Recently in Sports, Media, & Society Category

STATEment looked at the round-the-clock coverage of Carmelo Anthony's (NBA) trade last week to the New York Knicks (Here's a great mash-up they link to that illustrates the way the trade has dominated the news cycle).The group considers the way beat reporters have jumped at the opportunity to weigh-in on the Anthony trade: "Beat reporters across the country are excited that something is happening in the professional basketball world; no matter how distant or irrelevant the trade is to their actual beat, they have found a way to tie the trade back into their writing." Using Lowes' work, the group explains the widespread interest in the Anthony trade by considering the ways pressures and constraints facing sports beat reporters have made reporting on the trade more likely. The group provides links to a few stories that emphasize "fluff instead of hard news and rumors instead of facts." 

Sports mega-events like the Super Bowl, the World Cup, and the Olympics offer grand stages for the participants (athletes & others), organizations, and institutions associated with each; these mega-events also provide an opportune stage for analysis and critique of the relationships between -- on the one hand -- these very participants, organizations, and institutions, and -- on the other hand -- culture, society, politics, and economics. That is, of course, if those offering the analysis and critique can manage to be heard over the cheerleading.

Several articles have caught my eye recently as intriguing analysis and criticism concerning the NFL and society. Each are, in my opinion, definitely worth a read:

NPR's Michele Martin looks at concerns about football-related long-term brain injury from the NFL down to pee wee. Further, she goes on to point out the social toll our exuberant emphasis on youth sports may have: "this might be particularly insidious in sports dominated by poor kids, especially poor black kids, because the people involved are so busy congratulating themselves on how they are saving the kids from ruin."

The Washington Post's Sally Jenkins considers whether "Jerry World" -- referring to Cowboy's owner Jerry Jones' new $1.15 billion stadium -- is the direction the league should be going in. While Jenkins acknowledges that the Super Bowl can be a valuable source for civic pride, this Super Bowl highlighted for her that "luxury can be debasing." She points out that everyday fans have been priced out of the spectacle, while the taxpayers in most of the NFL's U.S. metropolitan areas have been asked to pick up much of the tab for stadium and luxury box construction over the past 15 years.

Finally, progressive sportswriter Dave Zirin has been on a tear of late (see here, here, and here), highlighting the non-profit, public ownership of the Green Bay Packers by the citizens of Green Bay -- a unique arrangement in U.S. professional sports (NFL bylaws, interestingly, say that no other NFL franchise is allowed to employ a similar ownership structure).

Zirin has been busy of late...

** He's got a new book out, "Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love." 
** His new documentary "Not Just a Game: Power, Politics, and American Sports" (produced by the good folks over at the Media Education Foundation) is getting attention within academic circles and in major sports media outlets.

-T.C.

A new study by researchers associated with Penn State's John Curley Center for Sports Journalism examines print coverage of Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius' quest to compete in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The study, recently published in theInternational Journal of Sport Communication, provides a textual analysis of New York Times and Time magazine coverage of the sprinter's case. In January 2007, the IAAF (track's governing body) barred Pistorius from competition, arguing that his "Cheetah" prosthetics provided a "clear mechanical advantage." Four months later, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) overturned the IAAF decision, citing a lack of conclusive evidence as well as new findings that refuted the governing body's ruling; however, Pistorius ultimately failed to qualify for the Beijing games.

Drawing on Foucault's ideas about the body, this study finds that media discourses surrounding Pistorius reinforced "an unjust but seemingly natural body hierarchy" (p. 303), perpetuating a view of the able body as the cultural sporting ideal. Deviant bodies, like Pistorius' and those of other athletes with disabilities, are constrained through discursive mechanisms and institutional structures of biopower that function through the knowledge and regulation of sporting bodies. 

While some media coverage offered progressive perspectives on disability and sport, this study finds that media discourses concerning Pistorius generally revolved around issues of fairness in competition. The New York Times, for instance, suggested that Pistorius' performance begs the question of whether he's "too abled." As the authors of this study argue, though, "[T]he too abled label reinforces body hierarchies rather than challenging them. It is not that Pistorius was too fast or too talented. It is that he, like other athletes with disabilities, is too different" (p. 303).

According to the study, the discourses of fairness in competition (a powerful normative value of sport) positioned Pistorius as deviant--a threat to the values, integrity, even very nature of sport. Other themes identified by the researchers reflect this apparent threat: a privileging of a medical view of disability (rather than the more progressive social view); descriptions of prosthetics that reflect cultural assumptions about "normal" bodies; and particularly troubling use of dangerous "cyborg" imagery. 

This analysis provides a lens on the role of discursive mechanisms in the classification and categorization of bodies that don't conform to a seemingly natural, but ultimately unjust body hierarchy. Media discourses concerning Oscar Pistorius, as "contested sites for meanings inscribed on the body," reflect this tension (p. 288).