Page 19 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

8 • Sport, Media and Society

The remaining chapters consider the different facets of the sport media, showing

how these analytic approaches can be developed in relation to specific media forms.

Chapter 2 explores approaches to the analysis of sport films. The first part of the

chapter explores the signifying systems of film (camera, lighting, editing, sound and

mise en scène) to consider how sport films communicate their meaning. Particular
attention is paid to the importance of sound for rendering the power of sport through
film. The concept of narrative is introduced as a way of knowing sport through fi lm,

and the second part of the chapter discusses genre in relation to sport films. The fi rst
of the case studies in this chapter looks at Raging Bull (1980), analysing three fi ght
scenes from the film to show how camera, lighting, sound and editing render the

perspective of the boxer, Jake La Motta. Baseball movies are the focus of the second
case study, which unpacks the formulaic aspects of these films and questions whether

they compose their own genre.
Chapter 3 builds on the identification of the importance of signifying systems,

narrative and genre in making sport meaningful in film by extending these concepts
to the analysis of sport on television. Televised sport is understood as comprised of

five channels of communication, graphics, image, voice, sound effects and music,
simultaneously constructing a narrative or way of knowing sport. Approaches to the
analysis of the five channels of communication are demonstrated, and, as the only

programme type that globally attracts more male than female viewers, televised sport
is considered as a gendered genre, containing features which draw in masculine audi-
ences. The first of two case studies for this chapter focuses on men’s and women’s

televised football on British television. The other explores the spectacularisation of
televised sport by analysing the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics
held in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the United States.
The fourth chapter pays attention to the interaction between images and words in
the ways that newspapers construct discourses of sport. The particular combinations

of codes that are specific to newspapers are explored, and the meanings of sport
news stories are considered as effects of connotation and intertextuality. The chapter
demonstrates how newspapers use codes in their selection of words and pictures that
stand in place of their readers, constructing subject positions for readers to occupy

and points of identification on the basis of class, nation, ethnicity and gender. These
subject positions are considered to vary according to the type of newspaper, the deci-
sions about which sports to include or exclude in the coverage and the way of report-
ing those sports. Newspapers are thus shown to use sport to engage in a dialogue with
readers, constructing mythic communities based on assumptions of shared values.
The two case studies for this chapter explore discourses of nation, gender and ethnic-
ity in British newspaper reports and photographs of Kelly Holmes’s double Olympic
victory in 2004 and discourses of deviance in the coverage of doping scandals in the
US sport press.
The way that media sport addresses its differing audiences is further explored in
Chapter 5. Sport and fi tness magazines are shown to use direct and indirect address