Sport, Public Broadcasting, and Cultural Citizenship

Signal Lost?

Jay Scherer, David Rowe, Jay Scherer, David Rowe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415886031
• eBook ISBN: 9781135017095
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Business

This book examines the political debates over the access to live telecasts of sport in the digital broadcasting era. It outlines the broad theoretical debates, political positions and policy calculations over the provision of live, free-to-air telecasts of sport as a right of cultural citizenship. In so doing, the book provides a number of comparative case studies that explore these debates and issues in various global spaces.

1 Sport, Public Service Media, and Cultural Citizenship

Jay Scherer and David Rowe

Introduction: Sport and Public Service Broadcasting

For many of us born in the second half of the 20^th century in countries where television became an ordinary feature of domestic life, watching live telecasts of sport on public and commercial terrestrial (free-to-air) broadcasters was, until very recently, a habitual leisure activity, part of the rhythm of our lives and a key source of fun, pleasure, community and, at times, common culture. In the new millennium, television continues to carry the most popular global sporting events, including the Olympic Games and the FIFA (International Federation of Football Associations) World Cup, as well as other key elements of national popular culture, into an unprecedented number of homes thanks to the emergence of new cable and satellite systems, and a host of other pay-TV services. Yet, just as these developments have radically expanded the viewing opportunities for subscribers (and filled the coffers of various sports leagues, organizations, teams, and professional athletes) so, too, have they worked to undermine the longstanding ‘viewing rights’ (Rowe 2004a) of citizens irrespective of their class position or personal financial circumstances. Live access to tele-casts of sporting events of national cultural significance in locales around the world is increasingly a matter of capacity to pay. At the same time, an array of integrated mobile technologies controlled by powerful commercial telecommunication empires can now deliver a seemingly unlimited amount of sports content for paying audiences as part of ‘integrated entertainment arenas’ that have challenged the dominance of free-to-air broadcast television as the medium of choice for the distribution and consumption of sport. In many countries, therefore, and especially those with a strong history of public service broadcasting mixed with commercial free-to-air television, there have recently been extensive policy reviews and public debates about protecting sports events of national importance and cultural significance from exclusive capture by dominant, commercial pay-TV networks. That these debates have been occurring against the backdrop of the introduction of full digital services—services that are increasingly integrated into global commercial networks—has, as many contributors to this book note, only amplified their political significance.

There was, though, a period when television itself was an emergent technology and, of course, an even earlier era where ‘live’ sport spectatorship was limited to in-stadium attendance and the listening opportunities provided by another (once innovative) form of broadcasting: radio. For the renowned social theorist and cultural critic, Raymond Williams (1974), television developed as a response to new and, at times, competing, political, social, and economic needs that had gradually grown out of a much longer history of capital accumulation and a host of working technical improvements by public science organizations and commercial-capitalist technological innovators and manufacturers of what would eventually become the standard television set. For Williams, it was not solely the specific uses of television or the existence of television itself that, even by the 1970s, were already taken-for-granted, but entire ways of life and associated structure(s) of feeling that were always better understood as long-term historical processes and cultural struggles.

According to Williams, the development of broadcasting as an institution was the outcome of “two apparently paradoxical yet deeply connected tendencies of modern urban industrial living: on the one hand mobility, on the other hand the more apparently self-efficient family home” (1974, p. 19). The new pressures and limits of industrial capitalist social organization generated greater levels of internal mobility and increased distances between living areas and places of work and government to unprecedented levels. At the same time, longstanding struggles over wages, working conditions and the length of the working day resulted in significant gains in ‘free time’ and substantial changes to “the distribution of the day, the week and the year between work and off-work periods” (p. .18). Together, these developments spurred the need for new contacts and relationships that would be provided by emergent institutions of communication that carried information into more private, familiar settings, as opposed to other public domains. As a result of a host of technical advancements by various manufacturers, television, following the path of radio, began to reconcile these contradictory pressures. Beginning in the 1930s (only to be temporarily disrupted by World War II), television took flight in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and provided audiences in many countries with an entirely new social repertoire of audio-visual experiences. The embryonic broadcasting model in capitalist societies, therefore, contained a powerful contradiction and tension from its earliest stage: centralized transmission and production of content that was to be received and consumed privately in the family home via domestic television sets sold by various manufacturing companies. In the UK, continental Europe, as well as in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it was only the state that could incur this substantial preliminary investment, especially that related to the costly development of an expansive means of distribution and the creation of expensive new content. Having already established public broadcasting corporations in a number of (mainly social democratic) countries, the public sector was always anxious to preserve its role as the regulator of broadcasting and the custodian of public airwaves in the name of the national interest in the post-World War II era.

As the public broadcasting sector expanded, moreover, it was subject to intensive bureaucratization and administered by trained, increasingly specialized staff and ‘experts’ who managed the new public communication landscape according to two key ideas. The first of the founding principles of public service broadcasting was universal accessibility— the ability to make radio and television programming, to the extent that was technically possible, available to anyone with a receiving apparatus, including households in rural and remote areas (Scannell 1989). This principle was clearly aligned with a broader political agenda of distributive justice, especially under post-war reconstruction, as various governments around the world pursued policies that sought to provide for all citizens, especially those classes of people whose life choices had been historically highly circumscribed.

Importantly, such ‘citizen rights’ were not limited to the basic necessities of life through an economic welfare safety net, but were extended to libraries, recreation facilities, and other leisure and cultural opportunities, including access to popular radio and television content via the nation’s public broadcaster. The license fees that initially supported public broadcasting in many countries were, in this spirit, premised on the belief that every citizen ought to have “access to the television, as every citizen had access to education, health care and welfare support, in return for a universal flat-rate charge whether that individual actually used that public service or not” (King 2002, pp. 113–114). This was also an era, it should be noted, in which various nation states played crucial roles in regulating their economies and restricting foreign investment in key sectors (including the heavily regulated media sector) through taxes, tariffs and other incentives, as well as penalties and restrictions that were designed to encourage the growth of local industries, including emergent cultural ones, that sought to foster and promote elements of national identity. Of course, this process of national identity building was subject to contestation. Nevertheless, public service television became increasingly ‘naturalized’ and, through all of these developments, public broadcasts quickly became important components of ways of life in various nations as ‘public goods’ that enhanced the lives of many citizens.

The second key ‘promise’ of public service television, though, was universal access to a breadth of programs that was representative of a common culture: news, current affairs, documentaries, game and quiz shows, children’s programs, dramatic content and, of course, sport. Public broadcasters in a diverse range of nations (including those mentioned above, but also in a host of Latin American and Asian nations), therefore, played pioneering roles in providing ‘emblematic’ telecasts of sporting events of national significance for all citizens in real time. They also, it can be suggested, helped to establish and promote various teams, leagues, and sports as national rituals and institutions, in addition to ‘personalizing’ athletes as celebrities in the eyes of national publics, thereby, incidentally, further adding to their economic image value (such as through product endorsement). Still, as sports and athletes profited from the new revenue streams offered by television, so, too, did public broadcasters benefit (financially and promotionally) from their association with the most popular sports and sporting events. It was in this very tangible sense that, in the early days of television, both public broadcasters and various sports became increasingly intertwined as pivotal symbols of nation, while access to live televised sport for all citizens was widely regarded as simply part of the ‘national estate.’

Of course, popular understandings of access to live telecasts of sport on public broadcasters as a right of cultural citizenship can be complicated and, as we shall see below, even some of the most vociferous proponents of public service television contested the presence of ‘mass’ sport on public networks that were often regarded as the preserve of intellectual, ‘high’ dramatic, and other forms of elite minority programming. Furthermore, the sport-television relationship was, from its earliest days, a predominantly masculine experience, and public broadcasters supplied an overwhelming amount of male sport that was consumed by a mostly male audience with greater levels of disposable income and influence in family households. In Canada, for example, former Olympian Bruce Kidd (1996) has rightly argued that the partnership between the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the National Hockey League (NHL) distorted the development of Canadian sport and culture along two key lines. First, the sheer quantity of airtime dedicated to NHL hockey on the public broadcaster reinforced the “symbolic annihilation” of women’s sport with regard to mainstream media with “public authority” (Kidd 1996, p. 259), a trend that continues to this day as the public broadcaster strives to capture a primarily male, national audience for advertisers. For Kidd, once advertisers discovered the “remarkable ability of sports broadcasts to assemble affluent male consumers for their sponsors’ appeals” (1996, p. 260), the new broadcasting terrain was quickly structured to ensure that women’s sport was heavily underrepresented. Second, telecasts of the most popular men’s sports on public networks habitually celebrated “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 2005) and, in the early days of professional sport, encouraged the repressive labor conditions faced by many athletes. Clearly, then, any argument that supports access to live telecasts of sport as a right of cultural citizenship needs to be held up to critical scrutiny.

Nevertheless, public service television did much more than just satisfy and extend the already well-established, mutually dependent relationship between sport and the media—what we call the media sports cultural complex (Rowe 2004b)—whether involving the penny presses of an earlier era, as well as newspapers and, as noted above, radio broadcasts. Rather, as a cultural technology, television produced a host of new effects, and sport was quickly restructured according to the codes of the entertainment industry to provide a radically different way of watching physical action. It offered new kinds of interests and new audiences; immediate commentaries and pre-and-post-match analysis by ‘experts’ who, themselves, quickly became household names; slow motion replays, multi-camera angles and color images; and, finally, it provided the platform for the further colonization of sport by the language and imagery of consumerism. While radio broadcasts certainly extended the core audiences of various sports into new geographic regions and allowed viewers to feel part of an event, “television’s pictures were often worth a thousand words” (Whitson 1998, p. 63). Moreover, unlike the daunting cost of producing new dramatic and other entertainment programming, coverage of sport was, in comparison, relatively economical precisely because it was an event “that was in any case happening or had happened” (Williams 1974, p. 24). The production of inexpensive sports content was of crucial importance for public broadcasters simply because, in its infancy, television was an extraordinarily expensive proposition that required significant initial investment in transmission services, production facilities and the cost of developing original content. These were expenses that were recouped through regimes of licensing, taxation and, eventually, a greater emphasis on commercial advertising and sponsorship revenue that, as we shall see below, was often principally acquired by popular sports programming. While the production cost of sport television, even with multiple cameras and large outside broadcast teams, remained inexpensive when compared with, for example, quality drama, the rising cost of acquiring broadcast rights began to reduce the potential pool of broadcasters, especially those that were publicly funded (Rowe 2004b).

Nevertheless, the popularity of live telecasts of sport initially worked to entrench the position of public broadcasters—and the public sector in general—as a key source of fun, pleasure, and community in the lives of ordinary citizens. The obvious exception to this pattern was, of course, the US, where more powerful private manufacturers of equipment sought to capitalize on a rapidly expanding market that lacked any significant public broadcasting presence. As Williams noted:

The early broadcasting networks were federations of prime manufacturers, who then acquired production facilities as an essentially secondary operation: secondary, that is, to the production and selling of sets. The finance for production, in this highly competitive situation, was drawn from advertising, in its two forms of insertion and sponsorship. (1974, p. 29)

From its earliest stages in the US, then, “the broadcasting public was effectively … the competitive broadcasting market” (p. 29), while public service “in any other than a market sense developed within a structure already dominated by these institutions” (p. 29). As Wenner, Bellamy and Walker note in Chapter 4 of this collection, the early provision of free-to-air telecasts of major league sport in the US was the exclusive domain of the highly capitalized major private national networks, NBC, CBS, ABC, and later Fox (Bellamy 1998, Chandler 1988). While live access to the most popular sports remains part of the way of life for many families and households, it is important to note that regulation—primarily by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)—has played a key role in ensuring the dominance of the national free-to-air broadcasters in the US sport broadcasting market. For example, the growth of the cable industry was actively restricted until the late 1970s to preserve free-to-air systems, while the US has been slower than its European counterparts to “allow significant competitive entry from pay-TV providers especially for premium programming” (Szymanski 2006, p. 158). Nevertheless, from its inception, US television was always predominantly a commercial proposition, and live telecasts of sport were of tremendous importance to the profit margins of the free-to-air national networks (McChesney 2008). Competition for the television rights to the most popular major league sports has always been fierce and, aided by the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 that exempted the collective sale of sports broadcasting rights from antitrust legislation, television contracts rapidly increased in value. Still, the sheer scope of the US market continues to allow the major networks to benefit from economies of scale, and a significant amount of live sport, with the exception of local blackout rules, remains available on the major commercial free-to-air networks, even after the full entrance of cable and satellite television. Outside the US, however, it was initially the nation’s public broadcasters that carried the new sports images and sounds into homes around the world.

Sport and Competing Broadcast Systems

Given the tremendous popularity of live sporting events in many countries, a burgeoning private sector was predictably anxious to de-stabilize the monopoly of public broadcasters and ‘get in the game’ of televising key sporting events. Beginning in the 1950s, the licensing of various private free-to-air networks and the inception of competition with the public sector marked the “basic early development of television institutions as a contrast or competition between ‘public service’ and ‘commercial’ institutions” (Williams 1974, pp. 30–31). Even in tightly regulated broadcasting markets (such as Canada and the UK), this was a contrast that would become sharper and be of tremendous institutional and programming significance for national television systems, not least regarding popular sports content. The commercial offensive against public broadcasters was, as Williams (1974) noted, grounded in promotional rhetoric and descriptive terms like ‘free’ and ‘independent’ versus ‘monopoly’ and ‘state control’—the ideological precursors of ‘neoliberal newspeak’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2001). Of course, the primary aims and objectives of the private broadcasters (themselves conglomerates of established capital interests) were always the realization “and distribution of private profit on investment capital” (p. 32), and the centralization of their monopoly power. State control and public broadcaster monopoly were, therefore, actively targeted to be replaced by the discipline of the ‘free’ market and the prerogatives of capital.

It is important to note that, while Williams was always ready to assess critically the introduction of competition and the inevitable centralization of capital in the media, he also actively cautioned against nostalgic interpretations of the role of the state in capitalist society, or the simplistic equation of the state with the public or national interest. Williams was willing to critique the insularity of the bureaucratic structure of various public broadcasters and the habitual assumed superiority of public authorities who ‘ruled from above’ in dictating the terms of cultural production. Indeed, one of the main sources of opposition to the continued role of public b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Sport, Public Service Media, and Cultural Citizenship
• 2. Before, During, and After the Neoliberal Moment: Media, Sports, Policy, Citizenship
• 3. Televised Sport and Cultural Citizenship in Canada: The “Two Solitudes” of Canadian Public Broadcasting?
• 4. Selling Out: The Gaming of the Living Room Seat for the US Sports Fan
• 5. Football for Everyone? Soccer, Television, and Politics in Argentina
• 6. No Longer the Crown Jewels of Sport? Television, Sport, and National Events in the UK
• 7. The Law Not Applied: French Controversies about Television Viewer Access to the 2006 European Handball Championship
• 8. Belgium’s “List of Major Events” Mechanism in the Digital Broadcasting Era
• 9. “Events of National Importance and Cultural Significance”: Sport, Television, and the Anti-Siphoning Regime in Australia
• 10. Millennium Blues: The Politics of Media Policy, Televised Sport, and Cultural Citizenship in New Zealand
• 11. The Political Economy of Sport Broadcasting in the Arab World
• 12. The Global Popular and the Local Obscure: Televised Sport in Contemporary Singapore
• 13. Sport, Broadcasting, and Cultural Citizenship in Japan
• 14. The Political Economy of Football Viewership in Africa
• 15. Watching the Football with Raymond Williams: A Reconsideration of the Global Game as a “Wonderful Game”
• 16. Afterword: Sport, Public Service Media, and a “Red Button” Future
• Contributors
• Index