Abstract
Sports journalism mediates between sports organizations, sports fans, and wider publics. Its remit ranges from basic reportage through celebrity gossip to serious critique of sport and its social implications. Sports journalists, as agents operating at the intersection of the sport and media fields, encounter conflicting demands to celebrate and scrutinize sport in highly commercialized and politicized environments. This chapter addresses sports journalism’s role in reproducing and contesting structures, practices, and power relations within the institution of sport, and in explicitly and implicitly representing the relationships between sport and society. It analyzes the ways in which sports journalism manages and promotes social mythologies and ideologies, including propositions that sport can be insulated from societal norms and, contrastingly, is merely a reflection of them. The chapter concludes by discussing the changes in sport media organizations and in communication technologies that are challenging the influence of traditional sports journalism on culture and society.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | The Oxford Handbook of Sport and Society |
| Editors | Lawrence A. Wenner |
| Place of Publication | U.K. |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Pages | 1025-1043 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9780197519042 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9780197519011 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2023 |