Page 76 - Sport Culture and the Media

WORKING IN MEDIA SPORT || 57

exclusive to sports journalists, are particularly common to and pressing for
them (like their status with fans and professional peers). Because the stereotype
of the hard-bitten sports journalist is such an established one, it is tempting to
discount the differences between them. While it is unquestionable that sports
journalists tend to be white, middle class and male – for example, Creedon
(1994a: 100) notes that the US-based Association for Women in Sports
Media found that ‘only 3% of the nation’s 10,000 print and broadcast sports
journalists are women’ – differences and tensions exist between practitioners
with similar social ‘profiles’. We can also anticipate that the breaches already
made in the bastion of sports journalism by women and non-Anglo people will
widen. That progress in diversifying the composition of the sports journalism
labour force and its professional ideologies is slow and uneven is reflected,
though, in the ‘heteronormativity’ of the workplace culture. There is little
evidence to date that openly gay and lesbian sports journalists are making
any more impression in their occupation than their athlete counterparts are
making in professional sport (Dworkin and Wachs 2000). Various divisions
of a professional nature may emanate from involvement in different genres
in the same medium (such as between tabloid and broadsheet journalists) or in
different sports media (such as print versus broadcast), and complicate even
further an already complex process of media sports text production in which
fans, fellow journalists, athletes, sports administrators and sponsors are also
implicated.
If we consider, for example, the case of Caroline, a female sports editor on an
Australian radio station using a contemporary pop music format, it is clear that
she must negotiate rather different work-related issues than a male journalist
on the sports desk of a major newspaper. First, there is the matter of gender
affecting the conduct of her work, such as in the ‘danger zone’ of the male
sports dressing room, the scene of various confrontations over rights of
access by female sport journalists, most famously symbolized by the ‘Lisa
Olson “incident”’ (Kane and Disch 1993) in which the Boston Herald reporter
was subjected to ‘locker room’ sexual harassment in 1990 by some players
from the New England Patriots football team. Caroline displayed acute aware-
ness of the pioneering role of women sports journalists like Lisa Olson,
whose public campaign against her treatment led to fines imposed by the
National Football League and guarantees of gender equity in the conduct of
sports journalism:

I know I have come in on the shoulders of other women who have had to
take football teams to court for not letting them in the dressing rooms. I
know that, I know that a few years ago I probably wouldn’t have been let
within coo-ee [Australian slang for proximate] of a football dressing room,