Page 82 - Sport Culture and the Media

WORKING IN MEDIA SPORT || 63

This model of what has been acidly called the ‘sports journalism is high
literature of the Mailer-in-Esquire school’ (Diamond 1994: 16) is especially
prominent in the USA, with its stronger tradition of celebrity sports writers,
for whom ‘Sportswriting, at its best, is an art form accomplished with a work
ethic’ (Richman 1991: 337). However, it also threatens ‘death’ at its own hands
in producing ‘Sportswriting [which], at its worst, panders to the lowest tastes
of readers, offering rumour instead of information, jokes instead of passion,
opinion instead of insight’ (Richman 1991: 337). For Darren, the approved or
‘hardboiled’ style of quality sportswriting is unusually extended to embrace
some tabloid sports journalists but, as we have seen, sports journalism in
general remains a highly stigmatized specialism.
The critiques quoted above of much current sports journalism and pro-
motion of ‘superior’ writing are paralleled in the unfavourable comparison
of the best textual material produced by the print media and the standard
programming of the broadcast media, which are seen to be overly reliant on
fact-based reporting and live coverage. Rivalry between sports media personnel
is readily apparent, often over who gets priority access to sports performers
after a game (usually the broadcast media; Rowe and Stevenson 1995) and
over the appropriate job specifications in the sports media. As a British sports
columnist asserted:

There is a distinct shortage of investigative reporting on TV and radio. I’m
hopeful that Radio 5 will commission some serious investigations. As you
know some of these debates in sports are pretty fundamental stuff about
the commercialization of sport, drugs in sport, many things that touch on
serious social problems, and I think the sporting press generally has been
slow to see that. I think newspapers are getting better but there was very
little sign until very recently that television was prepared to do that. In
fact, the point I made to the BBC the other day was that the number of
actually scripted programmes about sport is minimal. Now I accept that
live sport is live television, it’s wonderful television, but there is also scope
behind the scenes for doing much more, both on personalities and on
issues relating to sport, than they’re doing at the moment.
(Darren)

Many sports journalists feel that there needs to be a more critical and
enquiring approach to sport and, for the print journalists at least, this change
of tack has been forced on them by the broadcast media’s seizing of much of
their traditional territory of describing sports events. Several print journalists
argue that they need, in the age of live radio and television broadcasts and
the Internet, to find a new role that enhances the media services already pro-
vided by the broadcast media. But some believe that the lack of an established