Sports TV

Victoria E. Johnson

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317935384
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoría: Historia y crítica de la televisión

This book offers an introductory guide to sports TV, its history in the United States, the genre's defining characteristics, and analysis of its critical significance for the business practices, formal properties, and social, cultural, and political meanings of the medium.

Victoria E. Johnson discusses a range of examples, from textual analysis of programs such as Monday Night Football and Being Serena to examination of television rights details, to sports TV's technological innovations and engagement of critical political debates. Johnson examines sports TV from its introduction to the ESPN+ era. She proposes that sports, as seen on TV in all of its iterations, is the central cultural forum for working through questions of community ideals, struggles over national and regional mythologies, and questions of representative citizenship.

This book is an ideal guide for students and scholars of television, media, and cultural studies as well as those with an interest in television genre, sports TV history, and contemporary sport and media culture.

1 "NOT A TRADITIONAL BUSINESS"

Sports TV as For-Profit Public Good?

Communication historian Robert W. McChesney has traced the “symbiotic relationship”¹ between sports and mass media from the mid-1800s, when both daily newspapers and sports developed as local and regional cultural institutions. With the emergence of radio and the broadcast era in the 1920s, alongside corresponding improvements in transportation, social mobility, and increasingly national markets, “sport assumed its modern position as a cornerstone of US culture.”² To a significant degree, modern sports and broadcasting are analogous institutions. Both rest “upon a foundation of individual stations,” or teams “that give voice to local communities, promoting the values of citizenship and the unique character of local cultures.”³ Both are also integral to “post–World War II ideologies of the ‘national’ that [each] coincided with and contributed to.”⁴ As the broadcast era (of radio, then television) began in the US, so too did the professionalization of sports. Just as television became a truly national medium integral to everyday life by the 1960s, the big four sports leagues expanded to be truly cross-country phenomena. Commercially sponsored TV of the broadcast network era took the form of an oligopoly, with NBC, CBS, and ABC in control of the market. Simultaneously, professional sports leagues took the form of cartels, with the MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL absorbing or merging with competing leagues. Today, sports is the content upon which the continued relevance of broadcast television is staked. As Susan Crawford’s history of US telecommunication policy states, “the real value in American television entertainment lies in controlling rights to football, basketball, and baseball games.”⁵

In 2020, media rights for sports were valued at $21.7 billion. According to Price Waterhouse Coopers statistics, the North American sports market is projected to grow to a value of $83.1 billion in 2023.⁶ With new rights deals struck by NBC, CBS, FOX, ESPN, and DirecTV through 2022, the National Football League alone will soon earn almost $6 billion a year in television rights fees. Such costs and profits correlate to audience investment: in 2020, “around 27 percent of respondents from the United States stated that they were watching live sport at least once a week on television.”⁷ But why should sports content be more valuable to television than any other genre? As noted in the Introduction, sports is “television that matters in ways that no other entertainment can.”⁸ It involves “passions” and “emotional entanglements”⁹ that are rooted in regional and local identifications and the sports audience’s sense of self. As the owner of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, Tony Ressler recently stated, “it’s not a traditional business. You’re buying a community asset.”¹⁰

As a beloved local institution, sports teams or franchises are imagined to be a public good, with their continued success considered to be in the best interest of the public they “serve.” Sports law scholars Arthur T. Johnson and James H. Frey observe that “sport has acquired the status of a public trust, which must be protected. As a result, public policy in the form of law or regulatory action has been implemented to guarantee the public equitable access.”¹¹ From the inception of modern US sports and broadcasting to the present, “the belief—or perhaps the hope—that sport and the public interest are one lingers”¹² in large part because of sports’ uniqueness. Sports’ “difference” in terms of commerce, business practices, geography, and public access has been codified into law and upheld as such when periodically challenged. From the classic network era (1950s–1980s) through the multichannel era (1980s–2000s) and the connected viewing or streaming “post-network” era (2010s–present),¹³ media law and policy and TV industry negotiations with sports leagues have defined sports as a public good and viewers’ access to sports as a necessity and a right. As historian and TV policy scholar Allison Perlman has argued, “The public interest is not a singular, knowable thing. It is a device that reflects the interests of the person or community who invokes it.”¹⁴ What follows examines the intertwined historical, institutional, and commercial interests of professional sports and television in the US. Specifically, it examines key legal and policy documents that established the framework that continues to define sports TV as a public good, serving the public interest, with sports leagues and media rights holders affirmed as public “trustees.” It offers an overview of the impact of sports rights on specific networks across television history and a similar overview of the transformative power of TV upon a sports league’s growth and prosperity. Finally, it considers the increasingly untenable tension between sports’ appeals to local community service in relation to its leagues’ and teams’ conglomerate media interests.

In the Public Interest? Core Concepts in Sports Law and Media Policy

Prior to the broadcast era, the late 1800s in the US saw the growth of new media outlets and sports institutions alongside “growing concentrations of economic power in the hands of large corporations and big trusts such as oil, railroads, steel, meat packing, and tobacco.”¹⁵ Concerns over such concentrated, increasingly monopolistic power led to passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 “to regulate unreasonable anticompetitive methods that may be used to obtain or maintain market power,”¹⁶ including unlawful restraint of trade and exertion of monopoly power within a defined geographic market. As professional sports leagues grew, they, too, became the focus of antitrust inquiries. And yet, the Sherman Antitrust Act has also provided the legal foundation to maintain the idea that sports is not a “traditional business” and cannot be regulated as such. In 1922, writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, in Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore, Inc. v. National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, et al., Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled that professional baseball was not commerce. According to Holmes’s decision, even though its teams “play against one another in public exhibitions for money,”¹⁷ baseball games do not produce a tangible good in exchange for the ticket. Player “effort, not related to production, is not a subject of commerce,”¹⁸ and, therefore, team travel between states does not constitute interstate commerce. Notably, here, baseball players’ labor was considered synonymous with performance, theater, and the arts rather than with commercial production and trade. Federal Baseball thus determined that the sport transcended conventional modes of labor, production, and market exchange. This difference established what legal scholar Mitchell Nathanson has referred to as the “cultural fiction of the baseball creed,” assuring that “America’s game” was in a legally separate sphere, above the mundane.¹⁹ “To hold otherwise would be to hold that America’s game was no different than a shirt factory, and this simply would not do.”²⁰

Baseball’s special status was not legally extended to other sports leagues. However, from the Federal Baseball case to the present, core elements of this “cultural fiction” and “difference” of sports have been integral to understandings of the relationship between sports and television in law and policy. Across court cases, Congressional hearings, public laws, and FCC reports and policy statements, professional sports have routinely been interpreted as a business that remains “above” crass market pursuits. This premise is, largely, based on appeals to localism: the teams that make up professional leagues are not conceived as for-profit franchises but, rather, as civic institutions representing specific publics (e.g., Cardinals fans are different from Cubs fans in distinctive ways involving “St. Louis-ness” rather than “Chicago-ness”). This idealistic concept may seem hard to sustain in a highly mobile, contemporary era, but whenever the profit-motive of sports has appeared to supersede such civic myths is when, historically, legislators and regulators have intervened in sports’ business practices. Simultaneously, leagues and their television partners have also routinely invoked their role as “public servants” in order to assure continued, preferential market access. Whenever legally challenged, leagues and networks rhetorically have aligned sports TV with the FCC’s expressed commitment to television’s service in “the public interest, convenience and necessity.”

The Radio Act of 1927 correlated wireless transmission of radio signals to transportation of goods or services to the market while also defining “the airwaves themselves” as “a public resource.”²¹ Thus, the Act proscribed that broadcasters must serve “in the public interest, convenience and necessity” and that they would be required to obtain a license to operate, the allocation of which would be guided by this principle. The Communications Act of 1934 reinforced and extended these principles to telephone services and created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as broadcast and telecommunications’ oversight body. These extensions later allowed the Act’s provisions to be adopted for the cable industry. In 1946, the FCC reiterated the need for individual stations, or licensees, to be responsive to local interests. According to this report (known as the Blue Book, for the color of its binding), station license renewal would be premised on the licensee’s use of local talent wherever possible, and on the station’s responsiveness to the specific interest of the public it served.²² Though the public interest standard remained vaguely defined,

In the wake of the quiz show and “payola” scandals in the late 1950s, the FCC actually did attempt to clarify the public interest standard as a means to offer programming guidelines to an industry that seemed to be losing its way.²³

In “The 1960 Programming Policy Statement,” the FCC introduced an “ascertainment” requirement for successful licensing. Ascertainment required broadcasters to assess the specific “tastes, needs, and desires” of viewers or listeners in the licensee’s broadcast range.²⁴ Among fourteen elements considered necessary to meet the public interest were regular offering of sports programs.²⁵ This priority would be directly referenced by league commissioners as the rationale for exclusive rights deals brokered with TV networks.

Prior to television’s expansion across the country, the rights to broadcast games typically belonged to individual teams. As both sports’ and television’s markets and national, commercial viability grew, however, “professional sports leagues realized that pooling their teams’ individual rights into packages to sell to national television networks would increase total league revenue and allow revenue sharing among their teams.”²⁶ In 1953, the NFL’s rights-pooling policy was judged to violate the Sherman Act. The league was ruled to have...