Page 152 - Sport Culture and the Media

TAKING US THROUGH IT || 133

reproduce the professional ideologies that govern practice is not just felt in the
basement of sports journalism. As, for example, Alina Bernstein (2000) has
shown in her study of newspaper coverage of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics,
journalists are required to entertain, simultaneously, both localist (how’s our
team going?) and ‘global’ considerations (who won the glamorous Olympic
events dominated by somebody else?). Deborah Stevenson (2002), in a rather
different context, has analysed the ways in which the print media juggled
sexuality, gender and nation as ‘angles’ in the 1999 Australian Tennis Open.
The rules that have to be taken into account include ‘personification’ (the
reduction of large-scale, perhaps abstract events to the actions and motives
of recognizable people), ‘elite status’ (the use of celebrity and, when it is not
present, connections made to it), ‘consonance’ (the events and their treatment
are easily fitted into readers’ everyday frameworks and expectations when con-
fronting a sports news story) and ‘negativity’ (the established media wisdom
that, on balance, bad news is more newsworthy than good – in our examples
frustration at having shots saved in a minor game instead of playing for
Manchester United and marrying a Spice Girl; and getting ‘kicked out of the
game’ for the first time in a ‘19-year career’). Thus, even brief, formulaic and
modest print media sports texts are surprisingly effective in reaching beyond
themselves to other games, people, issues and myths. All texts are inter-textual
in that, to be effective, they must make connections with other phenomena and
stories. Yet the degree of intertextuality is limited by the amount of media space
allotted (it is hard to be too expansive in sixty-six words, although some sports
writers achieve an economy of style to rival Ernest Hemingway) and the tasks
that have to be performed in particular types of stories (giving the score, the
time of scoring, the identity of the scorer, and so on). Once the print coverage
of sport is severed from any requirement to report actual, public events to
people who have often seen and experienced them in some way, then the
opportunities to ‘free’ the text from its stricter obligations proliferate. Thus, for
example, a sports journalist can liken, in quasi-poetic language, an Australian
cricket captain to one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. Of Steve
Waugh (nicknamed Tugga) it can be said that ‘There are silken fibres within
Tugga’s tough exterior and an Einstein lurking inside his shaggy baggy green
cap’ (Meher-Homji 2002: 90). Pronouncing on the intellectual prowess of elite
sportspeople, however, has its news value limitations. More newsworthy is the
kind of text that is ostensibly generated by news media resources unavailable
to ordinary citizens, whereby sources can be tapped and interviews gained in
producing new knowledge.