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THE
REVIEW OF
COMMUNICATION Mediated Sports as Texts, Institutions,
and Commodities
Barry Brummett
David Rowe. Sport,
Culture and the Media. Buckingham,
UK: Open University Press,
1999. xiv + 193 pages. Notes, bibliography, index.
$29.95 Professor David Rowe, of the University of Newcastle in Australia, has written a valuable contribution to the scholarly literature in sports studies. That subject, as with so many phenomena of popular culture, has been marginalized by the academy for too long. Scholars in communication will find this book especially valuable, as it explores the ways in which the mediation of sports in the press and popular entertainment industry is becoming an ever larger and more important fact of our cultural life. Rowe’s outlook is global, his scholarship is solid, and his insights are keen. In the preface to the book, Rowe paints a picture of a “sports impregnated world” in need of serious attention by scholars. The book is then divided into two parts. Part 1, “Making Media Sport,” develops a strong Marxist analysis of the ways in which mediated sports have developed as an institution in capitalist countries. Rowe is concerned with newspaper, television, and radio coverage of “real” sports events as well as with fictionalized sports in movies and television dramas. The threads of capitalism, nationalism, media institutions, the symbolic and significant dimensions of sport, and sports entertainment industries are skillfully woven together to show their integral connections. A chapter on sport and media develops a socio-historical perspective on how our current fascination with mediated sports is inevitable given our economic and cultural institutions. A second chapter on sports journalism explains how sports journalists reflect and often reinscribe the dominant power relations of their societies through their professional practices. And a third chapter on the political economy of the sports media clearly shows how institutionalized sports are a big business implicated in the circulation of capital as well as central to a culture-wide practice that circulates signs in a political economy. Part 2, “Unmaking the Sports Text,” focuses on analysis of particular texts found in news and entertainment media. The first chapter in this section examines the symbolic strategies of sports commentating and writing. A third and fourth chapter in this section examine still and moving sports photography and film, respectively. A brief afterword suggests some directions for research into connections between sports and new computerized technologies. The overall structure of the book is thus clear and logical. Rowe’s book should be of interest to scholars in a small but growing group interested in the communicative dimensions of sport. It will certainly be of value to the larger community of scholars interested in popular culture and in the rhetoric of popular culture. And, of course, scholars of mass communication and mass media institutions will find this work particularly useful. The first section of the book is largely theoretical and is somewhat stronger than the second part. Rowe commendably notes the importance of studying cultural practices as sites of struggle, but I wish that his own analysis had shown more understanding of the different ways in which the meanings and practices of mediated sports might be shaped. Communicating a sense of struggle is difficult for scholars in all fields, I think, as we tend to write from our own more settled, committed perspectives. One dimension that might open up more of a sense of how mediated sports are a site of struggle would be more attention to the dimension of pleasure. Rowe’s otherwise insightful analysis is a bit short on the idea that millions tune in to today’s game because they are fans, because they like it, because it is fun. The second section of the book is strong for its close readings of sports texts across the world. Rowe is sensitive to a wide range of texts both fictional and nonfictional. But whereas his first section equips the reader with some theoretical structures to guide further understanding, his second section is not as strong in developing methodological structures that the reader might take away for application to her own readings. Rowe’s afterword, devoted to considering the connection between sports and computer technologies, is so brief and undeveloped as to be of not much use. It has the appearance more of an afterthought than an afterword. We are all sensitive today to the kind of technological and cultural imperatives represented by the Internet and its attendant technologies. But it may well be that there is really not much to say at present about sports on the Internet. Not everyone is digital, and while enacting roles as sports fans, it may be that audiences for mediated sports are not, either. In sum, this is a valuable and important
contribution to several literatures. Its strengths are admirable and its
weaknesses few and common to other works.
Standing on the borders of a number of scholarly communities, it
deserves to be read by many. Barry Brummett is Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
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