Page 230 - Sport Culture and the Media

AFTERWORD || 211

power (Wejbora 2003); indeed, they may reinforce existing inequalities and
promote new ones.
The driving force for most of the changes described above, no less than
for the earlier structures and processes described in Chapter 3, has been the
development of commercial markets rather than of cultural citizenship. This
is an unsurprising conclusion in the context of advanced capitalism. But as was
also argued in Chapter 3, marketized media that involve direct exchange create
inequalities of access and use that limit the ‘empowerment’ of media consumers
to those of sufficient means to purchase them. It is important, therefore, to go
beyond the attractive ‘pitch’ for new media sport and to ask who will benefit
from these innovations, and whether and how they might be made generally
available (Rowe 2003). The much-cited precedent for new forms of media
delivery – BSkyB’s ‘life’ saving (for itself) capture of the English Premier League
over a decade ago – is hardly an auspicious one in social justice terms. The
politics of media content are also not rendered redundant by new, shiny devices
and handy services. For example, Sagas et al. (2000) found in their US study of
the Internet coverage of sport on selected web sites that they reproduced, rather
than transcended, the entrenched gender inequality that characterizes more
traditional media sport. Again, this is not surprising given that much of the
flexibility of form and use described above involves the repackaging of sports
content that originates in traditional media. Because a sports match is being
watched on a mobile phone or a story read on a web site does not automatically
block racist or ethnocentric stereotypes in commentary or overcome the neglect
of the sports and sportspeople normally invisible in much traditional media
sport. No corner of the media sports cultural complex, therefore, however
freshly painted and enthusiastically touted, can be allowed to escape the critical
eye of the cultural analyst.

Conclusion: look and learn

The excitable hype-speech that pours out of the purveyors of new media
sports technologies (and not a few cultural analysts who trade in theories of
‘the people’s’ effortless ideological autonomy, resistiveness and capacity for
progressive textual decodings and uses) is perhaps counterbalanced by the
rather pessimistic academic assessments of the influence of the media on sport.
Stoddart (1994c: 280), for example, in reviewing the tendency of ‘Many critics
[to] regard television as the greatest of all change agents in twentieth century’,
judges (in the Australian context) that:
The overwhelming thrust of academic analysis of all this has been
gloomy, to wit, that television has ruined sport. These findings represent a