Page 58 - Sport Culture and the Media

WORKING IN MEDIA SPORT || 39

mediate understandings of social issues within sport and between sport and
the society in which it is embedded. The seemingly ‘automatic’, neutral pro-
cedures of media sports text production are thereby revealed as wedded to
the negotiation and promotion of power relations in their various forms. This
case study of sports journalism is, then, being used to exemplify the kind of
critical analysis that could be applied to any area of media sport production.
Specific questions might vary, but the crucial principle is that all media sports
texts are manufactured, and that the process of production involves many
decisions, calculations, dilemmas and disputes. The produced media sports
text, in other words, has to be released from its mechanical appearance and
humanized.
In this chapter, I shall explore the practice and status of sports journalism
(with the major emphasis on print) in teasing out key aspects of the making of
sports texts. In so doing, I shall draw on a research study (with some interview
extracts presented here also found in Rowe and Stevenson 1995) I conducted
in the mid-1990s, which involved over forty interviews (not all conducted by
me) with working sports journalists (mostly print, but also television and
radio) from three different English-speaking countries (Australia, the UK and
New Zealand), and subsequently informed by discussions with journalists from
various disciplines in the UK and the USA. A key element of the empirical study
was the sports journalists’ self-assessment of their own and their colleagues’
work activities in different sports media (all identifying names of individuals,
organizations and places, it should be noted, have been removed in presenting
these interview data). It is important to understand (although not be limited to)
what sports journalists think about what they do because, despite appearances
to the contrary on occasions, they do not robotically churn out pre-
programmed content. However urgent the deadlines, limited the vocabulary
and familiar the organizational routine of sports journalism, it should never be
forgotten that, as Schudson points out:

Journalists write the words that turn up in the papers or on the screen
as stories. Not government officials, not cultural forces, not ‘reality’
magically transforming itself into alphabetic signs, but flesh-and-blood
journalists literally compose the stories we call news.
(Schudson 1991: 141)
Despite the development in the early 1990s of computer programs like the
‘Zybrainic Sportswriter’, which can automatically compose sports data fed
to it by non-journalists, so allowing ‘The Monroe City News in Missouri [to]
become the world’s first newspaper to use a computer instead of journalists to
write its sports reports’ (Sydney Morning Herald 1993: 79), there is a human
body and brain behind the sports news.