Page 110 - Sport Culture and the Media

MONEY, MYTH AND THE BIG MATCH || 91

Media sports policy, politics and myth

It is probable that many times a day, somewhere in the western world, a talk-
back radio host or caller pronounces that ‘sport and politics don’t mix’ or
proclaims that ‘politics should be kept out of sport’. Such comments are a little
curious, given the many ways in which sport and politics interrelate. These
include: deciding public spending priorities, such as allocations by national,
state and regional governments to sporting organizations (Cashman and
Hughes 1998) and by local governments for civic sports amenities (Mowbray
1993); anti-discrimination policies (such as Title IX section of the US Education
Amendments Act of 1972, which denied ‘federal financial assistance’ to ‘any
education program or activity’ that discriminated against any person ‘on the
basis of sex’, and so had a substantial, positive impact on women’s and girls’
sport; see Guttmann 1991; Heywood 2000); and government restrictions on the
advertising and sponsorship through sports such as Formula One motor racing
and cricket of unhealthy products like tobacco and alcohol (Harris 1988). Sport
and identity politics would also have to be for ever separated (Baker and Boyd
1997; Bloom 2000), and uncomfortable questions about, for example, the
relationship between sport and violence against women suppressed (Benedict
1997). To be really vigilant about keeping sport and politics apart, it would be
necessary to ban politicians from using sports metaphors like ‘going the dis-
tance’, ‘levelling the playing field’ and ‘moving the goalpost after the game has
started’ in political speeches and interviews (Rowe 1995). The task of keeping
sport and politics for ever separate is, then, not only difficult, but inherently
futile. While the sphere of sport – as, among others, John Hargreaves (1982)
has noted – can never be reduced to ‘pure’ politics, neither can it be entirely
insulated from it. As a result, the sports media, which it was argued in Chapter 1
are always already implicated in the politics of communication, are necessarily
embroiled in the politics of sport – and the ‘sport’ of politics.
The media, in various ways, are called upon to:

• provide good, wholesome family entertainment through sport;
• offer sensationally dramatic coverage that will attract healthy audiences
(but perhaps for ‘unhealthy’ reasons);
• describe and show what happened to those who were not present or who
want to see it again and differently;
• subject sport to intense scrutiny as part of the media’s Fourth Estate
function;
• support local, regional and national sporting efforts; and
• further the Olympian ideals of sport by transcending petty, partisan
politics in the name of international peace and good will.