In Sport, Culture and Society: An Introduction, Grant Jarvie argues that sport and the media is not sport per se, but sport that has been mediated for the sports media complex. Many if not all aspects of media-sports are social, economic and political constructions that carry messages, are controlled by human beings, and provide selected representations of reality, Sports through the media carry messages about gender, race, class, nationhood, violence and what is good and what is bad sport.
So far in my analyses of mainstream media and citizen media on New Media Mogul I’ve more or less concluded that the citizen media sphere mirrors the mainstream media. Citizen journalists are interested in the same sports that their professionals counterparts in the mainstream media are, and they are more or less interested in the same issues within those sports, although they tend to devote more time and space to them than the mainstream media. However how representations of different sports are constructed within the citizen media sphere and whether these constructs come from the homogenised world of the mainstream media or an individual citizen journalist’s beliefs and morals is an interesting point. In order to test out any differences that may exist, I am going to present a content analysis of boxing this time, a sport that polarises sports fans, and seemingly polarises those within the mainstream media too.
The content analysis will concentrate on the recent bout between Anthony Mundine and Nader Hamdan, where Mundine defended his WBA title. The analysis concerns articles from The Sydney Morning Herald, Daily Telegraph and The Age, as well as the fan site boxingnews24.com.
The mainstream media seemingly construct the media sport of boxing along lines of violence, crime, religion and intelligence. In the first article I studied from The Sydney Morning Herald, Anthony Mundine’s use of the English language is seemingly commentated on in a derogatory manner. Mundine is directly quoted as saying that, ‘He is tougher than them two because this guy is a lionheart’. While this is undoubtably what Mundine said, I feel that quoting him like this was probably unnecessary and is part of the mainstream media construct that boxers are dumb thugs.
A feature article on Nader Hamdan also in The Sydney Morning Herald perpetuates this construct. Hamdan is quoted in the article as saying, “Who would have thought 16 years ago when I was hanging here and terrorising these streets that I would be fighting for a world title?”. It’s also pointed out that Hamdan has a long-time friend named Jimmy Barakat, ‘a huge tattooed man likely capable of staring down an agitated gorilla. The two spent juvenile detention together after a fight with police in which Hamdan grabbed an officer’s pistol. Barakat has survived gunshots, comas and jail but hopped from one foot to the other like a nervous child’.
Whether this construction of boxing within the mainstream media is due to a belief that its ‘outlaw’ side is sexy would be interesting to know, but it also seems to extend to an unnecessary focus on the Islamic religious views that many boxers have. It is explicitly stated that Hamdan’s day begins with a ‘ritualistic prayer at 5am’ and the names of his close friends, who all have Arabic sounding names, are mentioned in the article. While this is a ‘colour piece’ on Hamdan, it seems like there is an uneasy emphasis on his Muslim background, as though this is a further element of the mainstream media’s media sport construction of boxing.
In contrast, a report on the bout by a citizen journalist focuses on the contest between the two boxers instead. At one point Eric Shmidt criticises Mundine as he has ‘yet to face a hard challenger, instead going up against Pablo Daniel Zamora Nievas, Jose Alberto Clavero and now Hamden. Missing are names like Edison Miranda, Jean Pascal, and Jean Paul Mendy, to name just a few opponents that I consider much better than the utterly soft opposition that Mundine has chosen to defend his title against so far’. But Schmidt’s report doesn’t deal with either opponent’s Muslim beliefs, or their previous life of crime or the apparent poor English grammar that Mundine possesses. Instead this report criticises Mundine for his cowardice in not defending his title against quality opponents.
In On Television and Journalism Pierre Bourdieu argues that any sporting event is produced twice; the first time being in the stadium and the second time being on the television screen. Perhaps this rings true for all media to some extent; that any sporting event is reconstructed as media sport along selected lines of reality. Although in this case study it would seem that for the sport of boxing, the reality of the sport is far more specifically constructed within the mainstream media with overtones of thuggery and violence accompanying articles on boxing. In contrast the citizen media report analysed seems a far ‘truer’ account of what boxing really is – two men engaged in a sport that requires skill, strength and endurance.
It isn’t really a case of saying the mainstream media is wrong in their portrayal of boxing, but it is interesting that they choose to construct the sport in the manner they do, and it seems that fans don’t take away the same constructs from the sport as the mainstream media does.
