Page 85 - Sport Culture and the Media

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66 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

for groups and individuals to wield considerable socio-economic power through
class location but not be highly regarded by others (that is, be rich but with
relatively low status), it is also often the case that the economic power of the
sports department (in terms of the large number and handsome remuneration
of personnel; importance for circulation, ratings, advertising revenue, and so
on) is at variance with its cultural power (low professional reputation and
esteem). For this reason, sports journalists often craved equal status with
‘serious’ journalists or even recognition of their writing as ‘art’.
I observed that the economic power of sports journalism does seem, some-
what belatedly, to be raising its professional status, but that this improvement is
at least as signiﬁcantly due to sport being very much in vogue. Of course, the
current fashionability of sport is in part related to its skilful promotion as a
‘hip’ cultural commodity – a phenomenon conspicuously evident in British
soccer (Redhead 1991; Haynes 1995; Rowe 1995) and American basketball
(McKay 1995; Andrews 1996; Boyd 1997). Such developments in the making
and meaning of media sports texts reveal the impossibility of separating the
different and interacting inﬂuences on sports culture. Hence, the economics of
sport and media are deeply dependent on cultural dynamics – but no less than,
as is addressed in the next chapter, media sports culture is profoundly inﬂu-
enced by economic imperatives.