Page 91 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

80 • Sport, Media and Society

tabloid reporting of sport celebrities, which are thereby coded as part of an extended
national family. The hyperbolic use of ‘AXED’ by the Daily Mirror implied reader
outrage at Capello’s ‘snub’ to the former England captain.
A different lexis was noticeable in The Times’ headline, however. The Times used
a cricket expression ‘not out’ for its wordplay, indicating distance from the events on
behalf of its readership. The ironic slant was underscored by the image of Beckham
crying and throwing his arms up in an infantile gesture. Beckham’s black armband

made him look all the more ridiculous because of its signification of his captaincy.
Inside The Sun, a double-page spread (Irwin 2008: 74–5) carried the headline, ‘Is
It Any Wonder? Since England’s Last Match Becks Has Played 2 Games . . . Gerrard
Has Played 15’. The intertextual reference to David Bowie’s song ‘Fame’ introduced

the ensuing critical slant on Beckham’s lack of match fitness. The article began with
a list of attributes that made connections between his lifestyle and his nonselection:
‘International Celebrity, Male Model, Trophy Husband, Shirt Salesman . . . and Oc-
casional Footballer’ (Irwin 2008: 75). The implied contrast between the appropriate
masculinity of football and the inappropriate masculinity of celebrity was inscribed
into the resulting image of Beckham. The article invoked the persuasive power of

scientific discourse to lend truth to the account by including a graph of Beckham’s
club and international appearances each season between 2003 and 2008.
The different perspectives found in the reporting of the Beckham–Capello story
demonstrate how the newspapers constructed their relationships with their imagined
readerships. Both tabloid papers, the Daily Mirror and The Sun, assumed interest and
knowledge about soccer amongst their working-class readership, but the Daily Mir-
ror anticipated reader sympathy with Beckham, while The Sun expected its readers
to share its critical perspective on Beckham’s celebrity lifestyle. The Times, address-
ing a more ambivalent middle-class readership, adopted an ironic distance from the
events by using cricket terminology. As Reah (1998) observed, consistency within
a newspaper’s choice of words and grammatical structure construct the text as a
coherent unit of meaning conveying the cultural politics of the paper. This works to
‘establish a relationship with the audience; and establish the nature of that audience,
in the sense that newspapers often address an implied audience rather than an actual
one’ (Reah 1998: 109). The next section further explores newspapers’ address to
their readers.

The Imaginary Community of Newspaper Readers

Bignell (1997) argued that newspapers use combinations of linguistic signs to rep-
resent the readers’ own discursive idiom. This results in the language of the news-

paper acting as a reflection of the readers’ speech codes. The reader identifi es with
the style of language used and takes his or her place within the mythic community
constructed by the newspaper. In Reah’s (1998: 109) terms, it is possible to consider