Media Framing of Sports Competitions. Going Beyond the War and the Show Frames of Sports Events

As an interdisciplinary field, sports activate and re-contextualize a wide repertoire of symbolic elements, among which war nand show ethos seem to be the most prominent. The aim of this study is to go beyond the "war" and the "show" frames duality and to discuss the emergenceof a new hybrid construct: the sports war-show. Based on a discourse analysis of textual and visual units – images and their corollary captions, the study outlines the way in which media frame an international sports event, i.e. the 2011 Women's Handball WorldChampionship. While the evaluative potential of the textual component proves to be underused in media's coverage of sports competitions, the visual component is defined by a clear tendency to dramatizationand personalization, using the war and show elements in order to stress out the affective loading and the competitive tension of sports events as global war shows.