Page 231 - Sport Culture and the Media

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misshapen view of what sport was like BT (before television), and an
assumption that Australian society (and its foreign counterparts) had pro-
duced a sports form in syncromesh with its broad social patterns. Those
assumptions are flawed seriously and will be redressed only by a full-scale
analysis of Australian sport’s [and that of other countries’] historical
interaction with the media.
(Stoddart 1994c: 281)

It is, I think, reasonable to be critical of the a priori assumption of the malign
influence of the media on sport, and of the sports media on the wider culture
and society. What is incontestable is that media coverage – its presence or
absence – has had an incalculably large impact on sport, and that the sports
media are a key component of the fabric of contemporary culture. The current
recession in TV sport and the spectacular crash of technology companies in
March 2000 has demonstrated a hitherto largely unacknowledged vulnerability
of the media. As was discussed in Chapter 3, the impact on sport has been
shrinking broadcast revenues and somewhat retarded online development.
Historians like Stoddart are right to caution against grand generalizations
about how sport has been devoured by the media. Each sport has its own
distinctive history, its own way of negotiating how it is represented in the print
and broadcast media, just as individuals and social groups interpret and use the
sports media according to their own reading positions and relations within and
across texts and social institutions (over which they can, as socially produced
subjects, exert only limited control). But where sociologists (even those con-
vinced, like myself, of the importance of properly grounded historical analysis)
tend to part company with some historians is over the necessity of theorizing
social change and unravelling the connections between apparently disparate
social phenomena (Rowe and Lawrence 1998).
The contention of this book has been that media sports form is, indeed, to
a substantial (though by no means absolute) extent in ‘syncromesh with its
broad social patterns’. Those broad social patterns are the major social struc-
tures (class, gender, racial/ethnic) and processes (capital and other forms of
accumulation, postmodernization, ‘mediatization’, globalization) that, once
apprehended, make it possible to distinguish between common or unique,
connected or distinct phenomena in sport, media and culture. As the book’s
title suggests, the relationships between these two large institutions, the textual
outcomes of their union, and the vast universe of culture which makes them
and which they help make, do not obey ‘iron’ laws of cause and effect, supply
and demand. The unruly trinity of sport, culture and the media is not, like its
spiritual counterpart, three facets of the same, stable entity. Instead, it is a more
dynamic metaphor of contested power and protean forms.