Page 32 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

Analysing Media Sport • 21

studies. Hall (1980) replaced the traditional model of mass communication involving
a linear circuit or loop—sender–message–receiver—with a more complex frame-
work which understood the media to be the result of a negotiation between insti-
tutional producers of meaning and audiences as producers of meaning. The media
production process is discursive in that the television programme or newspaper or
magazine that it produces is framed with meanings and ideas resulting from histori-

cally defined production processes, assumptions about the audience and personal and
institutional agendas and identities.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) televised the Oxford and Cam-
bridge boat race between 1938 and 2004 (‘BBC Says Farewell’ 2004). This event—a
rowing race between crews from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge along
the river Thames in London—was part of the British social calendar historically as-
sociated with the introduction of debutantes to high society. The race carries mean-
ings associated with aristocracy and national identity and historical ideologies of
amateur sport (an ethos that was used to prevent working-class professionals from
taking part in sport). It is possible to argue that it was these characteristics that made
it appear appropriate for the BBC to televise the race in its remit as a public service
broadcaster. It is also possible to see evidence of the claims of cultural elitism and
paternalism that have been targeted at the BBC (O’Sullivan 2000) in this decision.
The broadcasts then can be said to be encoded with these values by the producers.
However, the organisers of the race agreed to a fi ve-year deal for the rival indepen-
dent terrestrial television channel, ITV, to broadcast the race from 2005. The BBC
(2004: para. 3) claimed that this decision was motivated by the organisers’ ‘desire
to pursue a highly commercial agenda’, something that would change the presenta-
tion of the race. Whannel (1992) documented the way that the commercial agenda
of ITV historically shaped the production techniques used in the encoding of sport
broadcasts. The reverential approach of the BBC to broadcasting major occasions
drew ‘upon the authority derived from its tradition of association with major national
events’ (Whannel 1992: 19), whereas ITV built large audiences by using techniques,
such as the close-up, that dramatised the action (Whannel 1992).
The encoding process produces media texts as meaningful discourse, but this dis-
course requires decoding by the audience. This becomes more complicated as the pro-
ducers and the audience of the media may not be the same. They need not share the
same agenda, education, political position, gender, race, sexuality, age, ability or
social class. The codes that exist within the media product may be understood by
the audience differently from the way the producers understand them. There is no
stable, unitary meaning that can be identified in television programming, but instead

a range of potential ways it might be understood. Media texts are, therefore, always
polysemic (carrying many meanings), and the task of media analysis is to consider
not what a television programme or a newspaper article means so much as the ways
in which it might be understood. One of the ways in which meaning is produced