Page 71 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

60 • Sport, Media and Society

people. In 1996, the National Broadcasting Corporation’s (NBC) coverage of the

Olympics was specifically designed, produced and packaged to attract ‘stereotypical’
female viewers: ‘NBC sought to hail, or interpellate, female members of the television
audience by proffering essentialized feminine subject positions within its prime time
Olympic discourse’ (Andrews 1998: 12). They employed strategies such as creat-
ing personal, emotional dramas about particular athletes and reconstructing sport-
ing events for prime time viewing. In addition, the coverage of female athletes was
provided with intertextual references within other media forms which also celebrated
the prowess of the United States’ female Olympians. A critical review of NBC’s pro-
duction techniques in The Humanist highlighted the substitution of sport and expert
commentary with sentimental dramas or ‘soaps’, and the pretence of live sport, which
was actually taped and represented in a narrative format. Mayberry, Proctor and Srb
(1996: 2) argued that the excessive use of close-ups to highlight the emotions and
reactions of US competitors was the most controlling of ‘NBC’s arsenal of tricks’.
As stated earlier, close-ups have been understood as having characteristics that make
them particularly popular with a female audience (Fiske 1987; Modleski 1984).
There are other aspects of the televising of football, however, that deemphasise
qualities of drama, obeying conventions of realist cinema to convey a sense of un-
adulterated reality, despite the necessary mediation of reality that television involves.
Techniques of realism within the televising of football and other sports could be
understood as the ‘style of truth’ that Easthope (1990) identified as one of three ele-

ments of masculine address in popular cultural forms. Easthope argued that it was
possible to explain how certain features of popular cultural texts effectively appealed
to men. These aspects of ‘masculine style’ included clarity and banter, both of which
are discernible in televised sport forms.

Clarity in Televised Sport

For Easthope (1990), when information is presented as an apparently plain statement
of truth without obvious personal bias, it can be understood as a masculine style.
This is because it ‘goes along with the masculine ego and its desire for mastery. Truth
in this style is presented as something to be fully known, seen in complete detail . . .
Vision is supposedly “clear” as water, as “transparent” as glass’ (Easthope 1990: 81).
The transparent style treats itself as invisible, not really a style at all. In this way,
meaning can be presented as ‘fixed, free-standing, closed round on itself’ and truth

as ‘objective and impersonal, something revealed once and for all and so there to be
mastered and known’ (Easthope 1990: 82).
Techniques that give the effect of realism in televising football were identifi ed by
Buscombe in 1975 and remain contemporary characteristics of both football and other
televised sports today. The naturalistic colours and the simple editing techniques, along
with on-screen graphics displaying group and team statistics, team lists, diagrams,