Page 75 - Sport Culture and the Media

56 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

as Urry (1990: 45) has noted in the social-class inflected split between forms of
tourism typified by the ‘collective’ and the ‘romantic’ gaze. Organized sport,
like other cultural forms, also moves in and out of fashion. For example, in the
1960s it was seen by many in the counter-culture as a popularly digestible form
of militarism, but in the following decade supporting a sports team became a
way for middle-class male intellectuals to demonstrate that they really were
‘men of the people’ (Rowe 1995). In contemporary Britain, soccer’s remarkable
recent wave of popularity has washed over groups in very different positions in
the social hierarchy of ‘Cool Britannia’ (Miller et al. 2001). The consummate
image-projecting politician of the post-Thatcher era, Prime Minister Tony
Blair, has made much of a personal love for football that is of disputed intensity
and longevity. This strategic deployment of ‘football fever’ is well captured on
the cover of a recent sociology of sport book, which bears a well-known image
of Blair practising his soccer and populist political skills with a former (and
predictably unsuccessful) England manager (Sugden and Tomlinson 2002).
Journalists from outside the sports round have neither been immune to this
epidemic of sports fandom nor have they been blind to its possibilities for
professional advancement, while proprietors, managers, programmers and
editors have, in many cases somewhat belatedly, realized the commercial value
of sport and have provided more capital and human resources for it.
What do these long-term trends and recent changes mean for the profile of
the sports journalist? As I mentioned above (and not unlike the position
of tabloid journalists in general), sports journalists are reasonably socially
advantaged professionals whose ‘patch’ is a form of popular pleasure with a
lowly reputation in some quarters. If the development of their professional
discipline has been stunted by a somewhat comfortable, socially homogeneous
male culture of giving ‘the facts’ and mixing with the players, it is, because of
its expanding audiences, commercial clout and cultural profile, also currently
in a state of flux. To improve our understanding of the making of the media
sports text, it is helpful to examine more deeply, as Schudson (1991: 141) noted
above, how in the specialism of sport the ‘flesh-and-blood journalists [who]
literally compose the stories we call news’ negotiate the various and conflicting
demands that are made on them.

Talking to the sports talkers

In the excerpts from interviews with sports journalists presented earlier in this
chapter it was apparent that, in going about their everyday duties, they are
subject both to the occupational problems that beset all types of journalists
(such as their relationships with sources) and others that, while not altogether