Page 73 - Sport Culture and the Media

54 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

(p. 101). The power of the media to ‘“make or break” an athlete’s reputation
and level of fame’, she argues, disadvantages sportspeople, leaving them so vul-
nerable to misquotation that they fear to challenge and are suspicious of sports
journalists. MacNeill’s advocacy of a new, international media sport-specific
code of ethics suggests that current professional self-regulation of sports
journalists is inadequate to protect athletes from unfair coverage. This is a
rather different anxiety to the one previously discussed that sports journalists
tend to be much more interested in back scratching than muck raking. These
matters are, as we have seen, not limited to the Canadian context, but travel
across continents and oceans to all the places where a sports journalist watches
a game, and asks a breathless athlete, ‘How does it feel to let the entire nation
and your ancestors down?’ or, alternatively, ‘What’s it like to be bigger than
Jesus and Mohammed combined?’, and files the story.
In this section, I have tried to flesh out the shadowy glimpse of the sports
journalist schematically presented in Henningham’s article. He concludes
by judging contemporary sports journalism as something of a throwback –
perhaps one that would be approved of, as discussed earlier, by Windschuttle
(1998: 17) – to ‘an older model of journalism, more objective and “fact based”,
more in tune with the commercial imperatives of the media, less questioning
of the ideological and sociological role of journalism’. Henningham is also
concerned by the lack of ‘angst’ and the absence of a ‘self-critical approach’
by sports journalists whose profile, as developed out of the survey, is of a
rather complacent group of white male professionals from comfortable back-
grounds with enviably ‘cushy’ jobs. This picture does not altogether match that
emerging from my qualitative study of sports journalists or that reported in
Salwen and Garrison’s quantitative and qualitative studies. Methodologically,
these variable findings may stem from the different types of data generated by
‘pencil and paper’ survey-style interviews and exploratory, semi-structured
interviews.
It is likely that the more thoughtful and self-critical responses of the sports
journalists in my study were artefacts of the selected research method, which
involved interviews of at least twenty minutes’ duration (often much longer)
and a series of inquisitive and sometimes discomfiting questions. It is also
possible that sports journalists are generally satisfied with their lot but feel less
so when reminded by interviewers that they tend to be poorly regarded by their
non-sports peers. Most of the interviewees in my study described both the
pleasure and pain of their jobs as producers of media sports texts. For example,
a female sports journalist on a broadsheet Australian newspaper (necessarily,
as we have seen, unrepresentative of her occupational group) expressed a sense
of international variation in the prestige of sports journalists, a desire for
greater recognition and the joy of sports writing: