Page 97 - Sport Culture and the Media

78 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

Several morals can be drawn from this US price war. One is that, more than
ever, sport is the most important commodity for TV. Another is that the
desperation of grown men, most of whom have never played top-level
sport themselves, to feel as if they are part of the game should never be
underestimated.
(Attwood 1998: 39)

The struggle for television sport can be seen to be more than a fight for profit: it
reveals the cultural power of sport, particularly in the higher ranks of large
corporate enterprises, where aggressive, competitive masculinity is as evident in
the boardrooms as in the locker rooms (McKay and Rowe 1997). For example,
the loss by the CBS network of its rights to Sunday football in 1993 to a Fox
network prepared to pay over three times the amount for them (US$1.58 billion
as opposed to US$500 million), had a demoralizing impact on the entire net-
work that went beyond the concomitant fall in ratings. As Attwood (1998: 39)
goes on to say, the four networks which paid unprecedented sums for the right
to televise American football into the early part of the twenty-first century
‘regard football as so crucial to their credibility and programming that they are
prepared to pay almost any price’, and that this phenomenon is not confined
to the boundaries of the United States, but ‘demonstrates how crucial major
sporting events are to networks, worldwide, in an increasingly competitive
TV market’. Thus, as Singer (1998: 36) notes, ‘today’s rule of thumb mandates
that any viable network must have sports to help raise the profile of its other
properties’; here he means literally to ‘have sports’, listing the direct ownership
of sports teams in the late 1990s by US media conglomerates, including Cable-
vision (the Knicks basketball and Rangers ice hockey franchises), Disney (the
Angels in baseball and Mighty Ducks in hockey) and (the now AOL-merged)
Time Warner (the Braves in baseball and Hawks in basketball). As Law et al.
(2002) have demonstrated, media sport involves intricate ‘supply chains’ that go
well beyond the ‘usual suspects’ (Disney, News Corp and AOL Time Warner)
and the more obvious ‘circuits of promotion’ (Whitson 1998). While the cross-
promotional possibilities of jointly owned media and sports enterprises are
attractive, it is the cultural appeal of sport that ensures that old fears of club
owners of ‘oversaturation’ and that ‘“giving away” the product on TV would
kill the gate’ are as ‘misguided as Hollywood’s fear of the VCR [video cassette
recorder]’ (Singer 1998: 36). Such popularity also allays the concerns of media
proprietors in countries like the USA that sport is not worth the asking price:
There’s good reason why sports is a TV staple: It’s human drama at a base
level, it’s cheap to produce and it’s live. One can’t minimize the power
of immediacy in this time-shifting era when sports are the last remaining
live coast-to-coast events – the Oscars, the Emmys, even ‘Saturday Night