Page 109 - Sport Culture and the Media

90 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

the economics of sports television are inextricably bound up with questions
of cultural politics. So, while a more complex mix of coexistent market
forms of television sport does potentially exist, and is characterized by very
different ways of creating and receiving media sports texts, the (full or partial)
realization of that potential – or even its failure to materialize significantly at all
– is dependent on political as well as economic factors.
Free-to-air mega sports events like the Olympics will continue to exist for
the foreseeable future because, as the International Olympic Committee
has recognized, their greatest economic (and cultural) asset is the massive
popularity that can give billions of people the sense of simultaneously having
the same sporting experience (Wilson 1998). On the other hand, smaller sports
TV audiences can be catered for, targeted or (even if notionally) created
through various forms of direct purchase. What Holger Preuss (2000: 122) calls
‘match TV: A combination of free TV and pay-per-view’ he believes to be ‘the
most probable variant for future Olympic coverage’ given the globalization of
television infrastructure. The delicate balance between these forms of delivery
of sports TV will, however, be constantly under strain as commercial interests,
governments and sports fans pursue their various and often contradictory inter-
ests. Whatever the mode of delivery, and even if national public broadcasters
manage to keep control over some ‘hallmark’ sports events, economic processes
of varying scale and intensity are inevitably in play. This mutability of the
production of broadcast media sports texts explains how they keep emerging,
‘hydra-headed’, despite some complaint that ‘television has taken over sport’.
It should be remembered, of course, that television is not the only means by
which sports culture is framed, disseminated, peddled and circulated. Radio
and print are also integral components of the media sports cultural complex,
their products just as pervasive in the everyday world. Yet, while radio rights are
contested for popular international and national sports; newspapers are com-
mitting greater resources to the sports pages, expanding print and photographic
coverage and headhunting their competitors’ ‘name’ sports writers; and new
general and specialist sports magazines are launched (and closed) every year, in
sports television lies the most compelling expression of naked economic power
in the media sports cultural complex. Accompanying this economic power to
make media sports texts for vast audiences comes, as noted earlier, considerable
political and cultural power. Because that arena is ‘only sport’, the extent and
potential of this power is often underestimated, and it is important to draw out
the political and cultural implications of the power to make media sports texts
for the national and global citizenry.