Page 68 - Sport Culture and the Media

WORKING IN MEDIA SPORT || 49

[multiple sclerosis]. Now that was something very few men could have
written – if any, I suspect – because it had a special sympathetic perspec-
tive, human perspective and did illuminate the situation for people very
well indeed. He talked to her in a way he might not have talked to a man,
there’s a kind of macho culture in which they hold back some of these
really personal things. I’d like to see a lot more of that.
(Darren)

The recruitment of female sports reporters was partly advocated here as a tactic
to increase circulation and partly to supply a more traditionally nurturant, non-
combative feminine quality to the sports page, yet it nevertheless reveals the
predictability of approach of much current sports journalism and the limited
experiential base of its practitioners. Three prominent women journalists inter-
viewed by Amanda Smith (1997: 93) were rather more circumspect about being
‘pigeonholed’ in their approach to their work, for example that they would
privilege women’s sports or write what one describes as ‘fluff pieces’. But they
also reported some difficulties of gaining access to athletes and undue con-
centration on their sex and sexuality. Emma Lindsey’s (2001) reflection on some
of her experiences as that very rare bird (no sexism intended), a black woman
sports journalist in Britain, illustrates the difficulty that a traditionally homo-
geneous workplace in racial, class and gender terms has with dealing with the
‘Other’ in its midst, and of its keenness to keep difference on the margins. Her
difficulties with gaining access to restricted areas despite her press pass,
exasperation with racial and sexual stereotyping of black athletes, and difficult
professional journalistic relationship with those same black athletes (including
a feud with champion sprinter Linford Christie) who often expect her
unequivocal endorsement as a fellow person of colour, all attest to the hard
labour in the sports department that awaits the small numbers of black and/or
female journalists that venture into it. In describing ‘how the media machine
works to perpetuate, and indeed helps to create, certain stereotypes that exist
elsewhere’, Lindsey is also describing ‘the role of business in the promotion
of certain stereotypes, and its ever-tightening grip on sport’s future’ (Lindsey
2001: 188). Sports journalists, she argues, in subscribing to the ‘Edenic view’
(p. 198) of sport as the privileged space of innocence and nobility, are largely
complicit in this process. It is easier to take this Panglossian position, she
implies, when the closest that the sports journalist has come to the experience
of social exclusion has been hearing snide remarks about junkets and free-
loading uttered by other journalists who have to write about welfare policy or
unemployment.
Henningham (1995: 15) records in his study that sports journalists were less
likely than non-sports journalists to have ‘experienced or had knowledge of