With the longstanding popularity of American team sports having now lead us to a point where athletes are multi‐million dollar investments capable of impacting culture beyond the playing field, the teams and leagues that provide a platform for these athletes to perform are more concerned with image and brand management now more than ever. Consequently, star athletes have become an increasingly vital part of building and sustaining league and team brands. The public relations methods utilized by these groups, especially the teams, when a star athlete has committed a PR blunder have varied over time. This content analysis uncovers whether the public relations tactics used by teams when a star athlete is accused of sexual assault has any impact on fan support. The study also seeks to find the public relations best practices that teams use in this situation, and whether or not there is any relationship in methods used by leagues and their corresponding teams and front offices. Newspaper articles pertaining to the sexual assault accusations of Kobe Bryant, Ben Roethlisberger and Johan Santana were used in this analysis, with two major news publications from each athlete’s home city providing the content. / Department of Journalism

Research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Art (Journalism and Media Studies), Johannesburg, 2016 / Rape is a predominant crime and a social issue in South Africa today. South Africa’s incidence of rape is among the highest in the world. Identifying and understanding the dominant rape narratives in news media is useful in pinpointing how the media represents the crime of rape. It is understood through agenda-setting theory that news media plays an important role in how topics come onto the national agenda, giving news media a particular influence in society. Further, through discourse analysis and narrative theories, research has shown how what people read and hear can influence their understanding of those matters, and can drive social change or maintain the stability of social structures. Some theorists take this further, arguing that narrative fundamentally informs how humans make sense of the world, that reality is discursively constructed. The research below attempts to access, reveal and unpack these dominant narratives as they pertain to rape, using a combination of corpusbased analysis and critical discourse analysis techniques on two corpora of South African newspaper text from the first quarter of 2013, and tied to a specific case study, the rape and murder of Anene Booysen. The resultant findings also provide a snapshot of the dominant ideology and social practices in South Africa over the time period studied, as discourse and narrative are implicitly tied to power in society / GR2017