Page 131 - Sport Culture and the Media

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of sport be protected from scandal when the ‘extra-curricular’ behaviour of
sportspeople brings it into disrepute by association. As Thompson (1997: 58)
argues, scandals have wider social ramifications than is often acknowledged,
being ‘consequential not just for the lives and reputations of the individuals
immediately affected by them’. In the case of sport, they do not merely damage
the ‘forms of trust’ on which the institution relies, but also permit the use of
a powerful and popular institution for the exploration and contestation of
significant contemporary social issues. In the cases briefly cited above, these
include: matters of resort to unethical means in the pursuit of approved goals;
normative conceptions of the body and the use of drugs; private ambition
versus the collective good; norms of conduct among women; the relationship
between aggressive sporting masculinity and a propensity to violence; physical
and other forms of abuse of women by men both inside and outside marriage;
the racialized nature of the justice system; the stigmatization of homosexuality
and celebration of male heterosexual promiscuity; gender inequality in sports
fandom, and so on (Rowe 1997a).
In coming to an understanding of the political economy of the media sports
scandal, it is, therefore, necessary to appreciate how the hunger for content,
the power of celebrity, and the ready transportability of images and informa-
tion within and across media, create the conditions for a full-blown media
phenomenon, but that to prosper they must articulate with social questions
that are of importance to media audiences and ‘moral entrepreneurs’ (Cohen
1980) alike. Media sport scandals, then, service the cultural economy by
comprehensively connecting sport, economics and the wider socio-cultural
order. They operate in the zone that the social anthropologist Victor Turner
(1990) calls the ‘liminoid’, where social conventions become frayed at the edges,
and the consequences of their transgression unpredictable, even subversive.
Recurrent media sports scandals are, ultimately, no more than spectacular
instances of the everyday product of the sports media. As grist for the media
mill, keeping sport to the forefront of formal news coverage, celebrity gossip
and everyday conversation, media sport scandals are structured into its systems
of production rather than bizarre disruptions to them. Every fragment of sports
report, snatch of commentary, still shot and flickering image, and all other
elements of sports discourse, are couched in visual and verbal languages
whose grammar and syntax, vocabulary and framing, carry within them a kind
of politics. These need not be overt, clear or consistent, but they represent a
politics of the popular that is pumped out unreflectively every day in the name
of sport. As Barthes (1973) has famously noted, it is not when politics is close to
the surface and easily recognizable that it is at its most popularly powerful, but
when it is strongly present but apparently absent, allowing myths to do their
work on the emotions, and ideologies to represent the interests of the privileged