Page 146 - Sport Culture and the Media
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TAKING US THROUGH IT ||  127


                         an injudicious word was chosen in the heat of the moment in the same way that
                         most ‘live’ broadcasts are littered with errors of grammar and expression, and
                         replete with non sequiturs and ‘spoonerisms’. Certainly, few live commentators
                         with the primary responsibility of accurately describing great media sports
                         events wish or are permitted to be socially provocative, although their fellow
                         studio  ‘summarizers’ usually have greater rhetorical licence. Setting aside
                         the methodologically opaque question of intention (Silverman 1993), what is
                         said or written can be subjected to detailed analysis to reveal which views of the
                         world, couched in the language of sport, are being given an airing. As Blain and
                         Boyle argue:
                           And, since being a television or newspaper journalist or editor is a position
                           of privilege, we should bear in mind that the ideologies the mainstream
                           media produce or reproduce when giving us accounts of sports-related
                           matters will tend to be those of socially dominant groups rather than those
                           who may be disempowered: we are more likely to find out what men think
                           about women than the other way round; more likely in Italy or France to
                           find out what Whites think about Blacks than vice versa; more likely on
                           British television networks to find out the English view of the next World
                           Cup than the Welsh or Scottish expectations. Conversely, the accounts
                           which we do not hear tell us a lot about the groups denied a voice on TV
                           and radio or the press.
                                                  (Blain and Boyle 1998: 371; original emphasis)

                           The circulation of discourses of dominance in media sports texts, then,
                         occurs as part of the overall flow of ideologies and mythologies in and out of
                         the media sports cultural complex and the social structures, large and small, to
                         which it is linked. These texts can be especially effective bearers of ideology
                         because they seem so innocuous and can be decoded in such habituated fashion
                         because of their repetitiveness and familiarity. The nasty sting of racism
                         (Carrington and McDonald 2001), (hetero)sexism (Hemphill and Symons
                         2002), and so on, may not be felt on the surface but can nevertheless efficiently
                         enter the ideological circulation system by means of sport. While, as Blain and
                         Boyle suggest, there is an obvious tendency for powerful forces to protect
                         their own interests (and sport, even when it is not wedded to the media, has
                         an institutional disposition towards deep conservatism; see Brohm 1978), this
                         cultural system is not as functionally self-reproductive as it may appear. One
                         of the protections against any powerful group entirely or even substantially
                         ‘sewing up’ sports meanings is (as I have argued above) a quite deep-seated
                         suspicion of (sometimes even contempt for) the sports media by audience
                         members. The frequent refusal to give high levels of professional respect to
                         many producers of media sports texts (like broadcast commentators and
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