Watching brief : cultural citizenship and viewing rights

As sport has become an ever more prominent feature of contemporary cultures, the sites of contestation surrounding it have proliferated. In particular, the outcome of the most important change in the institution of sport over the last century ââ"šÂ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å“ its convergence with another socio-cultural institution, the media, and the consequent creation of the ââ"šÂ¬Ã‹Å“media sports cultural complexââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢ ââ"šÂ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å“ has meant that questions of civil liberties in sport must be addressed at a wide range of discursive sites. Questions of access and equity in sports participation have been historically and continually prominent, but the profound importance of the media has now also placed the related but distinct matter of representation at the heart of the cultural politics of sport. Much of the concern here has been, quite correctly, with issues of equity (for example, the under-representation of womenââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢s sport in the media), ideology (such as the reproduction of class inequality in television sport commentary) and identity (including racial, ethnic and sexual stereotyping of athletes) in themedia.4 However, this mostly textualist focus must be matched, in an age of commodification and globalization of sport, with analytical approaches that are more institutional in nature. It is important, then, to analyse the mechanisms by which sports texts are brought to their publics in the first place and, once created, to track their passage through a shifting range of viewing sites.