Handbook of Sports and Media

Arthur A. Raney, Jennings Bryant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135257330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This distinctive Handbook covers the breadth of sports and media scholarship, one of the up-and-coming topics bridging media entertainment, sports management, and popular culture. Organized into historical, institutional, spectator, and critical studies perspectives, this volume brings together the work of many researchers into one quintessential volume, defining the full scope of the subject area. Editors Arthur Raney and Jennings Bryant have recruited contributors from around the world to identify and synthesize the research representing numerous facets of the sports-media relationship. As a unique collection on a very timely topic, the volume offers chapters examining the development of sports media; production, coverage, and economics of sports media; sports media audiences; sports promotion; and race and gender issues in sports and media. Unique in its orientation and breadth, the Handbook of Sports and Media is destined to play a major role in the future development of this fast-growing area of study. It is a must-have work for scholars, researchers, and graduate students working in media entertainment, media psychology, mass media/mass communication, sports marketing and management, popular communication, popular culture, and cultural studies.

Part II The Coverage and Business of Sports Media

Chapter 4 Sports Media: A Modern Institution

Robert V. Bellamy, Jr.

Duquesne University

DOI: 10.4324/9780203873670-6

The contribution of sports to media is difficult to overstate. In terms of content, hundreds of television and radio programs and networks, magazines, videogames, and newspapers focus on sport, as do hundreds of thousands of Internet sites. The seemingly insatiable appetite for sports content long ago extended from game or event coverage to reviews, previews, and "inside" information. The consistently growing importance of sports also is demonstrated by the expanding amount of fantasy sports information, lifestyle content, and even fictional content related to sports.

The importance of sports as media content programming and software is further demonstrated by its key role in the diffusion of the newer media technologies. Just as sports broadcasts (primarily baseball and boxing) were used to market television sets in the 1950s, media sports are today a major selling point for digital and high-definition television (HDTV) receivers, as well as videogames (see Lomax, chap. 23) and broadband Internet service (see Real, chap. 10; Mahan & McDanieL chap. 25; Lomax, chap. 23, this volume; and King, 2005).

Even nonfans can not help but notice how much media attention sports receive. Sports coverage consistently and increasingly appears both in its own specialized all-sports media (ESPN, Sports Illustrated, CBS Sportsline, et al. ) and as an integral part of the news of the day. Unlike most other industries, sports capture the attention of the public on an ongoing basis.

At a macrolevel, sports and media have long been considered to be separate institutions in a symbiotic, if somewhat dysfunctional, relationship. Sports content allowed media to reach desirable and otherwise difficult-to-reach audiences, while the publicity and money from media helped sports to become consistently more profitable and culturally important (Bellamy, 1998; McChesney, 1989; Rowe, 1999). While this relationship endures, the importance of sports content to media has reached the point where it makes less and less sense to discuss sports and media as separate institutions.

This chapter is about the evolution and present relationship of the sports and media industries but, more importantly, about the increasingly powerful media entertainment industry, and the importance of sports to that power and influence. Following Wenner (1998), I argue that "MediaSport" is now an institution of its own (although obviously with a variety of permutations), worthy of the scholarly pursuit. In addition to intrinsic MediaSport content, another area worthy of consideration is the influence of sport on nonsports media content. Television examples include the increasing value of live programming, zapproof advertising, reality programs based on competition, and content that can be repurposed for other media outlets both domestically and globally. Newspapers devote more space to sports because sports and entertainment news, which often and increasingly overlap, are perceived in the industry as one of the key ways of attracting younger readers, a demographic segment that is increasingly difficult for newspapers to attract.

Magazines devoted to sports are increasingly common for the same reasons. Magazines, one of the better barometers of popular culture due to their ubiquity and diversity, have taken a lead role in promoting the intersection of sports and entertainment with such sports-as-entertainment titles as ESPN, the Magazine, as well as the many features on sports personalities in such nonsports celebrity titles as People and Us. Sports radio has been one of the most successful radio formats of the last 15 years and has joined conservative talk radio in leading to somewhat of a revival in the fortunes of AM radio. Both of the formats have thrived in large part on "guy talk," a format with topics said to be of interest to men. hi short, there is now a nexus of sport and entertainment similar to that of popular music and movie and television performers that is an important part of media business and culture.

While both older and newer media inform much of the content of this chapter, the emphasis is on television. While recognizing the crucial role of earlier print and electronic mass media in the rising importance of sports, television's advent in the mid-twentieth century was, and remains, key to our understanding of MediaSport. The full blooming of the intersection and symbiosis of sports and media occurred with the development of television. Television continued and expanded the nationalization of sports begun by radio. Television was the major component of the "circuits of promotion" that made sporting events and personalities "newsworthy" (Whitson, 1998, pp. 57-72).

The centrality of television's role is not likely to radically change with the new technologies. Broadband Internet, for example, is offering an increasing amount of television content. Streaming or downloading video files from the Internet is becoming as common as downloading audio or print files. Mobile/cell telephones with live video capability are beginning to diffuse throughout the globe, which will expand television's already ubiquitous presence.

Play, games, and competitions have been part of the human experience virtually since the beginning of recorded history (see Scanlon, chap. 1, this volume). Long before the development of mass media, sports were an integral part in the lives of people and social groups all over the globe in this premodern era. In addition, the psychological hold of sports on humans is a very complex set of issues that have kept many scholars in sociology, kinesiology, psychology, and now leisure studies, business, and communication occupied for years (Coakley, 2003; Eitzen, 2001; Wann, Melnick, Russell. & Pease, 2001). However, sports as most individuals conceive them today are defined as something that you watch, listen to, read about, and talk about rather than something you do. My intent here is not to disregard the hundreds of millions of people who participate in athletics of one sort or another. Rather, it is to argue that the position of spectator has long defined big time sports and is the essential linkage of media studies to sport.

Rise of "Big Time" Spectator Sport

Big time sports are organized, professional (even in terms of amateur sports management), and content for media. They grew from relatively disorganized amateur roots parallel to and a component part of industrialization from the early to mid-nineteenth century. There obviously are far too many social effects of industrialization to discuss here. Suffice it to say that urbanization, the resultant dislocation and alienation of many people, the rapid movement to a cash economy, the spread of systemized education, and the shift in time perspective to one bound by defined work, sleep, and leisure/personal time were all essential elements in the rise of both mass media and spectator sports. Sports provided the new Penny Press with content that was interesting to readers at a time when larger circulation and advertising support were essential to the development of the modem newspaper.

A key side benefit of the increase in newspaper sports coverage, as McChesney (1989) explained, is that sports coverage is almost always much less controversial than coverage of political economic issues. Over time, sports became even more important in the consolidation of the industry and the consequent development of the concept of newspapers as a nonpartisan "objective" source of news. Sports and other entertainment and amusements (theatre, vaudeville, amusement parks, et al.) gained untold amounts of free publicity from the papers affirming and promoting their importance. The symbiosis between big time sports and the mass media was established from the very beginning of both institutions (see Wanta, chap. 6, this volume, for more on the present state of print coverage of sports). However, it would take the rise of electronic media to make spectator sports an important component of popular culture throughout the nation.

Broadcasting and Sport

The relationship of sports and radio goes back to the earliest days of commercial radio service with Pirates games on Pittsburgh's pioneering KDKA-AM in the early 1920s. Soon after, baseball, college football, and boxing became among the most popular radio events (see Bryant, chap. 2, and Owens, chap. 7, this volume, for more on the history and present status of radio sports). Sports were found to be a major factor in the selling of radio receivers, an attribute still relevant today in television and broadband. Major sponsors soon became heavily involved with sports sponsorships. In many local markets, a local brewery exploited the close relationship between the consumption of beer and the enjoyment of sports. As in the case of most other radio programming, mentions of the sponsor (e.g., "Ballantine Blasts") were commonly sprinkled throughout the radio broadcast.

At first, the marriage of television and big time sports was almost perfect. At a time when the major motion picture studios considered the new medium an adversary, sports events provided television networks and stations with some of its most successful programming. Although episodic series eventually replaced most sports from the prime time hours, sports filled an ever-increasing amount of weekend airtime. Sports were ideal because of the action they provided, the male audience they attracted, the beer and razors that they sold, and their relatively low cost for the amount of programming they provided.

Big time sports and the Big 3 networks that dominated television for years were both oligopolies and cartels (Alexander, Owers, Carveth, Hollifield, & Greco, 2003; Bellamy, 1998). The barriers to entry were very high, innovation was limited, and collusive behavior was common. Both had legal protections and obligations as "special" types of businesses—sports leagues and organizations through court decisions that defined them as not "in commerce," and broadcasters through their federal licensing in "the public interest." However, by the 1960s there was little doubt but that television was the dominant partner in the marriage. A growing course of criticism about how television had or was destroying sport was often heard from the print media. The clout of sports, a result of years of cumulative media exposure, was such that legal action was taken to protect certain sports from the "alleged" dangers of television. The most important remains the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 or SBA (P.L. 87-331, 75 Stat. 732). The SBA granted professional sports leagues an exemption from antitrust laws to pool their league members' broadcast rights for sale to television and radio. This was the culmination of the nationalization of sport that had been set in motion years earlier and led to the enormous and almost ev...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• I The Development of Sports Media
• II The Coverage and Business of Sports Media
• III Sports Media Audiences
• IV Critical Perspectives on Sports Media: Cases and Issues
• Author Index
• Subject Index