Page 67 - Sport Culture and the Media

48 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

Afro-Caribbeans coming through the ranks of young sports journalists. One
British former editor and current sports columnist noted the irony of the largely
mono racial/ethnic composition of sports journalism, ‘Just as an increasing
number of sportsmen have become black’. He went on to remark that:

Barry Brain, the sports editor of The Watchdog, told me that he was very
consciously bringing on black sports writers because he did feel they had
a perspective that was missing in the sports pages, but not very many are
doing that. Again, I just don’t know how many guys there are who are any
good at it.
(Darren)
The under-representation of non-Anglo people in the sports media could be
the journalistic equivalent of ‘stacking’, the practice in sport of (often
unconsciously) assigning black athletes to ‘race-appropriate’ sports, team and
coaching positions that rarely involve tactical decision making and leadership
(Cashmore 2000). From this perspective, sports reporting and commentary
largely involves white people in a non-manual occupation authoritatively
judging the sporting deeds of largely silent and objectified non-white people
using their bodies to make a living. The outcome (if not the intention) is racist
and ethnocentric in that the culture of sports journalism can be seen to be
replicating a very old and damaging structure of inequality that reserves key
‘gatekeeping’ positions for dominant social groups even as subaltern people
appear to be making progress in the area in question. Eric Dunning (1999:
212–13) describes the agitation of some black sports journalists and the Black
Newspaper Publishers Association in the USA in the 1940s to end racial segre-
gation in baseball, the self-proclaimed ‘national pastime’. It is ironic that,
several decades later, the spectre of segregation, symbolic rather than formal,
still haunts many sports desks.
The view that diversifying the ‘body’ of sports journalists not only is a matter
of social equity but is also likely to produce fresh insights and approaches was
again expressed by Darren when he reflected on the dearth of good female
sports reporters in Britain, and the pattern of those who had specialized in sport
becoming discouraged and moving to other specialisms:

Every sports editor starts off paying lip service that he wants women to
read the sports page, and one effective way of getting more women to read
the sports pages is getting more women to write on sport pages – there is a
natural identity there. And then they get bored with it or there aren’t
enough women around and it fades away again. I think it’s a great shame
because I think, I read a piece that Sue Knott wrote in The Sunday Times
a few weeks ago, an interview with Ray Kennedy, the footballer with MS