Page 54 - Sport Culture and the Media

UNDERSTANDING SPORT AND MEDIA || 35

In this book I am interested in three main manifestations of power. The first
is at the institutional level – the manner in which the institutions of media and
sport have come together, the ways in which one may be said to have dominated
(or even consumed) the other, the extent to which their interaction has had
a mutually modifying effect. The second is at the symbolic level – how the
institutionally provided and moulded media sports texts can be interpreted
and used, sometimes accepted and revered, on other occasions rejected and
ridiculed. The third is at the relational level – the wider social and cultural
ramifications of the development of a giant, partially globalized media sports
cultural complex; that is, the extent to which this great ‘engine’ of signs and
myths itself symbolizes and helps create our current ‘being in the world’. By
gaining a better knowledge and understanding of how media sports texts are
produced and what they might mean, it is possible to learn more about societies
in which ‘grounded’ and ‘mediated’ experience intermesh in ever more insidious
and seemingly seamless ways.
This chapter has covered a good deal of ground in attempting to establish a
socio-historical framework for the study of sport, culture and the media. Many
corners have been cut in the process, because to do a thorough job would have
taken up the whole of this book – and probably several more volumes. I have
tried to demonstrate something of how sport and the media developed as social
institutions and then intersected and interpenetrated as the rapid growth in
industrialized leisure and large-scale consumption, coupled with the require-
ments of modern nation building, created the circumstances for a long-lasting
and increasingly intense union. Such developments, I have argued, need to be
interrogated rather than merely documented, because the enormous investment
of capital, human labour, political rhetoric, social effort and cultural space that
has produced contemporary media sport has also created the conditions for the
playing out of many forms of power to:

•‘discipline’ great proportions of the world’s citizens to watch sports TV in
escalating (though disputed) numbers, such as the estimated 3.7 billion
people in 220 countries claimed to have watched the Sydney 2000 Olympics
and the cumulative audience for the Korea/Japan 2002 World Cup of
28.8 billion people from 213 countries;
• determine the destiny of large companies and their employees, including
giant media corporations like NBC, the now defunct Kirch media (who
paid too much for the broadcast rights to the 2002 soccer World Cup and
couldn’t recoup the cost), sports apparel manufacturers like Nike, and soft
drink makers like Pepsi;
• influence the policies of government in, for example, underwriting bids
to host mega-media sports events, deciding on whether to participate in