Page 69 - Sport Culture and the Media

50 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

newsroom prejudice’ relating to race, ethnicity or sex. Of those few sports
journalists in his study who were female, women journalists were far more
likely than their male colleagues to agree that it is ‘more difficult for women to
get ahead in journalism’ (36 per cent compared with 85 per cent, although their
non-Anglo counterparts did not tend to attribute to ethnicity an equivalent
level of obstruction to upward occupational mobility). Because they had not
experienced prejudice and discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity
or sex themselves, or had not been sensitized to the negative experience of
others (not least because most of their immediate colleagues had similar back-
grounds), most of the sports journalists in this study were not much troubled by
social structural inequities.
This cosy picture of the sports desk as a WASP male enclave is reinforced to a
degree by Henningham’s findings that sports journalists tended to stay in the
same job and, indeed, profession, for longer than their non-sports colleagues,
and (as mentioned above) were generally more satisfied with, and less stressed
by, their jobs than journalists in general. When questioned on the relative
importance of different characteristics of those jobs, sports journalists were
significantly (in statistical terms) attracted to their job’s pay, security and
fringe benefits, and significantly less concerned with the editorial policies of
their organization (Henningham 1995: 16). This last characteristic connects
with the pattern of political orientation of journalists. As we saw in Chapter 1,
western news media workers have traditionally prided themselves (though
sometimes only with the aid of self-delusion) on their fiercely guarded critical
independence from governments and big business enterprises (even when the
latter are their own employers). Yet, the sports journalists whose attitudes are
recorded in studies like Henningham’s are more politically conservative than
non-sports journalists (almost twice as likely to vote on the Right), and more
positive and optimistic about the current state of press freedom, concentration
of ownership and control, and so on. The ‘splendid isolation’ of the sports
department has no doubt partially insulated it from the improper interference
by proprietors and managers that bothers journalists in other departments.
Greater priority, as a result, is given to news functions like ‘get information to
the public quickly’ and ‘concentrate on news of interest to the widest possible
public’ rather than ‘provide analysis and interpretation of complex problems’
or taking the role of sceptical ‘adversary’ in dealing with public officials
and businesses (Henningham 1995: 16). Here the traditional sports reporting
and recording function comes to the fore at the expense of the analytical and
investigative tasks of the news media.