Page 85 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

74 • Sport, Media and Society

This chapter unravels the ways that newspapers use words and images to construct dis-
courses 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 con-
notation and intertextuality. The chapter highlights the narrative and linguistic strategies
that journalists employ to tell stories about sport. The chapter demonstrates ways that

theses techniques serve to construct points of identification with readers on the basis of
class, nation, ethnicity and gender. 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 in this chapter involve stories from the Olympics.

The first case study analyses the media’s coverage of Ben Johnson’s positive drug test at
the 1988 Olympics, and the second explores discourses of nation, gender and ethnicity
in British newspaper reports and photographs of Kelly Holmes’s double Olympic vic-
tory in 2004.

Making Sport News

Newspapers do more than report the news; they determine what news is and present
it in accordance with particular values and organisational needs. Van Dijk (1983: 28)
advised against understanding news as ‘simply an (incomplete) description of the
facts’ since it is a ‘specific kind of (re)construction of reality according to the norms

and values of some society’. The media chooses from a large pool of events and is-
sues what they wish to include and how they wish to tell about them. Journalists se lect
those stories deemed newsworthy with reference to their own definitions of news and

with the broader constraints of organisations that are structured to deliver news to
the public. As Graber (1979: 9) observed, the mass media ‘not only survey the events
of the day and make them the focus of public and private attention, they also inter-
pret their meanings, put them into context, and speculate about their consequences’.
What results from this process is an unusual presentation of information known as
the news story. Reah (1998: 5) pointed out that ‘other texts that deliver information
are not referred to as “stories”. We don’t talk about “report stories” or “lecture sto-
ries” or “textbook stories” ’. News stories occupy a strange middle ground between

factual reporting of past events and fictional accounts. It is necessary, therefore, to
consider the importance of the sports writer in constructing the news.
All journalists work within the constraints of publication deadlines and news
space limitations, but sports writers may have additional pressures such as game
deadlines and their relationships with sport organisations. Sports writers have to
depend upon athletes, coaches and teams for information day after day; because
of this, their stories may reflect a need to maintain amicable relations. As Trujillo

and Ekdom (1985: 265) noted, ‘sportswriters rarely make overt and/or critical value
judgments that might endanger circulation and profi t.’