Page 108 - Sport Culture and the Media

MONEY, MYTH AND THE BIG MATCH || 89

for the privilege), what is being offered for exchange is not TV sport for inter-
ested viewers but TV viewers for interested sports. The ‘market’ is constructed
around the need to patch the holes created by technologically induced
abundance; the opportunity to offer sports that cannot command huge broad-
cast rights revenue the chance to do so in the future by contacting some kind
of television audience; and accommodation of those sports with more modest
ambitions of receiving some valuable media coverage in the knowledge that
some committed fans are willing to pay for it (Moore 1996). This form of sports
TV delivery, unlike the networked free-to-air television that is heavily reliant
on ‘blockbuster’, ratings-based viewing figures, is in principle amenable to
smaller-scale, targeted, niche-marketed, post-Fordist sport (Giulianotti 1999),
as is indicated by the development of a cable channel for golf in the United
States and a women’s sport TV network in Canada. But, at least in Britain and
Australia, the pattern to date in satellite and cable sport has mainly involved
broadcasting well-established national and international sports, accompanied
by entertainment-based packaged segments that show snippets of sporting
moments (triumphant and disastrous), novelty sports, ‘extreme’ sports (Reine-
hart 1998) and material relayed from one country to another for no other
apparent reason than it is sport and there is a space in the schedule for it.
The ‘bonanza’ for minority sports promised by multi-channel pay TV has
not yet eventuated, with claims of increased broadcast sports diversity more
closely resembling political and marketing rhetoric than the actual practice
of expanding the range of sports on television. As Crosswhite (1996: 58) has
pointed out in the Australian context, for example, women’s sports have often
been required to pay broadcasters (both free-to-air and subscription) to get on
screen, have come under pressure to be more ‘watchable’, and so have been
forced to confront such questions as ‘Should athletes go into Lycra outfits, or
the sport alter the size of the playing area, or speed up the flow of the game, or
change the venue, increase the crowd, etc?’ Appleton (1995: 32), however, is less
concerned by television changing sport than the need for sports organizations
to cater better for television. This means for her mobilizing to secure greater
genuine broadcast sports diversity rather than the ‘resort to entertainment of
the ilk of demolition derbies and mud wrestling rather than “real” sport’. My
own research into questions of equity and diversity in Australian sports TV
has found that, in a sample period of one month in 1999, only 5.8 per cent of
sports programming on free-to-air TV was devoted to women’s sport, but a tiny
0.71 per cent of all sport on pay TV was women’s sport. One pay TV channel
(Fox Sports 2) carried no women’s sport in the sample period, but this was also
the case with all three commercial free-to-air channels, leaving the two public
channels (ABC and SBS) to carry almost 70 per cent of all women’s sport. Such
arguments and evidence indicate that (as will be discussed later in this chapter)