Page 86 - Sport Culture and the Media

3 MONE Y , M Y TH AND THE BIG MA TCH:

THE POLITIC AL EC ONOMY OF THE

SPORTS MEDIA

The influence of television is felt in the ever increasing number of on-site
advertising banners and logos and sponsorship tie-ins. Some athletes have
become walking billboards for their multiple sponsors and equipment
suppliers . . . The commercialization of sports, even at amateur level,
continues apace, justified by the constant need to bring in more money,
and limited only by initial resistance from the public, which inevitably
overcomes its outrage and learns to accept yet more blatant salesmanship
in sport as a necessary evil which subsidizes the undertaking. If in junk
sports, it’s tough to separate the junk from the sports, then in all sports
it’s equally tough to separate the business from the sport.
(Klatell and Marcus 1988: 21)

Introduction: valuing sport

I have delayed a fuller discussion of the economics of the sports media until the
closing chapter of this first ‘Making media sport’ part of the book, but not
because it is of any lesser importance than other influences on production – far
from it, as the previous analysis has repeatedly shown. For example, in Chapter
2 we saw how developments in broadcast and print sports journalism are linked
to the calculation of their economic value in increasing the size and broadening
the base of media sports audiences. The discussion of sport and media eco-
nomics leads into the second part of ‘Unmaking the media sports text’ for the
slightly perverse reason that, just at the point where many other works in media
and cultural studies tend to bracket off the rather unromantic ‘business of
business’ and get down to the more freewheeling task of textual reading and
interpretation, it is, I believe, all the more necessary to keep economic concerns