The Olympic Movement and the sports–media complex

Abstract

The history of sport is inseparable from the history of the mass media. The rules and the ways games are played, the values and narratives associated with sports, teams and rivalries, the audiences that follow or ignore particular sports and of course the revenues that certain athletes and enterprises enjoy have all been profoundly shaped by the mass media. In most countries in the world today, most people form their knowledge of sports from the mass media and not from direct experience. While mass media coverage of sports is usually presented as a series of neutral windows, and most of those who report on sport try their best to be as accurate as possible, the presentations of sports in the media are deeply structured – if not deliberately framed – by the institutions that produce and disseminate them, as the last several decades of scholarship have clearly shown. In the world of rights fees, very few broadcasts are independent of the interests they cover; on the contrary, they are contractually controlled by those very interests in the partnerships Sut Jhally called ‘the sport–media complex’. These partnerships now extend to the Olympic Games. In this paper, the keynote address to a conference in Calgary on the eve of the 1988 Olympic Winter Games, I reviewed this history and its implications for the Olympic Movement. I argued that the International Olympic Committee should use its control over the Games in the way that other sports enterprises do to ensure that Olympic broadcasters contributed to the humanitarian educational goals of the Olympic Movement and, at the very least, to ensure a multitude of broadcasting perspectives. At the time, I was chair of the Olympic Academy of Canada.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Rob Beamish and Varda Burstyn for their helpful comments in the preparation of this talk.

Notes

^1. For a useful discussion of this point, see Gruneau, ‘Modernization or Hegemony’.

^2.Whitson, ‘Souls without History’.

^3.Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution; Delamont and Duffin, Nineteenth Century Woman; Dunning and Sheard, Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players; James, Beyond a Boundary.

^4.Mandell, First Modern Games, 92–4; Weber, ‘Pierre de Coubertin’.

^5.Glassford, Application of Theory of Games; Paraschak, ‘Hereotransplantation of Organized Sport’.

^6.Riordan, ‘Workers' Olympics’; Wheeler, ‘Organized Sport and Organized Labour’.

^7.MacAloon, Great Symbol.

^8.Guttmann, From Ritual to Record; Metcalfe, Canada Learns to Play.

^9.Kidd, Tom Longboat.

^10.Weber, From Max Weber, 97.

^11.Kidd and Macfarlane, Death of Hockey, 10.

^12.Powers, Supertube, 28.

^13.Cochrane, Hoffman, and Kincaid, Women in Canadian Sport, 35–47; Lensky, Out of Bounds.

^14.McIntosh, ‘Bill C-131’.

^15. For one statement of these aspirations, see Canadian Olympic Association, Towards Definition of Olympism.

^16.Canada, Report of the Royal Commission.

^17.Audley, Canada's Cultural Industries; Clement, Canadian Corporate Elite, 270–343.

^18. For example, Cantelon, Gruneau, and Turnbull, ‘Images of Canadian Sport’; Jhally, ‘Spectacle of Accumulation’; Whannel, ‘Television Spectacular’, 30–43.

^19. For example, Taylor, ‘Depoliticizing Current Affairs Television’.

^20.Hempel, ‘Advertising, Sponsors and Commercialization’.

^21. William Taffe, ‘TV to Sports: The Bucks Stop Here’, Sports Illustrated, February 24, 1986.

^22. Former Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau, who first tried to stage the Olympics on a ‘self-financing’ basis, once proposed that the IOC conduct an international lottery to finance the Games and its other programmes. No doubt there would be political and practical objections to such a scheme, but the idea of some sort of international levy, with a strong element of progressivity, to support the Olympic Movement, is worth further study. If the Olympic Games and the other events associated with it are worth having, as I still believe they are, they should not have to be dependent upon vagaries of the North America television market and the whims of marketing managers for their survival.

^23. This point has been developed further in Beamish et al., ‘In Support of CBC Sports Broadcasting’.

^24.Lipsitz, ‘Meaning of Memory’.

^25. See, for example, Canada, Report of the Task Force; Nelson, ‘CRTC Asleep at the Wheel’.

^26.McCollum and McCollum, ‘Analysis of ABC-Tv Coverage’, 27.

^27. For example, Wilson, ‘Broadcasting, Bureaucracy and New Television’.

^28.Kidd, ‘Elite Athlete’.