The convergence of sport and the world’s most popular domestic leisure practice, television viewing,\u00a0 was especially important. The sociology of media’s focus on television had found in sport an integral element of its content, while the sociology of sport could not ignore television’s highly efficient conveyance\u00a0 of sport straight to the domestic hearth. Indeed, the eminent cultural theorist and TV critic Raymond\u00a0 Williams (1989) observed that sport provided one of the few good reasons to watch television.<\/p>\n
When the entire ’media sports cultural complex’ (as I call it)\u2014also encompassing newspapers,\u00a0 magazines, radio, film, internet and games\u2014is taken into account, sport can be said to have colonised\u00a0 many corners of contemporary culture. Sports metaphors in advertising, business and politics abound,\u00a0 surreptitiously suggesting that all life can be reduced to contests, rules, wins, losses, and heroic\/demonic\u00a0 performances. Multiple media platforms carry sport constantly, and sometimes to spectacular global\u00a0 effect, as in the case of the Olympic Games and the Summer World Cup. Without it, the television\u00a0 industry would be in freefall.<\/p>\n It is not surprising, therefore, that media has been a key focus area in the sociology of sport. When\u00a0 Jon Dart (2014) did a content analysis spanning 25 years of the main journals publishing sociology of\u00a0 sport (International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Journal of Sport and Social Issues and Sociology of\u00a0<\/em> Sport Journal)<\/em>, he found that media featured heavily among its themes and topics:<\/p>\n There is a broad consensus in the main themes with a very similar ’top 10’ across the three journals. What is noticeable is that all the core sociological concepts (’usual suspects’) feature prominently: that is, gender<\/em> [coded here separately as sex\/sexuality, feminism<\/em> and masculinity<\/em> ], race\/ethnicity, education, media, politics<\/em> and economy<\/em> and globalisation<\/em> . Class also features but less frequently. There is limited identification of other core sociological concepts, including religion, the family, the environment<\/em>, and work\/employment<\/em>. (Dart, 2014: 652).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When the International Review for the Sociology of Sport<\/em> (2015) produced a 50th anniversary special issue ’assessing the trajectory and challenges’ of the sub-discipline, the subject of the media was prominent. This is hardly a surprise, because without the media sport would be largely confined to aficionados performing or watching a cultural practice in a limited range of spaces at set times. The media \u2014especially electronic\u2014have made sport everybody’s business, willingly or otherwise. For example,\u00a0 how many people who’d never heard of Sepp Blatter and have no idea what the acronym FIFA stands for, now know more than they could have imagined about the political economy and governance of association football (soccer)? The reason is that the news media forcibly educated them on the subject during a period of saturation coverage in mid-2015.<\/p>\n Media and sport are two institutional products of modernity that have progressively intertwined \u2014to the extent that Lawrence Wenner (1998) has offered us the neologism ’mediasport’. By the same\u00a0 token, changes in one part of this ’zone’ resonate across all of it, through a series of feedback loops. For\u00a0 example, if sport associations, clubs and athletes change their modes of presentation through attention-grabbing behaviour and commercially-oriented display, the media both carry and reinforce the\u00a0 change. Similarly, if the media environment shifts towards ’social’ as opposed to institutional media,\u00a0 sports are required to accommodate the change, both in terms of ’citizen journalists’ recording player\u00a0 transgressions and by exploiting new possibilities for connecting with sport fans.<\/p>\n But, as noted above, these are not matters of exclusive interest for a self-enclosed mediasport world.\u00a0 They have important consequences across all of society and culture, offering powerful ’instruction’\u00a0 on class relations (not least through an abiding love of individualistic ’rags to riches’ narratives); the\u00a0 gender order (with its persistent constructions of sporting masculinity in opposition to femininity);\u00a0 racial and ethnic power (the common ascription of biologistic and culturally essentialist characteris tics); sexual identity (through its largely unexamined heteronormativity); nation-state boundary maintenance (sporting celebration of a nation); globalisation and transnationalism (sporting transcendence\u00a0 of nation); humanity and technology (the genetically and pharmacologically enhanced cyborg-athlete),\u00a0 and so on. Close attention to mediasport reveals abundant ways in which the popular\u2013political can be\u00a0 mobilised and contested.<\/p>\n Sociologists do not have a responsibility to savour sport and its mediated manifestations any more\u00a0 than they should be required to embrace the aesthetics of ’reality’ television and Hollywood film or the\u00a0 speculative art of gambling. Sport fandom is optional. But it is difficult to negotiate quotidian life and\u00a0 to understand the socio-cultural power of popular culture without at least a working knowledge of the\u00a0 discourses of power and pleasure that find in sport a readymade vehicle for their taken-for-granted,\u00a0 apparently innocuous and naturalised ’truths’. It took sociology a while to grasp the opportunity fully,\u00a0 but there are rich analytical pickings in every sport news bulletin, live broadcast and online forum.<\/p>\n Dart, J. (2014) Sports review: A content analysis of the International Review for the Sociology of Sport,\u00a0the Journal of Sport and Social Issues and the Sociology of Sport Journal<\/em> across 25 years. International\u00a0<\/em> Review for the Sociology of Sport<\/em>, 49(6): 645\u201368.<\/p>\n Pike, E. C. J., Jackson, S. J. and Wenner, L. A. (eds.) (2015) Special issue: Assessing the trajectory and\u00a0 challenges of the sociology of sport. International Review for the Sociology of Sport<\/em>, 50(4\u20135): 357\u2013644.<\/p>\n Wenner, L. A. (ed.) (1998) MediaSport.<\/em> London: Routledge.<\/p>\n Williams, R. (1989 [1970]) ’There’s always the sport’, in A. O’Connor (ed.) Raymond Williams on Television: Selected writings.<\/em> London: Routledge, 95\u201399.<\/p>\n![\"Cathy](\"http:\/\/www.westernsydney.edu.au\/__data\/assets\/image\/0016\/1110616\/cathyfreeman.jpg\")
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