Page 128 - Sport Culture and the Media

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League in 2003, for example, the Russian oil billioniaire Roman Abramovich
has bought and paid millions of pounds into the ailing Chelsea – or ‘Chelski’ as
the tabloids now describe the club. But whatever the economic trials and tribu-
lations of media sport, its public visibility is undiminished and, if anything,
enhanced. This is because although ‘live’ TV sport is the bedrock of the econ-
omy of sport, it is gossip and scandal that keep it in perpetual view both in and
outside the formal framework of the sports media.

Sport as school for scandal

It is worthwhile to look briefly at media sports scandals because they reveal
how the political economy of media sport extends far beyond the production,
distribution and consumption of sports reports and live television. We have
noted how sport has notable popular appeal for large (especially male) sections
of the population, and that media sports texts take many forms, from ‘hard’
objective reporting to the ‘soft’ news of gossip, background and ‘colour’
(Andrews and Jackson 2001; Whannel 2001a). However, sport’s cultural promi-
nence and the visibility of its celebrities make it a useful vehicle for carrying
news stories ‘outside’ itself and its routine audiences. Some of these stories are
positive in nature, drawing, for example, after success in major international
competitions like the Olympics, on the nationalist impulse that can be activated
in many citizens, irrespective of their usual involvement in sports spectatorship
(Miller et al. 2001). But scandals are particularly instructive because their
inherently transgressive quality raises the possibility of ‘contagion’ or, as John
B. Thompson (1997: 59) puts it, ‘a corrosive impact on the forms of trust
which underpin social relations and institutions’. As we have seen, sport for its
adherents is the bearer of strong mythologies of nobility and fair competition,
while even those who are not sports fans are of necessity aware of the material
success and high standing of sports stars. Media sports scandals like those
involving, for example, Ben Johnson’s disqualification after winning the 100
metres at the 1988 Seoul Olympics for taking performance-enhancing drugs, or
the trial of iceskater Tonya Harding for conspiring to injure her US teammate
and rival Nancy Kerrigan, or Mike Tyson snacking on the ear of an opponent,
directly transgress the ‘fair play’ values of sport. In other words, the contra-
dictory mythological structure at the heart of sport – ennobling physical con-
test and benevolent universal values versus ‘base’ competition and cynical
exploitation – is ripe for the periodic production of scandals that explode
through the media sports cultural complex with firestorm intensity. These may
be exhausted or dowsed, but the embers of sports scandal glow perpetually,
with the media providing the perfect accelerant.