Page 111 - Sport Culture and the Media

92 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

No single organ of the media can fulfil all of these expectations (some of which
are seen as unfortunate obligations), just as different types of media sports text
are better suited to the performance of some tasks than others. To develop this
logic to its fullest extent absolves the sports media of any general responsibility
for their actions beyond the minimal observance (‘actionable’, in any case) of
the laws of defamation, obscenity, and so on. The sports public, it is claimed,
is provided with what it wants from the media on orthodox, market principles –
if a demand exists for a type of sports coverage, then the market will provide it.
No single sports programme or publication, from this perspective, need feel
responsible for what its competitors currently or might do. The different elem-
ents of the sports media, it plausibly follows, do what they do – until it is shown
to be unprofitable or illegal to do otherwise. To take the sports media simply at
their word and to accept this account of their motives, operations and effects
would be as unwise as to confine analysis only to the surface properties of
media sports texts. By pointing out the latent and sometimes manifest political
significance of their practices, it is made more difficult for the sports media to
evade the proposition that with cultural power comes political responsibility.
One major contention of this book is that, while the mythology of sport rests
heavily on the belief that it is or should be free of the grubby workings of the
political world, it cannot escape the less than glamorous struggle, both external
and internal, for power and influence. In other words, sports culture – at least
its official, ‘legitimate’ face – is highly romanticized. We have also seen that
media have their own romantic myth – that of the fearless watchdog resisting
the pressures of the state, capital and other powerful entities by exposing all
and telling the truth. When isolated from each other, these two romantic dis-
positions pull in different directions; sporting mythology relies on the studied
evasion of politics, while media mythology depends on a principled confronta-
tion with it. The uneasy coming together of myths in making media sport helps
explain the problems of professional practice and prestige for sports journalism
analysed at some length in Chapter 2. An unsentimental take on how media
sports texts are framed suggests that both sports and media mythologies –
and so, inevitably, sports media mythologies – are mythological in a rather
unfashionable, unspecialized sense. The ‘lay’ meaning of myth is that it is
untrue or a mistaken impression (such as, ‘it’s a myth that watching too much
sport on television makes you go blind’), whereas in most recent social and
cultural theory, the term does not so much denote a lack of correspondence
between what is said and what is ‘real’, but demonstrates the power of particu-
lar symbols and narratives in expressing widely, unconsciously and deeply held
beliefs as ‘natural’ in any given society, irrespective of any burden of ‘proof’
(like the myths of romantic love, the ‘perfectibility of man’, of national cultural
identity, and so on). The tension between these two meanings of mythology can