Sports media : beyond broadcasting, beyond sports, beyond societies?

In this chapter I will explore the trajectory of sports television, and propose necessary research avenues for media sports scholars. In so doing, it is important to avoid being too sports media centric and absorbed by its internal commercial concerns. Sports media of necessity operate within wider cultural and social environments that are themselves undergoing substantial change. In this respect there is nothing exceptional about sports media in an epoch in which, among sundry disturbances, globalization, regional conflict and often intricate local relations, are in dynamic interplay, and in which the everyday working and domestic lives of people around the world are increasingly uncertain and fluid (Appadurai, 2001; Bauman, 2000). It is for this reason that I will pose some critically skeptical questions about the state of television broadcasting, the cultural status of sports, and the relationships between sports, television and nation. This task entails interrogating the position of sports media within a socio-cultural environment in which the received conceptualization of society itself has been problematical, and even undermined by the instabilities that accompany diffused, intensified mobilities. First, though, there will be a consideration of a sports medium that is still pre-eminent, has now been installed substantially across the world, and yet is troubled by intimations of technological mortality – broadcast television.