Page 48 - Sport Culture and the Media

UNDERSTANDING SPORT AND MEDIA || 29

perhaps reluctant consumers into the orbit of commodity culture. In ‘capturing
audiences for advertisers’ – as Smythe (1977) has influentially argued – for the
purpose of mass consumer persuasion, the mass media could now be subsidized
by those same advertisers to provide cheap (as in the case of newspapers whose
cover price is only a fraction of their production cost) or free (as in much ‘free-
to-air’ television) media content that would provide the opportunity for an
unprecedentedly massive ‘window display’ for goods and services.
As the mass media developed into large-scale, formal, bureaucratic organiza-
tions in the business of producing news, culture and entertainment in a manner
imitative of the continuous process production methods of factories, they also
displayed an insatiable hunger for content – the vast spaces of print and air
time had to be filled in fulfilling their dual informational and entertainment
functions. It is impossible to imagine newspapers or radio news bulletins being
cancelled on the grounds that nothing sufficiently newsworthy happened in the
world today, or no new records or films being released this week because of a
temporary talent shortage, or blank pages in magazines and empty TV screens
on account of a failure to come up with anything sufficiently diverting. This is
not only because news is always being made and culture produced that is of
interest to somebody somewhere, but also because ‘dead air’, blank screens,
empty pages and goods-free shops cannot be tolerated by the media and cultural
industries and their business clients. The economics of the commercial media
are premised on the continued availability of ‘new’ material (however familiar
in form and predictable in content) that will constantly stimulate popular atten-
tion, and that will balance the comfortable expectations of audiences with
elements of novelty and surprise (Cunningham and Miller (with Rowe) 1994).
In this way, the mass media can be conceived as an institutional space that must
be filled on a daily basis to function, rather than in more conventional terms as
a supplier of cultural goods on the basis of established and measurable demand.
The publicly funded media, furthermore, are charged as we have seen with
the additional responsibility of fostering national culture, a sense of belonging
to the nation which brings its various citizens together across the barriers
of locality, class, age, race, ethnicity, gender, and so on. The public media are
no less required to provide continuous content than the commercial media,
although their revenue does not derive directly from selling goods and exposing
audiences. For public media to fail to produce copious quantities of informa-
tion and entertainment would imply the unthinkable – that the nation is not
being dutifully served or, worse, that during breaks in transmission it does
not exist! All media – public or private, large or small – have to deal with the
question of a public. While it is misleading to reduce media relations simply
to one group of people (the audience) accepting or rejecting the product of
another (journalists, film-makers, pop musicians, television directors, and so