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.