Coverage of Northwestern Unionization Attempt
On March 26, 2014, the Chicago district of the National Labor Relations Board ruled that football players at Northwestern University were employees, not amateur athletes, and were able to vote on wherather they should form a union. Led by former Wildcats quarterback Kain Colter and National College Players Association president Ramogi Huma, and backed by the United Steelworkers union, the newly formed College Athletes Players Association (CAPA) had successfully convinced NLRB regional director Peter Sung Ohr that college football players were primarily on campus to win football games, not for an education.
The decision sent shockwaves through the world of intercollegiate athletics, as the NLRB ruling threatened to end the seemingly entrenched NCAA system of amateurism. It also came at an extraordinary time of change in college sports. On the legal front, the NCAA faced several lawsuits over athlete compensation and health-related issues. Outside the courtroom, the chase for television revenue has forced schools to switch conferences as for financial reasons, while the NCAA and football power schools have signed lucrative basketball and football playoff television deals in recent years. When placed withinIn this context, the saga involving Northwestern calls into question an enterprise moving further away from its educational mission.
A study conducted by myself and fellow graduate student Alex Holt for the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism at the University of Maryland examined media coverage of Northwestern players’ attempt to unionize, with a specific focus on how both the unionizing players and college sports establishment were framed. Past research on the media coverage of professional sport labor unions suggest the existence of an anti-union, pro-management bias within the media. Research also notes that sport labor disputes are covered from the perspective of the consumer, often ignoring the underlying issues creating the labor strife in the first place.
The existence of the Northwestern case within the college sports realm also brings up issues unique to the realm of intercollegiate athletics. Scholars have demonstrated that the NCAA has shaped discourse to maintain its amateur system even as big-time college football and college basketball increasingly mimic their professional counterparts.
College sports’ increasing intimate ties to television networks also suggests a potential conflict of interest within coverage of labor unions. ESPN’s decision last year to back out of a documentary project critical of a key broadcast partner, the NFL, underscores the potential conflict of interest between television networks and the organizations with which they do business with. Each major network which broadcasts college athletics utilizes a website to disseminate information online. While looking at traditional print media, this study also examines the coverage on these websites and their framing of Northwestern’s union push.
A framing analysis was conducted utilizing past research on college sports and hegemony and political economy. In all, three major frames were identified in coverage. First, a focus was placed on improving student-athlete welfare. A second frame concentrated on the how a potential union would affect the future of both Northwestern football and college athletics ats large. The last major frame showed the media attacking the power structure within college athletics, while lightly glossing over some of the major problems affecting the sport.
Frame #1: Focus on Student-Athlete Welfare
Both print and online journalists focused on the CAPA’s potential to give athletes a much needed voice on their fate within the college athletic system and for benefits such as long-term medical care. Dennis Dodd of CBS Sports.com believed that student-athletes deserved to have their voices heard, especially since their bodies were on the line for very limited compensation. In support of the CAPA and itstheir quest for better health-care for athletes, Dodd noted, “A free education doesn’t pay for dementia at age 50, or a knee replacement at age 60.” Similar to Dodd, Washington Post columnist Mike Wise noted the issue of concussions and singled out “the travesty of programs funneling kids through the system, picking their class and majors for them in some instances, ‘receiving a degree, but they are not truly receiving an education.”
While coverage of labor has often painted unions as greedy and overly aggressive, media commentators commended the CAPA and its players for taking a nobler route in focusing on welfare issues. Pat Forde , a columnist for Yahoo Sports, noted that “the CAPA is not grabbing a bullhorn and shouting, ‘”Pay the players!’ ” It is avoiding that divisive, hot-button topic for the time being and focusing on player health and education.” Big Ten Network writer Tom Dienhart listed several of the CAPA’s demands and then quickly reminded readers “Note what wasn’t included: pay for play. CAPA already has argued that the players were employees based on the fact they are paid in the form of a scholarship.”
There was a markedly mix view in web publications of Colter and a potential union. Yahoo Sports’s Dan Wetzel praised Colter, who was inspired to become a national leader in the union movement from a summer class, for being a model student-athlete. However, Dienhart described Colter, who complained his football commitment prevented him from a pre-med curriculum, as a spoiled brat of sorts who should have been content with his football scholarship. The potential union, while depicted as a possible bastion of reform, was also described as an imperfect solution. Northwestern alum and USA Today columnist David Calloway believed unions probably served as the best hope for reform, yet, noting the waning power of unions, questioned “ how could any reasonable young person expect a union to protect them these days.”
Frame #2: The Future of College Sports (and Northwestern Football)
Echoing previous studies, another major frame focused on how a potential union would affect fans. Within this frame, the Northwestern unionization story was transformed from a story about student-athlete welfare to a story about the 2014 Wildcat season. In a report from Northwestern’s spring practice, Tom Dienhart noted that the union vote was “hanging over the on-field goings-on” and was “a distraction” for Coach Pat Fitzgerald and his team as they tried to erase the memories of the previous year’s 5-7 campaign.
The frame also focused on the future of college athletics. An April 4 column in the Washington Post by sports attorney Donald Yee was titled “In the 2020 College Football Season, Will Your Favorite Football Team Still Exist?,” but despite that column’s title, there doesn’t hasn’t appeared to have been any major media consensus that major college sports would cease to exist in the wake of unionization or pay-for-play. Journalists did predict significant reform. The Northwestern case was linked to other potential challenges to the college sports system. Northwestern was often mentioned alongside former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon’s legal challenge over the NCAA’s use of likenesses in advertising. Michael McCann of Sports Illustrated predicted the NCAA would make major concessions to limit the damage of potential losing the O’Bannon or several other cases and limit the impact to the NLRB decision.
Frame #3: Attacking the System
In lumping the Northwestern unionization process with the O’Bannon case and other litigation against the NCAA, journalists on the web took full aim at the embattled organization and its leaders. The NCAA itself was seen as a crumbling relic symbolizing a business model that was no longer viable. Clay Travis of Fox Sports began his analysis of the NLRB ruling by declaring “the NCAA is a dead man walking” and suggested that the days of pretending college athletes were not professional were over. The Washington Post editorial board also attacked the myth of the amateur student-athlete, writing “the hard truth for those who love watching college sports is that major-conference basketball and football teams, billion-dollar businesses, exploit many of their players. By pretending the system is designed to help them, the teams add insult to sometimes literal injury. The labor relations board’s ruling cuts through the hypocrisy.”
While writers attacked the tone-deafness of NCAA president Mark Emmert and other college sport power brokers and coaches who defended the amateurism system, television’s influence on the sport and issue of race and college sport were only briefly mentioned within articles, and were not present as prominent frames as writers heavily critiqued other aspects of the college sport system. Though writers were willing to mention how television money has funded the professionalization of the sport, there was scant commentary on the power television networks truly had in controlling the sport, such as constructing made- for- television matchups, moving games to weekdays, and using unpaid student labor to promote programming. Similarly, publications missed a significant opportunity to tackle the racial dynamics of college sports, particularly when the public face of opposition to the unionization of mostly black student-athletes were white males.
Conclusion
Previous studies suggested the mainstream media was largely hostile to athletes and labor unions. Journalists covering the Northwestern unionization process, however, seemed sympathetic to the plight of college athletes, and actually protected them from claims that the union push was a money grab. Student-athlete welfare was a major concern for the vast majority of writers, as was a push to reform the amateurism system.
While journalists covering the Northwestern unionization attempted to address the causes behind Northwestern players’ demands, some issues were not discussed in great detail. The perverse influence of television money in college athletics was widely discussed, even by websites tied to college sport broadcast partners. Still, television networks were not taken to task with the same intensity as school presidents, conference commissioners, or the NCAA. The racial dynamics of college athletics were virtually ignored. Especially with online publications, the sporting aspect of the story was also emphasized. The effect the union would have on Northwestern’s 2014 season shifted the focus to football, not student-athletes. Similarly, focus on the future of the sport underscores a point emphasized by pro-union supporters; college football has become a form of popular entertainment, one in which the well-being of its participants is a secondary focus.
For the most part, writers pushed for subtle changes to the sport. While there was an overall disgust with the NCAA and the college power structure, there was not a wide call for the NCAA and that power structure to disappear. If anything, writers advocated bringing student-athletes into the fold of an increasingly professionalized enterprise.
Hudson is a Ph.D student at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Alex Holt, who contributed to this report, is a Masters student in the college’s graduate program.