, such coverage typified a pattern of pitting Clark against Black players—namely, the Chicago Sky’s Angel Reese—in narratives saturated with racial spectacle (Pickman 2024). Mainstream outlets, such as ESPN, publicly condemned these racist outbursts, attributing them to “trolls” who hijacked the WNBA story. Commentators lamented the rise of toxic fandom, echoing Connecticut Sun Coach Stephanie White’s critique that “trolls framed the narrative” (First Take 2024a). However, in condemning digital racism, ESPN simultaneously amplified and sensationalized it by emphasizing online conflict, amplifying racial controversy, and transforming trolling into a recurring storyline to sustain public attention and commercial interest.

This moment illustrates a central tension of contemporary media convergence. While digital publics appear to challenge institutional authority, they often become entangled in the same circuits of visibility, virality, and profit that sustain mass media. As Graeme Turner (2010) argues, this is the logic of the “demotic turn,” a shift that gives “ordinary people” more screen time and symbolic presence but rarely redistributes power. Building on Turner’s framework, this paper introduces the concept of co-framing to describe how mainstream media and digital audiences collaboratively construct racialized narratives in the hybrid television-social media ecosystem. Specifically, I situate ESPN’s coverage of the 2024 WNBA playoffs within this co-framing process to examine how the network reproduced racism and misogynoir while branding itself as neutral and self-aware. Drawing on televised commentary from the two weeks following the Indiana-Connecticut matchup, I argue that ESPN’s supposedly “neutral” engagement with trolls and audiences transformed racism into spectacle, marketing moral outrage as entertainment, while deferring responsibility to external scapegoats. Following, this paper aims to contribute to ongoing debates in media and cultural studies about how legacy institutions like ESPN sustain cultural authority and commercial relevance by monetizing participatory publics and affective economies of racial controversy.

Representing Black Women Athletes

Prior scholarship on representations of Black women athletes documents the persistence of racialized and gendered tropes that position Blackness in opposition to whiteness. Media coverage routinely fails to recognize Black women as “multiply burdened” subjects navigating patriarchy, racism, classism, nationality, and ethnicity, instead rendering them simultaneously unfeminine and hypersexual (Cooky et al. 2010; Schultz 2005; Withycombe 2011). Coverage of Serena Williams, for instance, routinely cast her as masculine, hypersexual, and threatening. Because tennis is historically aligned with white, upper-class femininity, Williams’s physicality and assertiveness were framed as violation, denying her the internal subjectivity granted to white women athletes (Kaufulu 2023; Tredway 2020). Intersectional analysis helps explain how media construct Black women athletes as racialized and gendered others. Rather than treating race or gender as discrete categories, intersectionality foregrounds overlapping systems of power. Recent Black feminist scholarship, however, critiques intersectionality’s “citational ubiquity” and its tendency to position Black women as its default subjects (Cooper 2015). A more nuanced intersectional approach attends to heterogeneity and difference among Black women’s experiences (Nash 2019). Bailey’s (2021) concept of misogynoir further specifies the anti-Black racist misogyny directed at Black women, highlighting how racism and sexism operate simultaneously in ways often obscured in mainstream feminist and anti-racist discourse, particularly across digital and cultural spheres.

Black women basketballers have long been subjected to this form of anti-Black sexism in media representation (Zenquis and Mwaniki 2019). During the 2007 NCAA Championship between Rutgers and Tennessee, radio host Don Imus referred to the majority-Black Rutgers team as a band of “nappy headed hos” (Cooky et al. 2010). Contrasting their apparent lack of class and masculinity with the “cute” white players from Tennessee, Imus’s commentary re-ified whiteness as the quintessential beauty standard and Blackness as other, low-class, and masculine (Cahn 2015). Coverage of the incident centered on Imus, rather than the Rutgers players who were harmed, treating racism and sexism as individual transgressions rather than structural features of sports media culture (Cooky et al. 2010). This framing failed to meaningfully engage Black women athletes as agentic subjects and instead reproduced a broader pattern in which their voices and experiences are marginalized or instrumentalized in moments of controversy. Similar dynamics persist in more recent coverage, where Black women athletes continue to be scrutinized through racialized and gendered frames that emphasize demeanor, appearance, or “attitude,” while minimizing their athletic labor and interpretive authority (Bruce 2016). Angel Reese, for example, has been routinely positioned as excessive, aggressive, or unsportsmanlike in contrast to white opponents, reproducing long-standing racialized and gendered narratives about demeanor, femininity, and legitimacy in women’s basketball (Parsons et al. 2026).

Furthermore, as racial, feminist, and LGBTQ+ activism have become branding strategies across sport, these discourses are frequently co-opted by commercial and ideological forces (McClearen 2021) Research on WNBA discourse shows that right-wing actors weaponize intersectionality to re-center whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality. On social media, for example, Brittney Griner’s return from Russia was framed as evidence that marginalized identities—being Black, gay, and a woman—confer “privilege,” casting straight white men as victims (Keaton et al. 2024). Across its nearly thirty-year history, the WNBA has engaged in similar negotiations. The league initially marketed itself as a post-racial, heteronormative space of “super-moms,” later embracing Pride and Black Lives Matter within a broader neoliberal turn that commodifies visibility and activism rather than sustaining political commitments (McDonald and Barnes 2025). Together, these dynamics underscore that race and sexuality are not fixed identities but categories constructed and leveraged by ideological and market interests within and beyond the WNBA.

Framing Trolls

In this article, I treat trolling as a communicative practice that helps structure contemporary sports media discourse. While popular media often uses “trolling” as a catch-all term for any deliberately provocative online behavior, this study approaches trolling as a specific mode of mediated interaction that becomes especially salient in moments of controversy, virality, and spectacle. Phillips (2015) defines a troll as “a person who likes to disrupt stupid conversations on the internet,” seeking amusement through the emotional responses of others. Importantly, Phillips cautions against understanding trolls as figures external to media culture. Instead, trolling practices frequently draw upon and intensify colonist, masculine, and white supremacist logics already normalized within mainstream media and political discourse (Phillips 2015).

Feminist scholars have further conceptualized trolling as a form of gendered violence. Mantilla (2013) describes gendertrolling as the coordinated, sustained targeting of women through gender-based harassment, threats, and intimidation. Extending this work, Banet-Weiser and Miltner (2016) argue that such practices are better understood as networked misogyny: harassment that is distributed across platforms, amplified by visibility, and embedded in broader cultural economies of attention. These dynamics are particularly pronounced in sports media contexts, where Black women athletes experience disproportionate levels of racialized and gendered online abuse (Kavanagh et al. 2019). Rather than remain confined to fringe online spaces, such harassment frequently becomes visible through screenshots, quote-tweets, and curated “reaction” segments that circulate across social media and news coverage. Scholars of media spectacle note that outrage, conflict, and provocation are economically valuable forms of content, especially in competitive digital media environments (Papacharissi 2014; Penner 2020). While trolls do not single-handedly drive media agendas, their content can become valuable to news organizations when framed as evidence of controversy, public backlash, or cultural division. This observation does not suggest that legacy media simply endorse or intentionally promote trolling. Rather, it points to how trolling practices, networked misogyny, and media spectacle intersect within platformed information economies that reward visibility and engagement. As Kuo and Marwick (2021) argue, trolls should not be conceptualized as external “pollutants” of an otherwise neutral media ecosystem but actors whose practices are entangled with platform logics and journalistic routines oriented toward sensation, circulation, and profit. Situating trolling within this broader media ecology also helps clarify ongoing debates about framing.

Classical framing scholarship conceptualized framing as a largely top-down process, wherein institutional media emphasized certain interpretive cues while marginalizing others (Gitlin 1980). The rise of social media has complicated this model, prompting scholars to examine how everyday users participate in meaning-making through commentary and viral circulation (Nisbet 2010). Sports media scholars, in particular, have highlighted the influence of online audiences in shaping narratives around athlete performance, identity, and activism (Keaton et al. 2024; Schmidt et al. 2019; Xu 2023). However, as Turner (2010) argues, this shift is better understood as demotic rather than democratic. While non-elite voices become more visible, their participation is often incorporated into existing institutional frameworks. In this sense, user-generated outrage, including trolling, does not replace top-down framing but becomes one of the raw materials through which legacy media continues to assert narrative authority. Rather than presuming institutional complicity, this study examines how platform logics, user practices, and journalistic routines interact in specific cases to co-produce racialized and gendered meanings (Matamoros-Fernández and Farkas 2021). This approach allows for an empirical assessment of how outlets such as ESPN absorb, contextualize, or marginalize online discourse without assuming those outcomes in advance.

Method

To examine how ESPN framed digital audiences and invoked the figure of the “troll” in coverage of racism, sexism, and misogynoir during the 2024 WNBA playoffs, I conducted a critical textual analysis grounded in McDonald and Birrell’s (1999) method of reading sport critically. This approach treats sports media as “cultural texts” through which social meanings, ideological assumptions, and relations of power are negotiated. Rather than evaluating accuracy or intent, reading sport critically analyzes how mediated sporting moments function as “vantage points from which to observe, critique, and intervene in the complex and contradictory interactions of power” (McDonald and Birrell 1999, 296). I employed this method by, first, engaging in a close rhetorical reading, a form of qualitative textual analysis that examines patterns of language, symbolism, narrative, and evaluative framing to interpret how meaning and power operate within mediated texts (Foss 2018), and, second, considering these textual features within their institutional and socio-political context, drawing on insights from critical race and feminist scholarship (Bailey 2021; Crenshaw 2015). Examining these narratives within the context of ESPN’s role as the WNBA’s primary broadcaster enabled analysis of how power operates not only through explicit claims, but also repetition, normalization, and moments of rupture.

ESPN was selected as the primary site of analysis because of its institutional authority and unparalleled reach as the WNBA’s principal broadcast partner in 2024 (Friend 2025). ESPN broadcast the entire 2024 WNBA postseason, including all twenty-two televised playoff games, making it a comprehensive and internally consistent site for analyzing dominant media framing. The following analysis focuses exclusively on broadcast coverage aired between September 22 and October 6, 2024. This timeframe includes all playoff games proceeding the 2024 WNBA Final and begins with the on-court incident discussed in the introduction. Additionally, this period corresponds with a pronounced spike in public and media discourse about racial harassment and “trolling” in the WNBA. I conducted exploratory searches using the terms “WNBA,” “racism,” and “troll” across weekly intervals on Google and Bing. Results increased from six mentions in the week preceding September 22 to over 1,040 in the subsequent two-week period, before returning to single digit counts after October 6. While not intended as a comprehensive content analysis, this exploratory mapping helped justify the analytic focus on this discrete moment of heightened attention.

Broadcast segments were retrieved from ESPN’s official YouTube channel, which serves as a digital archive for the network’s programming. During the selected period, ESPN published 19 WNBA-related videos, including talk show commentary, interviews, and pre- and post-game coverage. Each video was watched, transcribed, and closely read. Analysis proceeded iteratively, with initial readings identifying recurring frames, rhetorical strategies, and points of emphasis, followed by subsequent readings that refined and deepened these observations. After identifying core analytic patterns, I returned to relevant theoretical frameworks in a process of interpretive “thickening” (Geertz 1973). This reflexive, iterative approach (Charmaz 2014) strengthens interpretive validity by grounding theoretical claims in sustained engagement with the texts themselves. Through this method, the following analysis examines how ESPN’s coverage positioned audiences in relation to racialized controversy and how the figure of the “troll” functioned within broader discourses of responsibility, conflict, and authority in contemporary sports media.

Background

After facing racism and threats of violence online, DiJonai Carrington returned for game two to a similarly hostile atmosphere of heckling attendees, some wearing fake nails and “ban nails” t-shirts. After the game, Sun forward Alyssa Thomas said the harassment was “unacceptable” and she had “never experienced the racial comments (like those) from the Fever fan base.” Clark denounced racism and those propagating it: “Those aren’t fans. Those are trolls” (NBA Today 2024). Sun Coach Stephanie White implicated the media for having “allowed trolls on social media to frame the narrative” (First Take 2024a). While several athletes, commentators, and league officials distinguished “trolls” from “fans” in their public responses, these categories are not mutually exclusive. Scholars have identified negative fan expression through concepts such as “anti-fandom”—a performance of dislike of media texts and othering of its audience—and “inter-fandom,” where fans of one text attack fans of another text (Gray 2003; Hill 2017). In practice, individuals who identify as fans may also engage in trolling, particularly within platform environments that reward antagonism, amplification, and spectacle (Scott 2018).

Subsequently, the WNBA pledged the administration “will not tolerate racist, derogatory, or threatening comments made about players, teams and anyone affiliated with the league” (WNBA [@WNBA] 2024). However, this statement followed comments made days earlier by WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert, who likened the “dark” social media discourse to the “Bird-Magic moment,” arguing fans “don’t want everybody being nice to one another. . . Sports need rivalry. That’s what makes people watch” (Doug 2024). While struggling with low viewership in the 1980s, the National Basketball Association (NBA) and media leveraged racial rivalry to attract audiences by pitting Larry Bird, a white, small-town star, against Magic Johnson, a Black, charismatic talent (Merlino 2011). Sports television, as a cornerstone of traditional broadcasting, epitomizes television’s power to shape narratives and influence public perception (Tamir and Lehman-Wilzig 2023). In 2024, Disney controlled most WNBA broadcast rights via ESPN and ABC, positioning the league as both a sporting and entertainment enterprise (Friend 2025). In order to sell sports, broadcasters modify the product to increase its value by transforming unadulterated game streams into definitive storylines and players into promotional tools (Lopez 2023). While the 2024 season saw unprecedented viewership, tripling 2023’s numbers and drawing sustained national media attention, the WNBA has nevertheless reported annual losses since its founding (Dixon 2024; WNBA 2024). This ongoing financial instability makes the league’s survival dependent on Disney to render it appealing to audiences and advertisers. Engelbert’s comments suggest that this rivalry was not a natural outcome but a media-constructed narrative that capitalized on social tensions to generate attention and profit. While WNBA players experienced social media attacks as legitimate harm, Engelbert’s remarks imply that, within the sports media and entertainment complex, racial tension are also a mechanism for driving audience engagement.

While sports leagues are often overpopulated with athletes of color, sports media logics remain structured around cis-white male ideals that racialize athletic labor by emphasizing Black and brown athletes’ physicality while positioning white athletes as intelligent leaders (Frisby 2016). These media logics further marginalize women athletes and non-heteronormative identities through unequal coverage and gendered framing, often rendering homosexuality invisible or treating it as aberrant within a presumptively heterosexual sports media culture (Fink 2015; Magrath and Anderson 2022). Within this ecosystem, the WNBA represents an anomalous space. 80 percent of league players are people of color, 70 percent are African American, and many identify as LGBTQ+ (Richard 2022). Black women and non-binary athletes have long been excluded from recognition in sport and broader sociopolitical discourse (Cooky and Antunovic 2020). However, WNBA players are at the forefront of the “return of the woke athlete,” and have consistently led activist efforts from dedicating the 2020 season to Breonna Taylor to campaigning for political candidates in Georgia (Delevoye 2022; Serazio 2019).

While social media has amplified players’ voices, it has also intensified harassment, particularly against women of color and LGBTQ+ athletes (Noble 2018; Yan et al. 2018). The George Floyd meme targeting DiJonai Carrington exemplifies this dynamic (TMZ 2024). The image, which places the figure of Clark/Chauvin kneeling on Floyd/Carrington’s neck, both visualizes racialized violence and operationalizes it as a form of online harassment, mobilizing a shared cultural memory of anti-Black violence to demean and threaten a Black woman athlete. As Jordan (2020) and Brown et al. (2025) argue, Black women athletes are rendered “political” whenever they speak rather than simply perform. For ESPN, which has been criticized for repeatedly supporting progressive causes (Strauss 2017), mediating the WNBA becomes both politically and economically fraught, as corporate interests, audience ideology, and racialized gender politics converge to shape which forms of activism are legitimized or contained.

Invoking Trolls

Throughout playoff coverage, ESPN commentators argued that external forces, namely trolls, were intervening in WNBA discourse, spinning focus toward racism, and distracting from the game. This stance elevated trolls to the position of co-framer in the WNBA product. Turner’s (2010) concept of the demotic turn describes a shift in media culture in which institutions foreground the voices of “ordinary” people as a marker of democratic and objective legitimacy. Within contemporary sports media, this turn is visible in the routine invocation of fans, social media users, and online discourse as shaping forces in coverage (Hutchins and Rowe 2009). Considering this framework, I identify ESPN’s rhetorical interventions as a process of co-framing, through which media institutions simultaneously acknowledge and obscure their own power by positioning audiences—including trolls as well as fans—as co-authors of public narratives. By attributing racism, harassment, and sensationalism to trolls, ESPN commentators adopted a deferential posture that framed the network as an objective or neutral conduit responding to an already-existing discourse. Through co-framing, ESPN appeared to devolve responsibility for dramatizing the WNBA narrative while continuing to benefit from the attention such controversy generated.

Commentators followed Caitlin Clark and Stephanie White in associating online harassment with trolls, extraneous influence, and the ulterior motives of non-fans. Analysts applauded Clark for her “on point” comments, agreeing “those aren’t fans. Those are trolls.” This framing rhetorically separated harassment from fandom, even though trolling and fan identification are not mutually exclusive. In some segments, racial discourse was cast as “BS” and “noise,” suggesting the perpetrators of online abuse were not central or inherent but peripheral and irrelevant (First Take 2024c, 5:05). In others, namely Stephen A. Smith—one of ESPN’s most visible figures, known for a debate-driven commentary style that blends journalism and entertainment—likened online harassers to internet terrorists, describing them as “merciless” people, who “hide behind computer screens. . . . don’t give a damn about decency. . . and attack women and children.” These attackers were not WNBA fans but “people who were looking at the WNBA and using that as a means to castigate people like myself” (First Take 2024c, 8:20–8:30). Although Smith (who is Black) identified harassment as the product of white supremacists, his reading ultimately functioned like attributions of troll discourse as “noise.” In both cases, harassment was positioned as external to the sport itself rather than as a condition emerging from its mediated culture. Treating racial harassment as external toxicity reflects a broader media trend that falsely prescribes safety, equity, and health to an ecosystem structured on racism, sexism, and homophobia (Kuo and Marwick 2021). While this framing may reflect aspirational values of sport and journalism, it becomes problematic when it displaces accountability for how media institutions select, amplify, or contextualize racial conflict. By adopting this approach, ESPN presented itself as unbiased mediation rather than commercial entertainment, turning controversy into profit while promoting the illusion that sports media is neutral and fair.

ESPN further distanced itself from racial harassment by portraying trolling as a distraction from “real” sports media, which they impressed should pertain only to the game. This stance aligns with journalistic norms that prioritize focus, order, and coherence. Analysts Chiney Ogwumike, a former WNBA player, and Kendrick Perkins, a former NBA player, positioned themselves as conduits for unadulterated analysis, asserting, “We’re here for one reason. . . for the game to speak for itself and not let the trolls do the talking,” because “what matters most (is) those young ladies going out there and doing their damn thing” (NBA Today 2024, 2:50–4:00). While masquerading as guardrails that refocus discourse on basketball, Ogwumike and Perkins advanced two inaccurate claims: first, that ESPN lets “the game speak for itself,” and second, that trolls shape discourse without mediation. Perkins cemented the latter, lamenting, “We can’t control the trolls” (NBA Today 2024). This claim does not suggest journalists should ignore harassment, but rather that they lack agency over how it enters public discourse. This statement also epitomizes co-framing in action. It implies that ESPN has no agency over what becomes news, even when the network chooses which quotes to repeat—namely Clark’s—and whose narratives to centralize—again, Clark’s. While analysts may not individually “control the trolls,” media outlets wield the power to highlight or ignore social media discourse (Couldry and Hepp 2017). When ESPN disguised this framing capacity and emphasized the outsized role of trolls, it granted trolls artificial authorship in public discourse. In transforming trolls into co-framers, ESPN constructed an ambiguous external force responsible for perpetuating racism, behind which the network could claim neutrality and lack of agency. Welcoming the troll as co-author allowed ESPN to devolve responsibility for its sensational tactics and using racial spectacle as intrigue. Although analysts did not condone racism explicitly, their commentary failed to denounce harassment outright. Instead, by embracing a false sense of objectivity, they positioned themselves against a constructed troll army. While this stance aligns with broader myths of sport as apolitical unity, it contradicts ESPN’s ongoing reliance on drama, star-making, and human interest (Butterworth 2020).

Constructing Audiences

ESPN further downplayed its institutional role in shaping racial discourse by repeatedly invoking “the audience” as the reason racial conflict became central to coverage. Commentators framed public interest as the explanatory force behind why these narratives circulated, positioning the network as responding to existing concern rather than actively shaping attention. Viewers were cast both as drawn to racial drama and as the implicit arbiters of what constitutes a legitimate sports story. For instance, Ogwumike argued:

Our country is captivated by achievement in sports. That’s why we come together and watch these games, to see all those great storylines come to fruition from college to the pros, but based off of what they represent, you can see the crevices of society (Get Up 2024, 5:30–5:45)

In the above quote, Ogwumike realized ESPN’s audience as representative of the entire country and a greater American commitment to sports as drama. These storylines, however, are not purely about hard work or game prowess and, instead, serve as a window into the “crevices of society.” While Ogwumike declined to name these crevices as racism, she intimated as much, positioning racial rivalry as a crucial factor in why audiences tune in. Similarly, Smith elevated viewers and their racial intrigue to the dominant authority in defining public discourse, lamenting,

The society. . .they decide what they want. We can point out how wrong it is. We can point out that shouldn't be a reality, but what we can't do is say this is what matters and that doesn't, when the audience was telling you something else matters (First Take 2024b, 13:27–13:45).

Through these concessions, Smith and colleagues engendered a second persona—an imagined audience—who plays a pivotal role in constructing the narrative with the ultimate power of defining the media’s actions and deciding what issues should be central. Invocations of audience always offers insight on the ethical perspective and purpose of speech (Black 1970). In welcoming viewers into these discussion, ESPN imagined its audience as the true agenda setters and ESPN itself as a passive conduit for external demand. This is not, however, an argument grounded in reality, as it ignores the network’s reach, agenda setting, and framing functions, cloaking their influence and commercial interest behind a impartial facade. In speaking to and against an imagined audience of co-framers, ESPN used notions of empowered viewership to further supposedly entertaining discussions of racism while attributing them to other speakers.

Analysts further reinforced their profit-driven framing by echoing Engelbert’s invocation of the Bird–Johnson rivalry. By mythologizing the “Bird–Johnson moment,” ESPN naturalized racism as audience demand. Ogwumike agreed that “history repeats itself,” likening Clark–Reese to when “Larry Bird and Magic Johnson stormed onto the scene. . . took the NBA off tape delay and elevated it to the modern day” (Get Up 2024, 4:50–5:10). On First Take, commentators again framed “history repeating itself,” describing two “captivating” figures who “revealed the underbellies of society but still made it interesting” (First Take 2024b, 10:50–11:00). In casting Bird and Johnson as mythic heroes who rescued the NBA, ESPN downplayed the media’s own role in amplifying racial narratives then and now. This interpretive frame aligns with the considerable literature on a “Great White Hope” trope, wherein media coverage of predominantly white athletes in racially charged contexts historically constructs them as heroic standards against which athletes of color are measured (Criblez 2015; Smith 2011). By framing Bird and Johnson’s stardom as inherent to the athletes themselves, and audience interest in racialized conflict as natural, ESPN obscured its own role in amplifying these narratives.

Racial discrimination in women’s basketball is a legitimate and necessary subject of journalistic attention. My critique is not that ESPN invented racial conflict or coverage of racism is inherently sensational, but that the network displaced responsibility for the prominence and framing of racial discourse onto “the audience,” obscuring its own editorial role within a commercial media system. By invoking racial rivalry as audience-driven, ESPN echoed Engelbert’s claim that racial conflict produces growth, mirroring neoliberal multicultural logics in which racial difference is commodified as consumable spectacle (Molina-Guzmán 2013). This framing renders the Carrington-Clark, Clark-Reese, and Bird-Johnson rivalries as marketable narratives that highlight racial diversity while leaving structural inequities intact. In attributing demand for these narratives to a supposedly authorial audience, ESPN further obscured its role in reproducing whiteness as normative, even as it profits from the visibility of Black athletes and racialized storytelling. Framed through other institutional actors, analysts ultimately positioned the WNBA as broadly palatable across political lines while legitimizing racial controversy as spectacle through constructed scapegoats.

Gendered Protectionist Framing

ESPN’s coverage repeatedly advanced the claim that, as a women’s league, the WNBA product deserves increased protection. This assertion did not emerge as an analytic conclusion but as a protectionist frame mobilized by commentators in response to troll harassment. In articulating this position, ESPN analysts—importantly, all men—drew on sexist tropes of infantilization and fragility, framing WNBA players as “young ladies” whose status as women should insulate them from public abuse rather than prompt institutional accountability for how harassment is mediated and amplified (NBA Today 2024). In explicating this framing, I do not seek to advance the claim that the WNBA requires increased protection but, instead, analyze and call attention to how ESPN mobilized protectionist rhetoric to reassert narrative control and gendered hierarchy. Take, for instance, Smith’s assertion in response to continued racism direct at WNBA players:

The fellas have been going through this forever, [but] there used to be a code, you don't do that to ladies, but [on social media,] there is no line of decency, there isn’t such a thing as you don’t mess with women and children” (First Take 2024b, 8:00–8:30).

In appealing to this “code” of protectionism, Smith reinforced a logic of symbolic dominance where men embody brawn and stoicism while women depend on male defense. Analysts repeatedly emphasized the WNBA’s supposed need for protection by casting its players as “ladies,” who are polite and refined in contrast to the NBA’s “fellas,” crude and resilient enough to withstand harassment (First Take 2024b). By invoking the defense of “women and children” as a matter of “decency,” commentators sustained a commonsense patriarchy that naturalizes men’s strength and women’s fragility, even in a digital, disembodied space. Although recent scholarship points to a decline in overt gender hierarchies in sports media, ESPN’s male commentators demonstrate their persistence (Cooky and Antunovic 2020). Smith’s appeal to “wartime decency” draws on a longstanding “culture of risk,” where athletic value is tied to pain tolerance and suppressed vulnerability. The infantilization of WNBA players and references to their maternal roles symbolically diminish both their athletic legitimacy and social authority, reproducing a rigid binary in which men are strong and women weak (Duncan and Messner 1998). Notably, these hierarchies are most forcefully articulated by commentators rooted in men’s sports, suggesting that analysts who center women’s athletics, such as Ogwumike, may offer alternative gender imaginaries less bound to inherited norms (Bruce 2016).

Greater emphasis on fragility and protection also breaks with prior scholarship, which argues Black women athletes are portrayed through associations with masculinity, sexuality, and disruption, and appeared to mirror traditional representations of white women athletes (Cahn 2015; Tredway 2020). Whereas mainstream media has historically cast Black women athletes with an overemphasis on physicality and classlessness, Carter described Alyssa Thomas’s response to racial harassment—her admission of facing “unacceptable” “racial comments from the Fever fan base”—as a “heartbreaking” moment, repeatedly emphasizing her emotional restraint and vulnerability (Sports Center 2024). Similarly, Ogwumike emphasized Thomas’s “soft-spoken” demeanor and unsettled countenance, casting her comments as a plea from a harmed victim and a “woman of few words” (First Take 2024c, 4:25). This language rhetorically distances Thomas from the familiar trope of the unruly or aggressive Black woman athlete, but it does so not by granting her authority. Instead, commentators recast her as passive and in need of protection. While ESPN’s coverage diverged from the entrenched trope of the Black woman athlete as an unruly aggressor, it merely inverted the script, substituting vulnerability for aggression. Both frames—hyper-aggression and helplessness—function to deny Black women athletic agency and subjectivity. This rhetorical reversal, though seemingly sympathetic, reinscribes traditional ideals of feminine fragility and reasserts women’s inferiority as athletes. Moreover, by continuing to center Clark in discussions of player harassment, commentators further displaced attention from Thomas’s experience, reproducing the racialized hierarchy they appeared to critique.

As the central figure in ESPN’s coverage, Clark became inseparable from conversations about racist attacks targeting her colleagues. Though not the object of most harassment, she was positioned as a sympathetic proxy, particularly when framed as a victim of external actors invoking her name to sow chaos or white supremacy. When she offered even limited pushback against harassment, commentators elevated her to heroic status. That valor was sharpened against ESPN’s portrayal of Thomas as meek and vulnerable. Rather than reproduce older tropes of Black female aggression, ESPN recast Black WNBA players as multiply-burdened victims. While this counters right-wing depictions of Black women as violent, it risks reinscribing harm by redefining them through oppression (Bailey 2021).

In both conservative and liberal frames, Black women were denied agency. While conservatives cast Carrington as uncivil and out of control, ESPN emphasized her vulnerability over her power. Clark’s prominence also reflects American sports media’s longstanding appeal to a white, male gaze (Brandt and Carstens 2005). Scholarship on the NBA notes that when the league was perceived as a “Black domain” in the 1980s, coverage expanded only after Larry Bird emerged as a marketable “white hope” (Rosenbaum 1995). Clark functions, similarly, offering a figure through whom the WNBA—often coded as a Black domain—can be marketed to white audiences. Unlike Bird, however, WNBA players are framed through youth and vulnerability, intensifying white infantilization and protectionism. As a stand-in for the league, Clark effectively whitens both its image and coverage. By centering this white-branded sexism, commentators sidelined the intersectional realities of Black women athletes and layered misogynoir directed at them. In casting Black players as perpetual victims without naming misogyny’s racialized dimensions, ESPN flattened structural harm into marketable hero/victim narratives. Racism and sexism became consumable spectacle, reinforcing an apathetic white gaze. In defending players from “racist” trolls, ESPN ultimately reaffirmed its authorial power and its enduring commitment to promotional frames that resonate with white-coded audiences.

Conclusion

As both a sports and entertainment network, ESPN’s response to targeted social media harassment illustrates the tensions that arise when legacy media institutions confront racialized conflict within commercially mediated sport. Rather than overtly sensationalizing racism, commentators frequently positioned themselves as neutral intermediaries for external discourse, attributing racialized hostility to trolls and audiences while continuing to circulate narratives that rendered racial conflict “captivating.” This strategy, which I conceptualize as co-framing, does not deny institutional framing but rearticulates it through appeals to neutrality that obscure editorial selection and amplification. Read through this lens, ESPN’s coverage did not simply reflect external dynamics but participated in shaping how those dynamics were understood, particularly through recurring contrasts between sympathetic white figures and vulnerable Black athletes. While these patterns do not establish intentionality, they demonstrate how longstanding racialized frames can be reactivated under the guise of impartial mediation. In this way, co-framing enables institutions to benefit from heightened attention to racial controversy while deflecting responsibility for how such narratives are structured and sustained.

This study is limited by its focus on a single network and a narrow window of coverage. Nevertheless, it suggests that co-framing warrants closer scholarly attention as a broader institutional practice through which media organizations incorporate external discourse while maintaining narrative authority. Future research should examine how audiences interpret claims that they “frame the narrative,” how such claims shape understandings of harassment and accountability, and how athletes experience being positioned within these frames. Taken together, these findings point toward the need for greater scrutiny of how neutrality, participation, and responsibility are rhetorically negotiated in contemporary sports media.