Page 50 - Sport Culture and the Media

UNDERSTANDING SPORT AND MEDIA || 31

disparate demands of diverse populations? The answer – for so many editors
and programmers the dream solution to the perennial problem of contacting
and holding media audiences – is sport.

Having it both ways: sport meets media

Sport provides the mass media with many precious qualities. In terms of
audiences it is able regularly to deliver large (sometimes enormous), often
extremely loyal cohorts of readers, listeners and viewers. The linkage between
sport and media did not await the arrival of the age of television. As Michael
Harris (1998: 19), for example, demonstrates, ‘cricket was drawn into the
content of the London newspapers’ well before 1750 as part of the ‘widening
circle of commercialization within what might begin to be described as the
leisure industries’ and of the ‘emergent urban activity which became closely
associated with the elite groups in English society’. Newspapers, therefore, were
key promotional tools as entrepreneurs began to ‘construct a business around
public recreation’ (Harris 1998: 24). The core audience of sports fans (and the
derivation from ‘fanatic’ is frequently appropriate) is a reliable ‘commodity’
that can be profitably sold to advertisers, and on occasions a much larger and
less committed audience can be drawn in to take part in the great national
and international spectacles which generate their own momentum of interest
through their sheer size and ‘cross-media’ visibility. Just as television has, like
fashion, its new seasons, sport has its equivalent of serials and blockbusters.
The established sports can bubble away in their rolling time slots (in some cases
becoming global, year-round offerings courtesy of satellite television), while the
media machine periodically gears up for national and international mega media
sports events, which, in self-fulfilling fashion, become compulsive viewing and
reading matter (because they are nearly impossible to escape). Consider, for
example, the scarcity of personal space impervious to images and information
concerning the Summer Olympics or the soccer World Cup during the com-
petition period in any society with a reasonably well-developed media
infrastructure. Sport not only produces audiences faithful to the media which
are displaying it, but also is productive of other forms of loyalty, such as to
products (as the sponsors of sports competitions and the companies that invest
heavily in sports-related advertising, like Benson and Hedges, Coca-Cola and
McDonald’s, can attest) and also to city, state, county, region or nation (an
emotion much prized by governments and much exploited by commerce).
In countries like Australia, where sensitivity to media and cultural imperialism
exists as a result of its earlier colonial status and current openness to media
products from the dominant English language centres of production, sport also