Page 27 - Sport Culture and the Media

8 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

an important aspect of a fully realized cultural citizenship (Murdock 1992;
Stevenson 1995; Rowe 2003) in the era of the omnipresent sports image. It is
important, then, to understand the dynamics of the relationship between sport
and the media. We need to be able to analyse their mutual roles as social
institutions (including assessment of the traditional sports fan’s lament that
‘TV has taken over sport’), and to develop a knowledge of the institutional
processes, practices and motivations that bring media sports texts of various
kinds to their willing and unwilling audiences. It is also incumbent on us to
be able to criticize their (separate and mutual) interaction with other social
institutions, groups and individuals, not least by interrogating the ideologies
of repression and exclusion embedded within such seemingly innocent and
exhaustingly available elements of popular culture.
In examining the production and content of mainstream media sport texts,
we also encounter the points of dissonance and resistance, the places where
different meanings and practices of and for sport are made and played out.
The requirement is not to treat the sport–media nexus as a closed system of
commercial exploitation, massified communication and unreflexive image con-
sumption, but to acquire the critical means to establish an authoritative grasp
of the structural, institutional and organizational framework governing their
production, dissemination and reception. This is not as grim a task as it sounds,
because to gain critical knowledge and acumen in this or any other corner
of the popular world involves the pleasure of trading heedless absorption or
numb indifference for knowing reflection and informed appreciation (in its
broadest sense). In engaging with sport and media, the personal and the
political, the serious and the fun-loving, the po-faced and the ironic, can be
combined in the most surprising and productive of ways.