Page 57 - Sport Culture and the Media

38 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

How can we explain, putting aside the wider question of the surprising lack
of occupational prestige of journalists as a group – according to Curran (1998:
90) ‘former standards of accuracy are declining, at least in the eyes of the
public’ – the rather low esteem in which sports journalists are held within their
chosen profession? Or, even if journalists in general retain high or even growing
repute, why does the American writer James Traub (1991: 35) note that after
a short stint as a sports writer, ‘The experience taught me that the trend of
increasing prestige for the press, observable in such coverage sectors as business
and politics, has not been universal’? In looking for an answer to these
questions, it is necessary to understand the wider ambivalence concerning the
value of popular culture and of attempts to take it seriously. Sports journalists,
furthermore, are caught in a particularly difficult bind because of the different,
sometimes contradictory professional demands made on them: they are
expected, often at the same time, to be objective reporters, critical investigators,
apologists for sports and teams, representatives of fans and, not unusually,
to have performed in sport at elite levels. Their readers, listeners and viewers
are more than a little uncertain about the value of their work. As Hornby
(1992) pronounces in his obsessive fan’s paean to soccer, Fever Pitch (the film of
which is discussed in Chapter 6), ‘Sports journalists and armchair Corinthians
are the Amazon Indians who know more than we do – but in another way
they know much, much less’ (p. 136). Such questioning of authoritative
knowledge recurs repeatedly in lounge and bar-room discussions of sports
journalism: What do they know anyway? Can they really feel it? Are they
too close to it? Maybe they’re just overpaid sports groupies? Often lying
behind such doubts is a lingering resentment, from non-sports colleagues
and sports fans alike, that sports journalism is something of a ‘lurk’ – a case of
‘nice work if you can get it’. Simon Barnes (1989: 1) in detailing A Sports-
writer’s Year, registers his acute awareness of this attitude of combined
hostility and envy towards sports journalists in calling its introduction ‘How to
become a sportswriter by complete accident’, and through self-deprecating
humour. He also discloses a craft secret: ‘I hope that it does not come as a
complete shock to the world that the job involves a spot of work here and there’
(p. 3).
These conflicts over the identity and conduct of sports journalists go beyond
a little jockeying for position in the professional pecking order: they have
far-reaching ramifications for the process of making media sports genres and
texts. By inspecting the ‘coalface’ of media sports production, it is possible
to ‘de-naturalize’ media sports texts and so to understand that they are par-
ticular creations and constructions arising from the complex, contradictory
forces that make culture. At the same time, we begin to see something of the
cultural politics of sports journalism, especially the ways in which sports texts