Page 66 - Sport Culture and the Media

WORKING IN MEDIA SPORT || 47

four-year cadetship, doing shipping rounds and nonsense like that. I was
lucky and so far so good it’s worked out well.
(Philip)

This experience of ‘stumbling’ into sports journalism from another occu-
pational area – including elite sport – is a common and, in many cases, by no
means an illegitimate one, but it does not do much, from a credentialist point
of view, for the status of the specialism, especially when it is accompanied by
the ethically dubious practice of ghosting. It is not helped in this case when the
journalist resents accusations that his work is ‘ghosted’ but he is prepared to
‘ghost’ for others. In ‘paying their dues’ on the shipping and garden fete rounds,
many journalists expect to bank up professional experience that is recognized
as a qualification for the job, including sports reporting. The movement into
their ranks of those unqualified or underqualified in journalistic terms not only
questions the value of such experience, but also raises the broad issue of the
authority of the writer and critic who has not been what he or she is describing
at the highest level – an Olympic athlete, opera singer, chef, and so on. This
tension between competing forms of authority – sporting and literary – in a
discipline of journalism that is already subject to considerable scepticism
concerning its quality and worth leads, as is noted below, to an anxious pressing
of claims to professional and even artistic legitimacy.
This difficulty in restricting labour market entry – especially in cases where
‘ingress’ is on the basis of demonstrated physical rather than mental and
literary prowess – may negatively affect sports journalism’s prestige, but it
does not automatically depress its social class composition. As McKay (1991)
has noted, in terms of the general population, participants in sport ‘have a
relatively high level of income and education’ (p. 11). Furthermore, Henningham
(1995) found that, while indistinguishable from other journalists in socio-
economic class terms, sports journalists are more likely to be Anglo and male
than their colleagues in the wider profession. A degree of caution is needed here
– there are no doubt other equally WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant)
dominated journalistic specialisms (business and political reporting spring
to mind), but these may be protected from criticism by their concern with
‘serious’ matters of state and economics. In other words, the social homo-
geneity that is barely questioned in some areas of journalism becomes, in the
negative stereotype of the sports journalist, a sign of the ‘hack’. A ‘clubbish’
image of sport journalism begins to emerge when it is seen to be resistant to
entry by women (according to Van Zoonen (1998: 129), masculinity and a
subjective attachment to sport and sportspeople is definitive of sports jour-
nalism) and/or those of non-Anglo background. In my (qualitative) study it was
sometimes remarked that, for example, in Britain there were few Asians and