Page 98 - Sport Culture and the Media

MONEY, MYTH AND THE BIG MATCH || 79

Live’ are tape delayed to the West Coast. Only sports has the nation, and
sometimes the world, watching the same thing at the same time, and if you
have a message, that’s a potent messenger.
(Singer 1998: 36)

Once again, the power of sports television to create and connect nations
fragmented by space, time and social difference is shown to be its crowning
economic advantage. With this power, though, comes contest and even chaos.

The ‘strategic chaos’ of media sport

Network free-to-air television is, it should be noted, not the only player in the
sports market. The fierce ‘internal’ competition between networks is replicated
in the struggle between the network and pay television sectors. In some cases, as
with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (which owns the Fox network and
various pay satellite services like British-based BSkyB and the Hong Kong-based
Star) or the Walt Disney Company (which owns both the ABC network and the
leading sports cable channel ESPN), the enterprise is ‘horizontally integrated’
(that is, spread across different media and modes of delivery) and so is involved
in both free-to-air and pay sports television. The continuing and accelerating
realignment of organizations and convergence of technologies (as discussed in
the Afterword) ensures that sports television will continue to be in a dynamic
(which is often a euphemism for unstable) condition.
While it is premature to conclude that there is a single, integrated global
sport or sports media market – for such a thing to exist much greater cultural
homogeneity and economic rationalization would be necessary – there is a
marked globalizing trend in media sport that makes it increasingly hard to
insulate any aspect of sport and media in any particular country from external,
disruptive forces (Maguire 1999; Roche 2000). Just how much power the media
wield over sport can be seen through some brief case studies. In Australia, for
example, a large country with a medium-sized population (now 19 million – as
Turner (1990) has noted, a country with a land mass comparable to that of
the USA and a population similar to that of Holland) some distance from the
centres of power in media sport, there has been turmoil in sports television as
the belated introduction of pay TV (in January 1995) precipitated a convulsion
in the industry that is far from approaching a settled state. The intimidating
presence in the free-to-air and pay TV market of Rupert Murdoch (who was
born in Australia but gave up his citizenship to purchase key media assets in the
USA) and his great commercial rival (and sometime strategic ally) Kerry Packer,
owner of the top-rating Network Nine and (in)famous TV pioneer of one-day