Page 53 - Sport Culture and the Media

34 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

sinisterly, wall-to-wall media sport can be seen as the extension of the ‘bread
and circuses’ policies of dominant groups, perpetually distracting the popula-
tion with trivia while getting on with the business of ruling a grossly unequal
world to their own advantage by making sure that oppositional values are
discredited and neglected. These well known polarized perspectives, described
over a quarter of a century ago by Cohen and Young (1973) as the commercial
laissez-faire and mass manipulative models of the media, have between them
a range of different positions that gravitate, in emphasis rather than in their
totality, towards one or other end of the analytical spectrum. Even less con-
clusive is the approach which stresses the inconsistent, contingent, negotiated
or emergent relations between media, sport, culture and society. Instead of
the master narrative of consumer freedom versus mass oppression, there is a
more modest and qualified attention paid to the historical and institutional
conditions which produce outcomes that can only be pronounced upon after
close and unprejudiced inspections of particular instances of media sport on a
case-by-case basis. From such a perspective it is not possible to speak of the
state of the sports media in general, but only of the diverse complexity of
sites and processes out of which are produced many different, historically
conditioned but non-determinant circumstances (Sugden and Tomlinson 2002).
Here, then, commercial and media forces can be said to have wrested control
of a sport from ‘the people’, but over here ‘the people’ have successfully resisted
the blandishments of sports media commerce, or have accepted the need for
economic rationalization, or have formed alliances with more ‘sympathetic’
commercial enterprises or governments to repel the clumsy incursions of
‘buccaneering’ businesspeople. The cost of such an open, flexible and indeter-
minate approach is, however, the loss of explanatory power arising from a
concern with the uniqueness of each instance of media sport rather than
with the common features out of which patterns and trends can be discerned.
For this reason, the analysis of sport and media must move in different
directions, carefully weighing the macro and micro, general and specific influ-
ences, which, in combination, work to fashion everyday life out of the social
resources at hand. Thus, as Foucault (1980) observes, there are different forms
and effects of power that are in play at different levels throughout the social
world. Power is not necessarily a negative concept: it ranges in character from
the exercise of the grossest and subtlest forms of oppression to the capacity
to effect dramatic or cumulatively progressive change. Power also operates in
environments – like the domain of the sports media – often dismissed as trivial
and harmless. The ‘trick’ is to recognize the many forms, directions, sites
and effects of power without optimistically inflating the success of resistive
strategies or playing down the capacity of established power structures to assert
themselves with an almost effortless and invisible force.