Page 26 - Sport Culture and the Media

INTRODUCTION || 7

populist meaning, thereby tracing the two-way flow of media sports texts and
social ideologies.
Words, although a vital component of media sports culture, are by no means
its only vectors. In ‘Framed and mounted: sport through the photographic eye’
(Chapter 5), the still, visual media sports text is appraised, concentrating on the
aesthetic codes that govern the composition of sports photographs. Particular
attention is given to the representation of gendered and racialized athletes’
bodies in orthodox sports news photographs and publicity stills. Visual meta-
phors, especially in advertising, are shown to work alongside print captions in
the accomplishment of various sporting associations and connotations. In
concluding Part II, ‘Screening the action: the moving sports image’ (Chapter 6)
interrogates media sports texts in sound and vision – the television broadcast,
filmic treatment of sport and sport-related themes. The ways in which sport as
myth makes itself readily accessible for the discharge of a variety of narrative
and ethical functions are appraised, alongside the efficacy of such symbolic
deployments of sport in the light of their substantial dependence on specific
and pre-existing audience histories.
This discussion returns us to the territory traversed in this Introduction – the
relationships between sport, culture and the media that are always everywhere
in process, influencing and being influenced by each other in a perpetual dance
of assertion and counter-assertion. There are both traditional and novel aspects
of this process, but also little doubt that, at the much-hyped dawn of a new
millennium, it is subject to profound and rapid change. An Afterword looks
to the future of media sport, which, in technological capability if not yet in
widespread cultural practice, has arrived. ‘Sport into the ether(net): new tech-
nologies, new consumers’ closes the book with a consideration of the trajectory
of media sport in terms of the texts being generated (‘reality’ media sport), the
relationship between the institutions of sport and media, and the exchanges
between sport producers and consumers. The capacity of new media technolo-
gies to subvert current prevailing textual relations and practices in sport is
assessed in the light of what is already known of the history of media sports
development. Once again, the linkage between the conditions under which
media sports texts are made and the meanings and ideologies that they generate
is shown to be in need of constant review.

Conclusion: looking towards sport and media

A trained capacity to decode media sports texts and to detect the forms of
ideological deployment of sport in the media is, irrespective of cultural taste, a
crucial skill. It is no exaggeration to assert that such a key critical competency is