Reporting Esports as Sport: News Genre and Selective Sportification in Chinese Institutional Media Coverage of the Asian Games

Esports became an official medal event at the 2023 Asian Games, yet its status as sport remains contested. Research has largely examined positive and negative media evaluations. Less is known about when news reports still justify esports as sport and when they simply report it through familiar sports conventions. This study analyzes 32 articles published by Xinhua, the People’s Daily media family, CCTV.com, and China News Service during the 2018 and 2023 Asian Games. Corpus A comprised 23 articles used to develop the analytical framework, while Corpus B added nine articles as a bounded comparative extension. We compared match reports with profiles, explanatory stories, governance coverage, and industry reporting. All 12 match reports used a routine sports-news structure built around teams, opponents, scores, tactics, competition stages, and medals. Ten did so without explicitly justifying or problematizing esports’ sporting status. By contrast, non-match articles more often explained why esports deserved recognition, emphasizing institutional approval, intensive training, discipline, teamwork, and professional standards. They also drew a moral boundary between professional esports and ordinary gaming. Two match reports contained explicit legitimation, whereas one non-match athlete profile treated sporting identity as an unmarked premise. We call this pattern status-unmarked sports reporting. It shows that the visibility of sporting-identity negotiation varies across news tasks. The findings do not demonstrate public acceptance. Rather, they show that the analyzed Chinese institutional media texts selectively treated professionalized, nationalized, and regulated esports as sport while ordinary gaming remained morally problematized—a pattern we term selective sportification.