CSCM has released the fifth annual “Politics in Sports Media” report. In 2025, sports and politics intersected in many forms and contexts. Our survey and content analysis provide quantitative data and our critical essays reveal the underlying dynamics that reflect struggles over resources and power.

The report’s research team includes 22 contributors, including faculty members, graduate students and undergraduates from the Moody College of Communication and across UT-Austin. The team was led by Dr. Natalie Brown-Devlin and CSCM director Dr. Michael L. Butterworth.

“Politics in Sports Media” defines “politics” broadly to encompass both formal political contexts, such as elections and legislative debates, and the equally important discourse concerning race, gender, sexuality, class, labor, economic development, the environment, and more. As with CSCM's previous reports (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025), we are concerned with the ways power and resources are acquired, distributed, and limited in and around sports in the United States. We continue to focus on “mainstream sports media,” meaning that we are attending to electronic and broadcast outlets with the widest reach. 

Findings from the fifth annual Politics in Sports Media report

• Among survey participants, the top five topics identified as the “most political” were:
  • Sports figure advocacy statements
  • Current/Former athletes running for office
  • Transgender rights
  • Athlete protest policies
  • Politicians’ attendance at sporting events
• A majority of participants (n = 55.42%) do not support athletes sharing their beliefs publicly on social media platforms. Interestingly, this result showed a sharp decrease from last year’s findings, though it tracks more closely with results from the 2021, 2022 and 2023 reports.
• This year’s report notes a majority of Democrats (n = 60.80%) do support athletes sharing their beliefs. In 2024, most Democrats (n = 63.75%) did not support athletes sharing their political beliefs.
• Survey participants also showed that they were strongly against sports leagues (n = 75.94%) and sports teams (n = 75.35%) sharing political beliefs publicly.
• Asked an open-ended question about athletes sharing political beliefs, Republicans’ responses suggested that they were more in favor of clear delineations between sports and politics. Democrats were more neutral on their feelings on the subject, with most stating that it was an athlete’s right to speak out if they chose to do so.
• In 2025, respondents collectively ranked ESPN as the most credible, accurate, and trustworthy sports media outlet, which was consistent from survey results in previous years. Participants who self-identified with the Republican Party rated FOX Sports as the most credible, accurate, and trustworthy sports media brand, continuing the pattern that audiences’ perceptions of a sports media brand will be influenced by their news media counterparts.
• Survey participants rated the political bias of most sports media brands as generally neutral. The rankings from liberal to conservative (on a seven-point scale) calculated as follows: NBC Sports (n = 3.55), ESPN (n = 3.59), CBS Sports (n= 3.67), Yahoo Sports (n = 3.79), Bleacher Report (n = 3.93), and FOX Sports (n = 4.97).
• Participants generally agreed that sports and politics should not mix (n = 4.99). When examined according to participants’ self-reported political party identity, results showed Democrats (n = 4.44) rated the question more neutrally than Republicans (n = 5.65).
• The 2025 Report affirmed that politics and sports are virtually inseparable. Results of an analysis of ESPN and Yahoo Sports homepages showed that both outlets covered at least one political topic 98 out of the sampled 100 days.
• In 2025, ESPN and Yahoo Sports both featured the highest number of political topics on their homepages during the month of October.

To compile the report, researchers from the Center for Sports Communication & Media surveyed over 500 sports fans about how they define and react to political content in sports and how they perceive leading sports media brands and their mix of sports and political content. The report also includes a content analysis of ESPN and Yahoo websites that reveal which political topics are most frequently featured in mainstream sports media. The report concludes with six case studies evaluating news stories from 2025 that featured politics and sports. The essays are titled:

• Masculine Rhetorical Performances at the 4 Nations Face-off Hockey Tournament
• Laboring over Labor in the WNBA
• A Tale of Two Cities at the U.S. Open
• Public Diplomacy and the NBA's Reconciliation with China
• What's the Risk? Speculating on the Sports Media Gambling Complex
• El Conejo Malo at the Fifty-Yard Line

Across these essays, we see various dimensions of politics at play: matters of identity, whether it is individual or national; uses of material resources, especially money; and questions of leverage, in terms of labor, financial investment, and public diplomacy.