Page 155 - Sport Culture and the Media

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exposé by Harry Harris (1997) entitled ‘TOP SECRET – SOCCER BUNG
DOSSIER’, which appeared in the same edition of the Daily Mirror as Gazza
and Mickey Mouse.
This type of ‘exclusive’ affirms and celebrates the media’s Fourth Estate role,
applauding its own part by breaking a story that exposes the inner, illicit
workings of sport. In this instance, Mirror Sport claimed to be instrumental in
prompting a Football Association inquiry which found that, in contravention
of its own rules, hidden payments (‘bungs’) were paid to various parties in the
transfer of players between soccer clubs. Over three pages, the ‘3 YEAR BUNG
PROBE’ is described, an interview is conducted with the ‘FA’S BUNG
BUSTER’, readers are told ‘HOW WE TRACKED DOWN THE CASH’ and
the newspaper’s role in the scandal is chronicled under the heading ‘VICTORY
FOR The Mirror’. Here, the insider knowledge of the sports world (signified by
the use of the slang term ‘bung’) is used in a crusading manner, seeking to ‘clean
up’ sport on behalf of a public suffering from the corrupt use of sports funds.
If the Daily Mirror’s self-mythologizing seems somewhat excessive, it is perhaps
because of over-compensation by sports journalists whose professional and
ethical standards are routinely denigrated. Such exposés transform, if only
temporarily, the toy department of the news media into something more
adult and serious – like the furniture section. At its most ambitious it produces
de-mythologizing journalistic books on sport like Simson and Jennings’s (1992)
The Lords of the Rings: Power, Money and Drugs in the Modern Olympics,
although the authors are at pains to stress that ‘We are not sports journalists.
We are not part of a circuit where too many reporters have preferred to keep
their gaze fixed on the sporting action and ignore the way sport has been
destroyed by greed and ambition’ (p. x). Here, again, the emphasis is on
revelation and disclosure. As they state in their introduction:

This book discloses what you are not allowed to see on TV and what
the newspapers do not tell you about the Olympics and world sport. For
the last four years we have sought to discover who controls sport, where the
money goes and why what a decade ago was seen as a source of beauty and
purity is now tacky, anti-democratic, drug ridden and auctioned off as a
marketing tool of the world’s multinational companies.
(Simson and Jennings 1992: ix)
Such critiques of the inner workings of major sporting phenomena like the
Olympics are usually highly populist in nature. Simson and Jennings (1992:
271), for example, want to remove the ‘perks’ of the IOC so that ‘we might
bring sport back down from this wasteful Mount Olympus and into the hands
of the ordinary people’. As the Atlanta Olympics approached, Jennings’s (1996:
1) The New Lords of the Rings: Olympic Corruption and How to Buy Gold