Page 151 - Sport Culture and the Media

132 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

Jaromir Jagr got Ray Bourque kicked out of the game and then assisted on
one of Kevin Hatcher’s two goals as the Pittsburgh Penguins beat the host
Boston Bruins, 4–2, last night.
Ron Francis became the 11th player in National Hockey League history
with 1,400 career points when he assisted on Stu Barnes’s goal to make it
1–0 with 7.2 seconds left in the first period. The goal came during a five-
minute power play after Bourque checked Jagr from behind, sending him
head-first into the boards behind the net.
Bourque also received a game misconduct for the first hit – the first
ejection in his 19-year career. Without their top defenseman, the Bruins
couldn’t hold on, and Tom Barrasso stopped 29 shots to keep the Penguins
unbeaten in their last six games (4–0–2).
(New York Times Sports Friday, 30 January 1998: C6)

Allowing for some variations in the nature of the two reports – the latter is
twice as long (133 words), covers a much more elite sports contest and does not
involve direct interview – there are remarkable similarities in approach between
two very different newspapers. The New York Times’s sports section, like The
Sun’s, contains more elaborate stories than those reproduced above, including
several that are not reports of specific sports events. Yet both provide summary
data of what occurred (in the case of the New York Times directly below the
report) accompanied by brief stories that highlight the roles of the main ‘act-
ors’, the key individual contests, the pivotal moments in the game, statistical
patterns, and so on – and all in three paragraphs.
Such news story formats can be regarded as international print sports media
genres (or sub-genres) that accommodate both the sporting preoccupation
with statistics and results and the deep concern with the mythological status
of sportspeople as heroes and villains, champions and battlers, engaged in
an eternal contest for supremacy on the field of play. Some of these abiding
concerns of sports culture are shared with other elements in the wider media
in obeying, as Galtung and Ruge (1970, 1973) have influentially proposed,
the dictates of particular ‘news values’ which signal the presence of ‘news-
worthiness’ (see also Schudson 1991; Palmer 1998). Several of the dominant
criteria for newsworthiness – the principles according to which only a few of
the billions of daily events are selected for media coverage and, of that tiny
proportion, only a minute number are given any sustained attention, with a few
matters receiving saturation coverage – are observed in the small sports stories
I have presented.
This does not mean that the stories are self-evidently worthy of attention,
but that they are constructed in a manner that ensures that they respect the
usual rules of news media text production and presentation. The pressure to