Page 25 - Sport Culture and the Media

6 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

media profession is, it is argued, symptomatic of a more general societal
ambivalence concerning the importance and seriousness of popular culture and
a squeamishness about its commercial dimensions. Hence, ‘Money, myth and
the big match: the political economy of the sports media’ (Chapter 3) concludes
the first part of the book by assessing the relative power of major sports and
sports organizations, and of media corporations and proprietors, in a world
showing signs of advancing globalization.
The development of new economic synergies and media technologies is
examined in this chapter along with sharply contrasting local and ‘amateurist’
sports media. Economic forces are shown to be central to the manufacture of
the form and content of media sports texts without exercising absolute powers
of determination over them. The constantly shifting institutional structures and
practices in the media sport economy inevitably involve questions of cultural
politics and there follows an examination of familiar debates about politics in
and of sport from a largely unfamiliar perspective – the rights associated with
the concept of cultural citizenship. The sports media are shown to be caught
between a ‘neutralist’ entertainment stance, their traditional ‘Fourth Estate’
role, and the Olympian ideology of sport as supra-political. The media sports
scandal is briefly discussed as a massively conspicuous media event that cannot
be contained by the ‘sport-and-politics don’t mix’ edict, which, to a substantial
degree, problematizes the notion of a separate sphere of sports journalism.
This discussion prompts a reconsideration of the political responsibilities of the
sports media where economic imperatives threaten to compromise journalistic
ethics. This semiotic and ideological instability and ‘contestability’ are then
addressed in Part II, ‘Unmaking the media sports text’.
In this second part of the book, the activities of reading, decoding and
deconstructing sports images and information are shown to be connected to,
but not entirely governed by, the industrial forces that have ‘supplied’ them. A
series of readings of ‘typical’ media sports texts of various kinds is conducted
in which each text is shown to be deeply inscribed with ideologies of power, so
demanding an overall critique of the concept of an entirely open text amenable
to an infinite range of meanings. At the same time, media sports texts are
shown to be available for multiple readings according to time, context and
readership, and can be seen to be subject to general representational shifts as
responses to organizational and wider social changes. In Chapter 4, ‘Taking us
through it: the “art” of sports commentating and writing’, there is an analysis
of several types of spoken and printed media sports texts (such as ‘live’ com-
mentary, routine sports reports and sports gossip), noting how each constructs
particular versions of the sporting and surrounding worlds. The language of
sport – sometimes called ‘sportuguese’ (Hargreaves 1986) – is also appraised
alongside the role of sports metaphors in non-sporting discourses as bearers of