Page 46 - Sport Culture and the Media

UNDERSTANDING SPORT AND MEDIA || 27

re-concentration as, for example, Internet service providers merge with media
conglomerates (as occurred in the formation of AOL Time Warner; see
Hesmondhalgh 2002) or in the case of the now standard practice of leading
newspapers producing online editions (Wejbora 2003). The intensification
of debates about media power and responsibility is, however, a product of
expansion of the whole media sector, rather than, as media moralists often
suggest, linked to a specific development like the invention of television, the
circulation of glossy magazines or the marketing of paperback books.

News and entertainment

The mass media, as we have seen, had from the outset two major, sometimes
conflicting functions. The first involved the ‘serious’ notion of news gathering
and processing as part of the Fourth Estate, which acted (at least ostensibly)
as a watchdog on the powerful and as an important influence in the key pro-
cess of nation building by communicating the nation to itself (Gellner 1983;
Schlesinger 1991). It was no longer necessary to listen to a town crier to hear the
news of the day or to rely on rumour and gossip to be informed about what was
happening outside the individual’s or small group’s immediate experience. The
great journals of record and opinion leaders such as The Times of London
and the New York Times and, later, public broadcasters like the BBC and those
in the former British colonies or dominions on which they were modelled,
like the Australian and Canadian Broadcasting Corporations (ABC and CBC,
respectively), were and are key media organizations in the formation of an
informed ‘public sphere’ (Habermas 1989). The extent to which the mass media
successfully fulfil this important function of challenging the powerful and pro-
moting informed citizenship has always been hotly disputed, not least because
to own or control a major media organization (especially an ‘empire’ consisting
of many different organizations operating in a single medium or, even more
powerfully, across different media) is a significant form of power in its own
right (Golding and Murdock 2000). However unflattering the ‘verdict’ might be
on the capitalist press or on state broadcasters in regard to their sincerity and
effectiveness in serving the people at large and protecting the weak from the
abuse of power by ruling elites, there is no doubt that major media organiza-
tions are highly sensitive to allegations that they ruthlessly exploit their com-
mand of the channels of mass communication to their commercial and political
advantage. As Windschuttle (1984) argues, the conventional defence of com-
mercial media organizations (and, we might add, even of some increasingly
entrepreneurial public media) against criticisms of dereliction of public duty