A Hit on American Football: A Case Study of Bottom up Framing Through Op Ed Readers' Comments
In December 2015, the movie Concussion was released. The film portrayed the story of Dr Bennet Omalu, who is credited with discovering chromic traumatic encephalopathy in the brains of deceased National Football League players. Before the release, on December 7, 2015, Omalu penned an op ed in The New York Times in which he opined that children should not play tackle football. This research explores 114 reader comments on Omalu's op ed through the lens of Nisbet's bottom up framing. Using a mixed methods approach, the results indicated that participants framed the issue through health and safety, American cultural values, parenting liability, and skepticism. Linguistic analysis revealed that comments contained a negative tone, with women's comments being more negative than men's. The analysis suggests that online news forums function as spaces where public deliberation around the viability of children playing tackle football occurs and illustrates the tensions around risk, sport participation, and health a.