Page 52 - Sport Culture and the Media

UNDERSTANDING SPORT AND MEDIA || 33

that the price of broadcast rights demanded by sport are extortionate (Milmo
2002), sports, sports fans and sports journalists (the latter two categories
can usually be collapsed) often bemoan that everything in sport has been
subordinated to the interests of the media. As one print sports journalist has
stated:
This year, Wimbledon has reversed the normal priorities. It is putting the
tastiest match on last, rather than first. This is vexing for the paying
punters, but good news for television, the biggest paying punter of them
all. Another of professional sport’s constant balancing acts is to please
both punters and television. And it is the interests of punters and, perhaps
more importantly, the leading players, that have come second...
But all sporting events must balance the needs of pure sport and the
needs of commerce. Without commerce there is no professional sport.
(Barnes 2000: 34)
Many of these visible, partly obscured and hidden elements of the sport–media
nexus will be analysed in the following chapters as we attempt to understand
how media sports texts are manufactured, ‘unwrapped’ and consumed. This
might be an all-very-interesting but not terribly enlightening exercise in the
description of cultural production if making media sport was just a technical
matter, a value-neutral process whereby sports information and action is
disseminated and a little (or even a lot of) money is made on the side. But
this is not the case: power over media sports production brings with it other
forms of power – economic, social, cultural and ideological – which often seem
elusive or the existence of which is denied altogether by those who believe that
‘it’s just business’ or ‘it’s only a game’. The final task in this summary socio-
historical analysis of sport and media is to propose that the (conscious or
unconscious) exercise of power is not an unfortunate by-product of the media
sport production process but is, in fact, central to it.

Conclusion: sport, media and cultural power

The heightened prominence of sport in print reportage (including specialist
sports, business and general journalism), magazines, still photography, radio,
film, video, television and the Internet is incontestable. What we are to make of
this observation is much less easily established. Several propositions can be
offered to explain the spectacular growth of the sports media. Blandly, it can
be suggested that it is produced by the efficient operation of the market in
cultural goods, services and information, a benign example of how popular
taste is accommodated by the cultural industries. Alternatively and more