Effects of Media on Sports

Abstract

In many ways, both today’s sport and the media are classic outcomes and, indeed, icons of the far-reaching social, economic and technological change that characterized the twentieth century. Each has developed extensively and rapidly as a major global industry. Each plays a significant part in structuring and informing people’s lives. Each has a global as well as more local scope of operation and has the structures and practices to reflect this. Importantly, they are two industries tied together in complex networks of relationships. Their respective histories of development have been fuelled and influenced by the dynamics of this partnership. The evidence of the partnership is all too apparent. The wellbeing of particular sports or, indeed, sport as whole has become linked to income generated directly or indirectly from the media. The way in which sport fills newspaper pages and television and radio schedules bears testimony to the influence it has on the structure and extent of media activity.