Page 197 - Sport Culture and the Media
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178  || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA


                         not always exercised (that is, induced to subscribe to a service). Like any other
                         small screen genre, sports television typically presents itself as compulsive
                         viewing. In the case of live television, part of this pitch connects to news
                         discourse – real events are unfolding before the viewers’ eyes and history is being
                         made, and so on. Such promotions can work only if sports events are imbued
                         with the necessary sense of significance, without which all sport looks like a
                         series of bizarre manoeuvres observing arcane rules for no apparent reason.
                         Sport as news is dependent on conventional news values (Hartley 1982; Critcher
                         1987), and the consequent placing of happenings in hierarchies and categories.
                         Just as news is sorted by criteria of importance (the assassination of a monarch
                         or president taking precedence over a politician’s photo opportunity), then
                         organized and presented to heighten its dramatic appeal, so sport is awarded
                         significance in the media (as well as receiving it from outside). Different media
                         spaces can be utilized to give live sports events prominence and appropriate
                         gravitas. Newspapers can endlessly preview the  ‘big game’, radio bulletins
                         update listeners on the lead-up to it, and television news sets the stage for the
                         major sports event to be televised live. Once shown, the action sports television
                         text can then be replayed in numerous ways, and act as the subject of a post-
                         mortem which can plug the gap until the next big sports event.
                           By tracing the features of the communicative apparatus that surrounds
                         the live sports text in the electronic media, it is readily apparent that even the
                         most important sports moments are not permitted to speak for themselves. We
                         have already discussed in Chapter 4 the aural commentary that accompanies
                         and helps direct responses to the visual text alongside the recorded sounds
                         (increasingly within the range of more sophisticated microphones) of the
                         crowd, sports competitors and officials, and ball against bat, body against
                         body, and so on. Beyond the more efficient capture of the sounds and sights
                         (from helicopter shots to extreme close-ups to slow-motion replays) of sport is
                         the organization of the action into an intelligible narrative that vastly extends
                         its range of meaning and cultural resonance. In bringing us this action, the
                         electronic media also help to produce it as something greater, so that what
                         appears on screen connects with other cultural and social phenomena in a
                         variety of ways. Andrew Tudor (1992), for example, advances this argument
                         in examining British television coverage of the 1990 soccer World Cup. After
                         noting the well-known sports TV audience research studies (such as by
                         Comisky et al. 1977) which demonstrate how ‘it is commentary above all that
                         provides the television audience with a framework through which events can be
                         viewed, interpreted and emotionally glossed’ (p. 391), he assesses the coverage
                         of a match between England and Cameroon in terms of the national and
                         racial stereotypes produced by ‘British television’s commitment to sustaining a
                         partisan and nationalistic England narrative’ (p. 407). While Tudor observes
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