Page 104 - Sport Culture and the Media

MONEY, MYTH AND THE BIG MATCH || 85

The Atlanta Thrashers, the NHL’s most recent expansion team . . . NBA
[National Basketball Association] and MLB [Major League Baseball]
teams in Atlanta, TNT Sports, the Goodwill Games, World Champion-
ship Wrestling, the CNN/SI sports network, Time, and Sports Illustrated,
and is the NBA’s cable partner.
(Miller et al. 2001: 66)

Irrespective of the state of the media, technology and information markets,
however, computer users are yet to be allocated any more hours in the day and
exemptions from work and family responsibilities than sports television
viewers.
Irrespective of the logistical problems of bringing the viewer in front of the
set, this economy of sports television is thoroughly representative of the newer
‘economies of signs and space’ discussed earlier, where power lies increasingly
in the control of images and information by means of copyright and associated
intellectual property rights, rather than by relying on the slower, more pre-
dictable processes of making goods or providing ‘human’ services. Of course,
such exchanges do still go on and, somewhere and at some time, capital has
to be exchanged. But following the ‘money trail’, as in contemporary tax
and fraud investigations, is an ever more complex task. Television sport
can, in strictly economic terms, be seen as a battlefield between media
corporations seeking to generate revenue from all manner of sources –
advertisers, sponsors, subscribing viewers and even from sports themselves
(the more unfortunate ones who need TV exposure so much that they are
prepared to pay for it). This state of affairs means that media mogul Rupert
Murdoch frequently tops the Sporting News’s annual list of the most powerful
people in sport rather than global sports celebrities like Michael Jordan,
Tiger Woods, Serena Williams and David Beckham; powerful sports adminis-
trators like current IOC President Jacques Rogge or FIFA President Sepp
Blatter (Rowe and McKay 2003); or sport and leisurewear entrepreneurs
like Nike founder Phil Knight. Why such a person is at the centre of power
in sport can be explained succinctly by the following opening paragraphs from
a newspaper feature article on Rupert Murdoch as the ‘champion of world
sports’:

Last month [January], American television networks spent [AUS]$26
billion on the broadcast rights for American football games for the next
eight years. That is not a misprint. That’s $26 billion. It works out to
almost $1 billion for each of the 30 teams in the National Football League
(NFL).
This stratospheric number is a foretaste of the revolution that is about
to engulf television, and Rupert Murdoch’s global sporting empire is