Mass Media and Sports Research Paper

1. The Historical Emergence of Mass Media and Sports

Both mass media and sports developed rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the full flowering of Western modernity, as an unprecedented combination of industrial, capitalist, political, technological and urban change stimulated and confronted deep transformations in work and popular play. The mass media emerged, in both public (state) and private (commercial) manifestations, as the key institutionalized communicator of political discourse, carrier of news, provider of entertainment, and vector of ‘promotional’ messages of various kinds. As the commercial mass media developed, so did advertising as a major income stream—in the case of free-to-air TV, in particular, the need to capture audiences for advertisers became clearly paramount. At the same time, new media technologies in the print and electronic media (including more-efficient presses and transmission–reception equipment) and the proliferation of media organizations meant a heightened level of ‘content hunger’—that is, a need to fill the expanding media space with material of sufficient popularity to create and sustain economically viable enterprises. While physical play has been a feature of all known societies for millennia, the specific social institution of sports—with its rules, regular competitions, industrial infrastructure and international relations—is a product of late modernity and so is barely a century old (Elias and Dunning 1986). Sports emerged as an important collective manifestation of popular leisure and pleasure, developing (first in the UK, which, not coincidentally, was also the first industrial and capitalist power) from intermittent forms of ‘folk’ (physical play on feast and holidays) into codified disciplines in which participants were either lovers of the game (amateurs) or paid to perform skillfully in front of paying spectators (professionals). Historically, the British imprint on the formation of contemporary sports is substantial, although at the commencement of the new millennium it has been substantially matched by the American influence on sports television, promotion and marketing.

It is ironic, however, that while the development of sports is closely linked with the processes of internationalization, Anglo–American cultural imperialism and globalization, it is also intimately connected to the consolidation of individual nation-states. Hence, for example, the revival in 1896 of the Olympic Games by the French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin—some fifteen centuries after the end of the ancient Games (Hill 1992)—was not insignificantly motivated by a felt need to enhance France’s sovereignty after a humiliating defeat in the Franco–Prussian War a quarter of a century earlier. In neighboring Belgium, by contrast, soccer was systematically organized in the twentieth century to counter French-speaking influence through a process of vervlaamsing (flemicizing) that used sports to help shape the national cultural landscape (Duke and Crolley 1996).

With the rise in popularity and increasing rationalization of sports since the late nineteenth century, it began to commend itself to the media as an ideal source of content, able to flow across the entire spectrum of news, entertainment and public affairs in a manner that has now made it all-pervasive in contemporary international media (Rowe 1999; Wenner 1998). Despite initial mutual misgivings— concerning the sustained appeal of sports for media audiences on one side and of the deleterious impact of media coverage to paid attendance at sporting events on the other—the possibilities of symbiosis gradually became clear. Sports, while a major staple subject of the press and radio, has formed its closest alliance with TV. This research paper, therefore, pays particular attention to the TV–sports nexus, demonstrating how their interrelationships have had a profound impact on the economics, politics and social dynamics of contemporary culture.

In general terms, the two principal forces behind the growth of media sports have been nation building and market development, with the balance and rate of development in any given context varying according to social, historical and spatial context. In the UK, for example, a strong impulse existed to nurture an established national culture through the state-fostered pioneering radio and TV broadcasting by the public British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) of great national sports events like the Grand National and Derby horse races and the Cup Final for soccer. These were prime instances of the mass media communicating the nation to itself, and conveying a sense of a seamless notion of British (especially English) identity (see Whannel 1992). In the USA, however, a much larger, ‘newer’ nation in which the public organization of broadcasting was subordinated to commercial impulses, the market potential of media sports was in the first instance more speedily realized in a decentralized environment in which the state played a greater role as free-market regulator rather than as promoter of national consciousness and cultural heritage (Goldlust 1987). Such sociohistorical differences have similarly marked the development of media sports in other continents and nations, but there is no doubt that media sports is one of the most potent manifestations of international (if not global) culture. One reason for this state of affairs, as noted above, is sports’ extraordinary capacity to appear in many forms across a variety of national and international media.

2. Forms of Mass Media Sports

The many potential and actual manifestations of mass media sports can be, in part, traced alongside wider developments in media technologies, genres, organizations and audiences. The initial coverage of sports in the mass media was, of course, in newspapers, where the initial prime purpose was to report significant sports events and to record their outcomes in a manner that would attract and sustain substantial readerships. As sports developed as a popular pursuit in the late nineteenth century, sports reports became more elaborate, with more detailed descriptions of play and the often poetic establishment and elaboration of atmosphere and resonance. They also took on a character that was less retrospective and less dependent on prevailing conventions of reportage. As organized sports became more popularly prominent and commercially significant, it was also more routinely discussed in the media, and sports events were anticipated and minutely analyzed—as well as advertised and used as a vehicle for advertising. Sports illustrations, photographs and advertisements (including those that used leading sports and sportspersons to endorse products) helped to develop the visual aesthetics of media sports.

The development of the electronic media provided new possibilities for instantaneous media sports coverage that even accelerated print productions schedules could not match. From the 1920s onwards radio delivered ‘real time’ coverage and ‘ambient’ sounds to growing audiences for soccer, boxing, baseball, cricket and other sports. But it was TV that had the unprecedented capacity, above all, to simulate plausibly the experience of physically attending sports contests while the viewer was far distant. As television technology developed, the use of multiple cameras, instant replays, slow (and, later, super slow) motion and other innovations made the remote viewing experience in some ways superior to that of actual attendance at the event. It is for this reason that live TV sport is the most prized and valuable form of mass media sports, despite the development of new media (such as Internet sites).

Many other types of program can be ‘spun off’ live TV sports, with sports magazine programs; previews; replays and delayed telecasts; retrospectives; quiz and chat shows; and documentaries supplementing the regular sports news bulletins and updates. The print media have adapted to what we might call ‘the hegemony of instantaneity’ imposed by live TV sports by using the reflective space provided by the written form to expand the sports pages in newspapers (often including daily sports supplements) and to produce many general (the best known of which is Sports Illustrated ) and specialist sports magazines (such as Golf World ), all of which are accompanied by sports photography (sometimes in the form of sports ‘photoessays’). At the same time, sports organizations and celebrities are covered routinely in general news, not least by means of proliferating sports celebrity scandals and the more-routine use of the gossip column. When the many novels and films that deal centrally with sports are included, as well as its key role in the promotion, advertising and endorsement of products and services from soft drink and leisurewear to life insurance and fitness programs, the degree to which mass media sports has become both ubiquitous and ‘multi-functional’ can be fully appreciated. The success of the mass media in insinuating sports into the fabric of everyday social life—even for those who are hostile or indifferent to it—has raised significant questions about its social and ideological ramifications, and has provoked keen debate about what it means to live in societies where sports has passed, in barely a century, from ‘rough play’ to high finance.

3. Debating Mass Media Sports: Theory, Research and Method

Until recently, social and behavioral scientists have on the whole either ignored mass media sports or regarded it, unproblematically, as a symptom of the commodification of popular culture. The argument that great global and national media sports events, with their reliance on a combination of deep belief and spectacular ritual, constitute a powerful form of secular religion under late modernity, has sometimes been advanced (for example, by Real 1989), but this position has raised rather less controversy than the contention that commerce, especially through the mass media and specifically by means of TV, has colonized (post)modern sports. The economic power that TV wields over sports can be strikingly demonstrated by the modification of sports to fit its requirements. Hence, the introduction of tie-breaks in tennis, one-day cricket, longer time-outs and the ‘shot clock’ in basketball, the ‘designated hitter’ in baseball, penalty ‘shoot-outs’ in soccer, more breaks for commercials in gridiron, minimal scrum rules in rugby league, and the speeding up of ‘rucks and mauls’ in rugby union, can be attributed wholly or partially to the drive to make sports more ‘telegenic’ and so commercially valuable. The political economic critique of mass media sports has, therefore, been central to debates about the large-scale growth of the media– sports nexus, not least in relation to the value of broadcast rights for live sports.

3.1 Political Economy

Live TV sport is able to bring global audiences simultaneously to the screen in massive numbers—for example, the cumulative, estimated 37 billion who watched the 1998 soccer World Cup and the guaranteed record audience for each successive opening ceremony of the Olympics. These vast viewing figures also explain why the cost of broadcast rights has escalated over the last three decades. To illustrate this point we may note that the TV broadcast rights in the USA for the summer Olympics paid by the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) network rose from US$72 million in 1980 (before the landmark entrepreneurialist 1984 Los Angeles Games, which are sometimes dubbed ‘The Hamburger Olympics’) to US$894 million for the 2008 Olympics. The escalating price for the TV rights to the Olympics in the USA can be seen as a response to the somewhat belated recognition by the increasingly hard-nosed rights sellers, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), of the global commercial value of their sporting ‘product,’ paralleled by the heightened competition between media corporations for the Olympic ‘property’ that they control.

It is useful at this point to go beyond these rather abstract and almost surreal facts, and to look more closely at the types of organizations and individuals who have the power—and bear the risk and expense—of managing such media sports spectacles on behalf of the viewing world. NBC’s huge long-term ‘futures’ investment package (incorporating all Summer and Winter Games until 2008) was clearly a preemptive strategy to prevent other media corporations from acquiring their prime TV sports assets, especially the Fox network controlled by the world’s most powerful contemporary media sports proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. However, there is much more to TV sports than intermittent global sports spectacles like the Olympics. Large local, regional, national and (with the growth of satellite pay TV sports) international audiences can be attracted by regular, ‘longform’ sports competitions within single countries. It is for this reason that, for example, in 1998 TV networks in the USA paid over US$15 billion for the eight-year broadcast rights to American football.

Yet free-to-air television sports is, despite its demonstrable popularity, also being supplemented (and in some cases supplanted) by pay television, with media entrepreneurs seeing live sports as (in Murdoch’s words) a ‘battering ram’ which, by achieving ‘exclusivity’ (that is, by being ‘siphoned off’ from free-to-air television) lures viewers first to subscribe to pay television and then to purchase its associated interactive services (like home banking and shopping, and telephony). Notably, for example, it was the securing in 1992 by the Rupert Murdoch-controlled BSkyB satellite service of the broadcast rights to Premier League soccer in Britain that turned a lossmaking company into one which, by 1996, had profits of £311 million (Goodwin 1998).

This convergence of sports and business interests is most advanced in the ownership by media corporations of sports clubs—these include the European soccer teams A.C. Milan and Paris St Germain by Silvio Berlusconi and Canal Plus respectively, and in the USA, the LA Lakers basketball and Dodgers baseball teams by Murdoch.

However, in 1999 a (perhaps temporary) setback to the literal ‘takeover’ of sports by the media occurred when the British Monopolies and Mergers Commission blocked a £625 million bid by Murdoch for one of the world’s most famous sports ‘brands,’ Manchester United Football Club, with the Industry and Trade Secretary announcing that the decision was made ‘mainly on competition grounds’ in the belief that ‘the merger would adversely affect competition between broadcasters.’ Economic concerns, however, did not entirely hold sway, with a ‘public interest’ argument advanced that ‘the merger would damage the quality of British football … by reinforcing the trend towards growing inequalities between the larger, richer clubs and the smaller, poorer ones.’ Such social-democratic resistance to the extension of the power of media and of other commercial corporations over sports has not been restricted to the state—in fact, political reluctance to approve such mergers and acquisitions may be prompted by the grass-roots mobilization of sports fans (in this case the Independent Manchester United Supporters Association).

This instance demonstrates how the complete ‘annexation’ of sports by the media can be resisted on two grounds—the prevention of oligopoly in the media industry and also the preservation of sports organizations likely to be destroyed by the unfettered application of commercial logic founded on the concentration of media capital on a small number of elite sports clubs. The latter is demonstrated by current resistance to the mooted replacement of nationally based soccer competitions by an inter(or, more accurately, trans-) national European soccer ‘Super League.’ It further demonstrates how, despite the unquestionable contribution of the political economic approach to the social analysis of mass media and sports, it is important to acquire specific knowledge of the popular dynamics of sports power without which there would be no valuable cultural phenomenon for the mass media to covet in the first place.

3.2 Culturalism

In addressing the extent to which the commercial media may have taken over and substantially blighted sports, it is necessary not to be transfixed by imposing numbers—both of spectators and of the costs of gaining access to them through TV. It also means being skeptical of the ‘stock’ positions that spectating is inferior to participating, and that television spectatorship and other types of media sports use are necessarily inferior to attending sports events in real space and time. Culturalist approaches are, somewhat belatedly, attending to media sports as a significant aspect of the fabric and politics of everyday life in seeking to divine the meanings and uses of media sports, the identities it helps to construct and reinforce, and the social faultlines and points of resistance and incorporation that it lays bare. For example, the somewhat anomalous celebration of African American masculinity represented by global sports superstars like (the now retired) Michael Jordan (Baker and Boyd 1997); the role of media sports in making and remaking diverse images from ‘desirable’ bodies to ‘champion’ nations (see various chapters in Martin and Miller 1999); and the media sports (and sportsrelated) scandals involving such figures as Ben Johnson, O. J. Simpson, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, and organizations like the IOC and soccer’s governing body FIFA, have all promoted widespread debate about such important social issues as drug taking, racial and gender inequality, violence and institutional corruption (Rowe 1995).

Culturalist analyses of media sports, then, without necessarily downplaying the impact of class relationships or economic forces, are (through interdisciplinary combinations of elements of ethnography, socio-linguistics, semiotics, and so on) more open than orthodox political economy to the complexities, contingencies and uncertainties of ‘common cultural’ experience. For example, sport is, given the continuing development of global media sports spectacles and infrastructures, a highly suggestive ‘test case’ for globalization theory. The extent to which global sports may be emerging, or the ways in which local or indigenous sports may survive or adapt to the changes precipitated by commercial media sports, are important concerns. The failure of predominantly American sports like baseball and gridiron to become truly global, despite heavy promotion by media sports corporations, for instance, or the corresponding slowness of the ‘world game,’ soccer, to consolidate itself commercially at the highest level in the USA despite their hosting the massive media spectacle of the World Cup in 1994, demonstrate how social and cultural groups do not simply ‘buy’—and may even actively resist—the media sports made commercially available for their consumption. Important to the dispersion and establishment of sports around the world are the specific histories of the relationships between different countries. For example, international cricket developed in the Indian sub-continent, Australasia and the Caribbean according to the southerly trajectory of the British Empire. Long after independence was gained, cricket has remained, with one sporting ‘country’—the West Indies—rather eccentrically consisting of sovereign nations which come together under the same banner solely and explicitly for the purpose of playing cricket.

This point raises significant cultural questions concerning the ‘on the ground’ relationships between media sports texts and audiences. Instead of seeing sports aficionados as inevitably victimized and exploited, greater allowance is made for how audiences might actively experience and negotiate their encounters with the sports media (see the final section of Wenner 1998). For example, the pleasures that women may take in viewing male sports can be viewed from this perspective as a legitimate leisure choice, rather than as an inevitable sign of patriarchal domination. Similarly, this perspective resists the a priori assumption that the media sports gaze of fans is inevitably controlled by capitalist interests for their own acquisitive ends. There is a danger, however, that such ‘discoveries’ of empowered, active media sports audiences may exaggerate the degrees of freedom of choice of the socially disadvantaged and act as a smokescreen for persistent social inequality. For this reason, it is necessary for continuing social scientific scrutiny both of the density of representations of human subjects in mass media sports (who is most visible) and of their differential social quality (how are they depicted). A striking illustration of this point is the conventional neglect of women’s sports in the print and electronic media, such that it is often less than 5 percent of total sports coverage, and is compounded further for ‘women of color’ (Creedon 1994), while the sexualization of the bodies of sportswomen is often comparable to that of soft pornography (Hargreaves 1994). Hence the role of mass media sports in the stereotyping, marginalization and disempowerment of subaltern groups can be assessed through a judicious combination of quantitative (including content analysis and audience statistics appraisal) and qualitative method (such as ethnographic studies of media sports audiences and textual analysis of media sports imagery). These forms of research and analysis in the culturalist tradition, when informed by a political economic perspective, present the most promising current lines of inquiry into mass media sports.

4. Futures for Mass Media Sports and its Research

There is every indication that sports will continue to develop as a major source of content in the mass media, although, just as it has been suggested that the age of broadcasting is over, it might be argued that the emergence of narrowcasting and interactive media technologies will have a great impact on the representation and use of sports in the media, especially in regard to free-to-air television. There is a requirement, then, to assess industry claims that sports fans can now (following the necessary investment of funds) construct ‘home stadia’ where they take on the traditional role of TV sports producers with hyperlinked access to a vast, instantly recoverable sports database. This image of the all-powerful mass media sports consumer-turned-producer is quite at variance to that of the TV sports audience as a commodity so valuable that (along with sport itself) it has been first besieged and then conquered by the media. Both polarized images need to be regarded with due skepticism. The processes of industrialization, capital accumulation and ‘mediatization’ that have transformed sports over the last century, therefore, must be carefully analyzed in the light of continuing contestation over the asserted right to use the sports media without being entirely used by them.

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