| Popis: |
Referees, sports institutions and researchers regularly denounce the treatment of "men in the middle" on TV. Criticized, denigrated, questioned for their alleged incompetence, officials are particularly vulnerable. Journalists and sports commentators discredit refs by exercising their professional activity. Despite these claims, there is no scientific research into the treatment of referees at sports matches. This article proposes to review the comments reserved for officials to check if they contain evidence of abuse. We hypothesize that two types of journalistic work can be observed : the one that leads the sports commentators to establish the criticism of the refereeing performances, to evaluate them and make a judgment ; and the one leading to the development of comments systematically against the referees’ corporation. The thesis defended here is the bet of a media treatment evolving according to the sports activity, the frequency of its media coverage, the commentators and the properties of the TV show. We propose to analyse the treatment of referees on TV in three sports : football for its high media coverage, hockey-on-ice whose diffusion grows and water polo for the low number of television broadcasts and its confidentiality. We were interested in what the commentators were saying about the referees or their decisions. The produced discourse was the object of a double analysis based on a frequent lexical examination making it possible to evaluate the assumed regularity of a categorized speech and on a contextualized analysis to the type of practice favouring a more qualitative posture. Thus, content analysis and discourse analysis have illuminated the quantitative and qualitative aspects of discursive productions, and their articulation has favoured the pursuit of four objectives : to describe "what" the journalist or consultant is talking about ; go back to "how" he talks about it ; represent what structures his thinking and "interpret" the content of his interventions (Fallery, Rodhain, 2007). This methodology is mobility to account for what the TV can do to the referees. |
