Sports and Play Chapter 12: Sports and The Media

Although it's important to discuss new trends and explain what may occur in the future,

it also is important to understand traditional media and their connections with sports.

Another encouraging development is that during the 2019 Women's World Cup, some members of the US national team did not hide that they were lesbians, and some people in the media actually acknowledged this fact in supportive ways.

A similar media acknowledgement occurred during NBC's coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympic Games as openly gay figure skater and bronze medal winner, Adam Rippon publicly owned his sexuality—a first in the Winter Olympics—and talked about his widely quoted objection to Vice President Mike Pence's stance on LGBTQ issues (Buzinski, 2018; Outsports, 2018; Robinson, 2019). In the process, he sparked a media conversation about him as a gay athlete.

Television revenues also have greater growth potential than revenues from gate receipts. The number of seats in a stadium limits ticket sales, and ticket costs are limited by demand. But television audiences can include literally billions of viewers now that satellite technology transmits signals to most locations worldwide. For example, the IOC and sponsors of other sports mega-events seek to package the entire world's population into an audience that can be sold to sponsors.

Additional reasons for increased rights fees include the following: The deregulation of the television industry. A growing demand to watch certain spectator sports. Increased connectivity with satellite and cable worldwide. Sponsors willing to pay top prices for access to live sports audiences because commercials are seen by people rather than being skipped over in recorded programs. The growth of ESPN and other cable channels that collect money from cable and satellite companies as well as commercial sponsors, which gives them two sources of income.

New digital media have altered relationships in the production and consumption of accessible content related to sports worldwide. They make possible individually created and selected information, interpretation, and entertainment.

Additionally, personal digital connections enable people to bypass the gatekeepers of content in the "old" media—that is, journalists, editors, and commentators—as they construct their own interpretations of events, athletes, and the overall organization of sports

Game attendance is related to many factors, including the consumption of media sports. On the one hand, many people say that they would rather watch certain events on television than attend them in person. On the other hand, the media publicize sports, promote interest, and provide information that helps people identify with athletes and teams and become potential ticket purchasers for events.

Although consuming media sports has generally been positively related to attending live events, this may be changing with widespread use of new media and the existence of large HD televisions. Whereas media companies in the past tried to duplicate the live-event experience on television, now stadium managers try to duplicate the home-viewing experience for those who attend live events. Spectators now demand broadband Wi-Fi and high-speed mobile phone connections in stadiums, large HD replay screens, and video screens by concessions and in restrooms so they don't miss the action they paid to see. These stadium upgrades are costly, but without them, more people may choose to stay at home, where they have access to everything they want during a game (Galily, 2014).

Although women in the print media regularly cover men's sports, very few women have done regular commentary for men's sports in the broadcast media apart from occasional "sideline reporters" who interview players and coaches a few times during and after games.

An exception to this pattern occurred in 2008 when Doris Burke was a color commentator for NBA playoff games. Online comments, nearly all from men, were generally supportive of Burke and praised her competence. But enough men complained that the network reassigned her to a sideline reporter role. Burke persisted and continued to earn the respect of players and coaches, and in 2017 became a regular NBA game analyst for ESPN—the first woman to have this position.

This gamblification would further change the ways that sports and media are integrated into the lives of individuals, families, and communities. For example, it might increase rates of gambling addiction, family financial problems, and the need for community rehab programs.

At the very least, it would change how many fans would consume traditional media coverage of sports.

A significant development in the United States is the number of colleges, over 200 as of 2020, that now sponsor esports teams and award scholarships to select team members. However, esports team members can also win money in the tournaments in which they play. Only 60 colleges designate esports as an official sport but Chris Haskell, coach of the Boise State University esports teams, recently predicted the following:

Collegiate esports is a coming wave. Somebody is going to become the Alabama football of esports. That seat is currently open. Why can't it be us? We just have to move quickly

But making these changes was difficult for white sports reporters and broadcast commentators who accepted dominant racial ideology and had never viewed it critically or from the perspectives of blacks, Latinxs, Asians, and Native Americans.

Consequently, some media personnel made careless or naïve mistakes, and a few were suspended or fired for them.

The global reach of the web creates new possibilities for large corporations wanting to "teach the world" to consume. However, it also creates challenges because new corporations will compete with traditional media companies for the video rights to sports. This is why NBC developed NBCOlympics.com in 2008, a portal enabling consumers to view events in the 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2014 Olympic Games in Beijing, Vancouver, London, and Sochi, along with on-demand replays and highlights.

Coverage was available on mobile devices and cable video-on-demand (VOD) packages, and other features were available for consumers interested in athlete profiles and gaming experiences. As this approach is expanded, rights fees will continue to increase.

Consuming media sports is clearly connected with gambling, but there is no evidence that it causes people to bet on sports. However, as states continue to legalize sports betting, as bookmakers buy advertising time during sport broadcasts, and as mainstream media include programming focused on sports betting, this could change.

Current marketing studies predict that sports betting will increase as it is legalized, but they make no predictions about the impact that advertising and programming will have on betting behaviors

Furthermore, friendships with others in the event are more important than media-hyped rivalries and competitive outcomes.

However, media narratives highlight rivalries and the desire to win because this reaffirms widely accepted cultural values and can be used to attract sponsors and consumers who may not understand the culture and skills possessed by athletes in action sports.

The media landscape is changing rapidly and dramatically. Personal computers, the Internet, wireless technology, and mobile communication devices have propelled us into a transition from an era of sponsored and programmed mass media into an era of multifaceted, on-demand, interactive, and personalized media content and experiences.

In fact, the time spent each day listening to the radio and watching traditional television is far surpassed by digital media consumption. The pace and implications of this transition are influencing our personal and social lives in ways that we don't yet fully understand.

Additionally, there may be circumstances when people who normally pay for their ticket at the gate will stay home to watch a televised game rather than go to the stadium. This might occur when they expect that there will be a large crowd at the game, violent or uncivil behavior on the part of other fans, or bad weather.

In light of these factors, those who manage venues and teams that depend on gate receipts must constantly create new forms of spectacle that cannot be experienced in a television broadcast. Unless fans are entertained in unique ways they may not buy as many season tickets or attend as many live events.

Of course, as the Internet and wireless technologies extend content and access, media sports reality is now constructed in diverse ways. This can be a contentious process as content providers compete for access to audiences.

In nations where mass media are controlled primarily by the state, the primary goals are to influence cultural values and social organization and provide a public service (Lund, 2007; Solvoll, 2016). However, state control has steadily declined as media companies have been privatized and deregulated, and as more individuals obtain online access to information, interpretation, entertainment, and opportunities for interactivity and content production.

Similarly, FIFA sponsors the FIFA19 Global Series that attracted 61 million total views in June 2019. Some of the views were driven by the 20 million global players that participated in a series of tournaments leading up to the finals in the series.

Like the NFL, FIFA uses the series to recruit young people as viewers of real FIFA soccer; unlike the NFL, FIFA has a much broader global appeal and potential.

Commercials are so central in the telecast of the Super Bowl that the media audience is polled to rate them. Audiences for media sports are encouraged to express their connections to teams and athletes by purchasing objects that display team logos.

Masculinity rules in media sports. Men's sports continue to receive about 95 percent of sports coverage in the media. However, recent media coverage of concussions, serious injuries, permanent sport-related physical and cognitive impairments, athletes in major men's sports coming out as gay, and athletes supporting gay marriage has led to a more representative media narrative about masculinity in sport. References to men as warriors doing battle and sacrificing their bodies for victories are now occasionally accompanied by discussions of safer sports, athlete health, and acceptance of difference. One reason for this is to create a positive media image of sports and preserve lucrative revenue flows for media companies. Research is needed to track media narratives to see if this shift is more than superficial, if it exists across sports, and if it persists over time in various countries.

Studies of audience experiences suggest that people interpret media content and integrate media sport consumption into their lives in diverse ways

More men than women are strongly committed to consuming media sports, and strongly committed consumers constitute less than a majority segment of the overall population in most societies, including the United States and Canada. However, these studies don't tell us much about the ways that people give meaning to and include the consumption of media sports in their lives.

This skewed pattern is unfortunate because ethnic diversity among media people would enrich stories and provide multiple perspectives for understanding sports and the people who play and coach them.

Of course, neither skin color nor gender precludes knowledge about sports or the people involved in them, but knowledge is based on a combination of experience and the richness of the perspectives one uses to make sense of the ethnically and racially diverse social worlds that constitute sports today.

As the management and team owners in the NFL and other major sports leagues read studies showing that fantasy sports participants were their most engaged fans and consumed more media articles and programming than other fans, they supported and invested in the growth of fantasy sports.

Other sports followed their lead. In addition to fantasy football, baseball, basketball, and hockey, there were fantasy leagues for auto racing, golf, tennis, global soccer, cricket, and even professional wrestling. Today you can manage fantasy teams selected from the National Women's Soccer League and the WNBA.

In response to one such claim, LeBron James argued that his tattoos were part of his "persona and identity" and said, "If I am not shown with my tattoos, it wouldn't really be a depiction of me" (in Bailey, 2018). Who owns the copyright on an original tattoo? What constitutes "fair use" of the inked image? These are legal questions now being discussed in court cases.

Overall, the financial stakes associated with creating realistic and entertaining video games are significant. This constantly pushes designers to refine graphics, action, and game possibilities. It also leads them to talk with potential sponsors about product placements and advertisements built into the storylines and actions in the games. As more young people play video games, corporations, including sports leagues and their sponsors see them as vehicles for developing outposts in the heads of game players, outposts that can be used to deliver messages that encourage consumption and generate revenues for the corporations involved.

Just as gender ideology influences media coverage, so do racial and ethnic ideologies and the stereotypes associated with them (Coogan, 2015; Love and Hughey, 2015).

Research in the 1970s and 1980s discredited the assumed factual basis of racial and ethnic stereotypes at the same time that media studies identified the ways that ideology influenced sports coverage and commentaries, particularly in reference to black athletes. This made white journalists and commentators increasingly aware that the quality of their work depended on avoiding words and inferences based on discredited racial stereotypes. As a result, most of them chose their words more carefully.

It also allows journalists to avoid asking critical questions about new patterns of residential and school segregation and growing income and wealth disparity that deeply influences who plays what sports in the United States today. They can put aside questions about why there are fewer African/Asian/Native American and Latinx professional golfers today than there were in 1981—15 years before Tiger Woods won his first PGA tournament as a professional in 1996. Most important, pretending to be color blind allows media people to ignore whiteness and all racial issues, thereby maintaining a high racial comfort level among white media consumers and advertisers. In this way, ignoring reality becomes an effective strategy for boosting profits.

Scholars in ethnic studies explain that this self-declared colorblindness denies the real history and relevance of skin color and ethnicity in societies where previously unquestioned racism has shaped the distribution of income and wealth and the everyday living conditions of nearly all people. When a color-blind approach governs the coverage of sports, media stories miss significant sport realities and reproduce the racial and ethnic status quo. This allows people in dominant racial and ethnic populations to see and use sports as forms of social escapism—as whitewashed worlds devoid of the complex, messy issues that characterize everyday life.

A classic example of commercial esports was the 2019 Fortnite World Cup sponsored by Epic Games. It involved 40 million players who competed online during ten weeks of qualifying rounds to determine the 200 finalists who competed for $30 million in cash prizes at the Arthur Ashe Stadium in Flushing, New York.

The finalists, all males, came from 34 countries and the $3 million first prize in the solo category was won by a 16-year old from the United States. There also were multi-million-dollar winners in other competition categories (Duos, Celebrity Pro/AM, and Creative); and the rest of the 200 finalists each took home $50,000. The 19,000 stadium seats were sold out for each of the three days of competitions. The media production truck had twice as many feeds as used by CBS during the 2019 Super Bowl. A full-color commentary broadcast was streamed on multiple platforms where many viewers had the option of choosing close-up camera shots of their favorite players

Media coverage of sports in the United States emphasizes success through individual effort, competition, teamwork, aggression, and effective game plans. Also important are big individual plays such as home runs, long touchdown passes, and single-handed goals.

The idea that success can be based on empathy, support for others, sharing resources, autonomy, intrinsic satisfaction, personal growth, compromise, incremental changes, or inclusiveness is seldom incorporated in media narratives, even though these elements often exist in sports.

Apart from newspapers and magazines devoted to specific sports, print media do not depend on sports; nor do films, radio, and the video game industry as a whole.

The urgency and uncertainty that are so compelling in sports are not captured and represented in any of these media as they are in visual media. Overall, the media most dependent on sports for commercial success are newspapers and television.

The NBA has taken a slightly different long-term marketing route. It formed the NFL 2K League that now has 21 teams named after and located in NBA cities. Although weekly games seldom attract more than 30,000 viewers, the league is only 2 years old. NBA teams sponsor and subsidize their esports teams, and organize them like the real teams.

There is a draft during which players demonstrate their skills and are selected (or not) by an NBA 2K team manager/coach. For those who make a team, the minimum base salary in 2019 was $33,000, although there is $1.2 million that is split into thirds and awarded to each team that wins one of three tournaments during the season. Additionally, travel to away games is paid by the NBA and each of the teams lives rent-free during the season in a nicely furnished house (Holmes, 2019).

The long-time marriage of sports and media is clearly held together and strengthened by vast amounts of money from corporations whose executives use sports to increase profits and promote ideologies consistent with personal and corporate interests. Ideology is a key factor in the sport-media marriage.

This is not a marriage based solely on money, but the goal of the sport-media partnership is to create a global family of eager consumers.

Although people often access online sport content to complement content they consume in traditional media, there is a growing number of others who use new digital media to replace traditional content

This shift in consumption patterns concerns people in media companies that broadcast live sports worldwide, because their revenues in the past have depended on controlling this content and maintaining large audiences to sell to advertisers.

In the case of sports, those who control mass media decide not only which sports and events to cover but also the images and commentary presented in the coverage.

When they do this, they play an important role in constructing the overall frameworks that audiences use to define and incorporate sports in their lives

Today, media provide

information, interpretation, entertainment, and opportunities for interactivity and content production. When media content is provided for commercial purposes, entertainment is emphasized more than information, interpretation, or opportunities for interactivity and content production. In the process, media consumers become commodities sold to advertisers with the primary goal of promoting lifestyles based on consumption.

The emphasis on consumption is clear in most media coverage of sports. About 20 percent of televised sports coverage in the US consists of commercial time. Ads fill newspapers and magazines, and Internet sites use multiple strategies to present ads mixed with content.

"TV time-outs" are now standard in football, basketball, and hockey games. And announcers remind media spectators that "This game is being brought to you by this or that corporation."

Narratives even redeem villains who demonstrate that they can be heroic warriors, with commentators describing them as

"loyal blue-collar players"—"willing to take figurative bullets for their teammates"—and "always being there when the chips are down," even if they sometimes have broken rules in the past.

Media also put us in touch with information, experiences, people, images, and ideas outside the realm of our everyday, real-time lives. But much media content is edited and "re-presented" to us by others—producers, editors, program directors, programmers, photographers and videographers, writers, journalists, commentators, sponsors, bloggers, and website controllers. These people present us with information, interpretation, entertainment, and even opportunities for interactivity to achieve one or more of the following five goals:

(1) make financial profits, (2) influence cultural values and social organization, (3) provide a public service, (4) enhance personal status and reputation, and (5) express themselves creatively or politically.

Media pervade our cultures and our lives from billboards and newspapers to radio and television to multiple forms of digital media.

Although each of us incorporates media into our lives in different ways, the things we read, hear, and see in the media are crucial parts of our experience. They frame and influence our thoughts, conversations, decisions, and actions.

At the same time, a color-blind approach constantly reminds people in racial and ethnic minority populations that their histories, heritages, and experiences are unrecognized in sports.

As a result, some ethnic minority people avoid some or all sports, or they use sports as sites for seeking recognition and respect in the dominant culture. When we view media critically, it becomes increasingly clear that they don't "tell it like it is" as much as they tell it as their target demographics and advertisers want it told.

Power relations in a society influence the priority given to the five goals that drive media content. Those who make content decisions for mass media programming act as filters as they select and create the images and messages to present. In the filtering and presentation process, these people usually emphasize images and narratives consistent with ideologies that support their interests in addition to attracting large audiences.

As deregulation and private ownership have increased, the media have become hypercommercialized and media content focuses more on individual consumption and less on civic values and community. In fact, when groups with anticommercial messages have wanted to buy commercial time on television, media corporations and networks have refused to sell it to them.

The internet boom in the late-1990s eliminated this tedious chore and opened the door for a massive influx of new fantasy sports gamers. Sports leagues along with media and tech companies developed online platforms that could serve millions of fantasy participants.

As participants increased exponentially into the early years of the 21st century, newspapers and magazines hired fantasy sportswriters to create media content sought by fantasy sports participants, especially those who played fantasy football, the sport that attracted the most participation.

Additionally, investors are tracking the commercial potential of gaming media platforms (portals) such as Twitch, Reddit, Discord, and various YouTube channels that are go-to streaming sites for millions of esports fans. This worries executives at mainstream television companies that have multi-billion-dollar rights deals with the NCAA and professional sports leagues. Even the executives at Netflix recently disclosed that "We compete with (and lose to) 'Fortnite' more than HBO"

As the global growth of esports has created a multi-billion-dollar media market, the people connected with the mainstream sport-media industry are taking notice. This is why the NFL and EA Sports sponsor the Madden NFL Championship Series that is streamed on EAMaddenNFL's channel on Twitch. In the process, the NFL hopes to recruit hardcore esports fans who will also consume media programming of football games.

One exception is a creative study of twenty white men and a few women who had grown up in various towns in western Pennsylvania but had moved to Fort Worth, Texas (Kraszewski, 2008). By various means each person joined with others who had started a tradition of meeting in a sports bar where they watched Pittsburgh Steelers games from August through December.

As they met each week their interaction focused on rekindling and nurturing their sense of western Pennsylvania as "home" and their identities associated with their geographical origins. In the process they created a place-image of western Pennsylvania that matched the blue-collar, white European-American, steelworker image of the Steelers. They wore Steelers jerseys, drank Iron City (Pittsburgh) beer in aluminum bottles, and were identified as Steelers fans by the Dallas Cowboys fans in the bar.

To say that a telecast of an American football game is a symbolic construction means that it presents the ideas that certain people have about football, values, social life, and the characteristics of the viewing audience. Although each of us interprets media images and narratives differently, many of us use mediated sports as reference points as we form, revise, and extend our ideas about sports, social life, and social relations.

Because media sports are part of everyday experience today, it's important to consider the following: Media production and representation of sports. Ideological themes underlying media coverage. Media consumers and the ways they integrate media content into their lives.

Sports are represented in the media through images and narratives that are selected from a vast array of possibilities. The traditional media resemble windows through which we view what others choose to put in our range of vision and hear what others choose to say. Therefore, the only way to avoid being duped is to become a critical media consumer.

Becoming a critical media consumer involves learning to identify the ideologies that guide others as they construct media representations. In the case of sports, the most central ideologies that influence what we see and hear are those related to success, consumption, gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality.

Avoiding stereotypes and covering racial and ethnic relations in an informed way are two different things. Most sports coverage today pretends that race and ethnicity don't exist; it assumes that sports are racially and ethnically blind and that everyone in sports faces the same challenges and odds for success.

But race and ethnicity are influential to such an extent that people cannot talk about them without discovering real, meaningful, and socially important racial and ethnic differences in what they think and feel. Ignoring facts about real differences allows whites in the media and media audiences to be comfortably color blind and deny the legacy and continuing relevance of skin color and cultural heritage in society and sports.

Do not include certain streaming rights prior to 2019. For example, in late-2013 the NFL signed a 4-year $1 billion deal allowing games to be live-streamed on Verizon phones.

But this deal did not include streaming on tablets, which will bring even more money to the NFL, and will force them to define the difference between tablets and smartphones!

Research on the consequences of consuming media sports has focused on a wide variety of issues. Here we'll focus on three: active participation in sports, attendance at sport events, and betting on sports events.

Does consuming media sports lead people to be more active sports participants or turn them into couch potatoes? This is an important issue, given the health problems associated with physical inactivity in many societies today.

The realism of the current NBA 2K games is produced by dressing every NBA player in a tight suit that has 60 reflective markers on it. Then they use 140 motion-capture cameras to film the player's moves on the court as infrared lights from each camera track the 60 markers.

Each camera records images at 120 frames per second which gives the game creator 16,800 images for each second that the athlete is filmed (Pierno, 2019). This enables them to realistically represent the movements and expressions of the player, which are integrated with commentary that describes the athlete's moves in situations anticipated during game play. The realism of the resulting game action is increased as AI is used to learn the team strategies that lead to high percentage shots. In fact, it has even been shown that basketball players who play the game can increase their basketball IQ in the process

The success ideology regularly emphasized in US media coverage is less apparent in the coverage that occurs in most other nations. Narratives in the United States focus on winners, records, and final scores.

Even silver and bronze Olympic medals are often viewed as consolation prizes, and games for third place are seldom played or covered by the media. Sportswriters and announcers focus on "shootouts," sudden-death playoffs, dominating others, and big plays or big hits. Rare are references to learning, enjoyment, and competing with others, even though many players see their participation in these terms. Thus, the media don't "tell it like it is" as much as they tell it to reaffirm a discourse of competitive success that closely matches the interests of sponsors and advertisers. This ideological bias does not undermine the enjoyment of sports for most people, but it ignores that there are many ways to enjoy sports, even when they are organized to promote corporate interests.

But as long as it remains untold, white privilege in sports will persist without being recognized.

Finally, if ethnic minority players or coaches try to tell the story, they're quickly accused of "playing the race card," being arrogant and ungrateful, promoting political correctness, or being bitter because of "imagined abuse."

At the same time that corporations try to maximize control over online representations of sports, YouTube and other sites provide people opportunities to upload their own information and interpretation of sports as well as representations of sports events and performances

For example, for more than three decades now, young people in alternative and action sports have found creative ways to photograph, film, and distribute images of their activities. Photos and VCR tapes were mailed and passed person to person, but distribution today occurs online with images accessible worldwide. Although these images represent what may be described as "performance sports," they're central to the media experiences of many young people who find highly structured, overtly competitive sports such as baseball or football to be boring, irrelevant, and uncreative.

Media representations exaggerate the importance of competitive rivalries as well as winning and losing in athletes' lives

For example, ESPN has organized its coverage of the X Games around the competitive quest for medals when, in fact, many of the athletes and the spectators aren't very concerned about competition or medals (Honea, 2009). Athletes in the X Games and similar events enjoy the external rewards that come with winning, and they certainly want to demonstrate their competence, but they often emphasize self-expression and creativity more than the final scores determined by official judges.

An attractive feature of sport programming for the major US networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC) is that events often are scheduled on Saturdays and Sundays—the slowest days of the week for television viewing. Sports events are the most popular weekend programs, especially among male viewers who don't watch much television at other times.

For example, NFL games have consistently accounted for 80 of the top 100 most-viewed television programs during recent years, and they provide sponsors access to young and middle-age males (Porter, 2018). Nearly all sport programming is ideal for promoting sales of beer, life insurance, trucks and cars, computers, investment services, credit cards, air travel and erectile dysfunction products. Sponsors realize that sports attract men who make purchasing decisions for hundreds, if not thousands, of employees, as well as for family members when it comes to buying beer, cars, computers, investments, and life insurance.

Most interesting for us in the sociology of sport is that fantasy sports have "gamified" media-sport consumption by turning consumers into virtual team managers who compete with each other. They also provide a research window through which we can study how participants engage with mediated sports content and how they use multiple media sources simultaneously

For example, fantasy participants continue to cheer for their favorite team, but they also cheer for players on multiple other teams because those players are on their fantasy teams. Therefore, they watch multiple games on multiple screens and are constantly online checking performance statistics as they are posted. Overall, they are deeply engaged with real-time sports in ways that people in the media-sport industry could only dream of in the past. For industry people, the challenge now is to use fantasy sports as a starting point for introducing interactive television—with the first-born triplet changing its adoptive parents in the process.

Finally, and maybe most significant, there is a close connection between fantasy sports and sports betting, each of which appeals to the same demographics and groups of fans (Fisher, 2019). The significance of this connection will increase as more states embrace sports betting and as commercial sports use the lure of gambling to increase their revenues.

For example, one idea is to put betting chips in team and league merchandise to encourage people to make more prop bets. Therefore, when a football fan buys a New England Patriots hat, a chip in the hat-band would enable him to bet on whether quarterback Tom Brady will throw two touchdown passes in the first half of the season-opening game (Delventhal, 2019). Such a marketing strategy would contribute to the "gamblification of sports," a concept developed by sports media scholar, David Rowe (2018).

Themes related to ethnicity and nationality also exist in sports media coverage worldwide. Although some sports reporters and broadcasters are careful to avoid using ethnic and national stereotypes in their representations of athletes and teams, evidence suggests that subtle stereotypes and other motives regularly influence sports coverage

For example, some media coverage has portrayed Asian athletes as methodical, mechanical, machinelike, mysterious, industrious, self-disciplined, and intelligent. Their achievements are more often attributed to cognitive than to physical abilities, and stereotypes about height and other physiological characteristics are sometimes used to explain success or failure in sports. Latinxs, on the other hand, have been described as flamboyant, exotic, emotional, passionate, moody, and hot-blooded.

Commercial sports require media to provide a combination of coverage, publicity, and news. Sports promoters and team owners know the value of coverage, and they provide free access to reporters, commentators, and photographers.

For example, the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) accredited 21,000 journalists, media technicians, producers, and camera operators to cover nearly 15,000 athletes during the Olympics and Paralympics; another 6000 to 8000 were credentialed to cover nonsport aspects of the events. NBC sent 2700 people. The BBC deployed 756 staff, and the Associated Press (AP) had 200 journalists and photographers working full time during the games. This made the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games the most comprehensively covered event in history. Credentialed media personnel often are given comfortable seats in press boxes, access to the playing field and locker rooms, and summaries of statistics and player information. In return, promoters and owners expect and usually receive supportive media coverage.

Major television networks in the United States now depend on the coverage of live sports as their primary revenue generators and they are willing to pay large amounts of money for the rights to broadcast them. Such high payouts for sports are a recent development.

For example, the NFL's first television contract with CBS in 1962 amounted to $4.65 million, or $330,000 per team. In 2019 the NFL received $8.1 billion—a windfall of $255 million per team. Other sports don't have such lucrative deals, but most have also seen significant increases in their rights fees. For sports that don't share in this media bounty, it is difficult to survive at a professional or elite level.

Future studies will tell us more about the ways that people integrate media sports experiences into their lives and when media sports become important sites at which social relationships occur.

For example, we know that social media magnify the voices of sport spectators and provide opportunities to raise their own issues in connection with sports (Millington and Darnell, 2014; Norman, 2012, 2014), but we don't know what that means in terms of their relationships and everyday lives at home, work, school, and in their own sport participation. It will be important to include the use of the Internet and video games in future studies.

Women's sports also attract television coverage although they receive only 4-6 percent of the total coverage. Even though females make up 40 percent of sports participants in the United States women's events don't receive more coverage partly because female viewers of women's games have not been identified as a target demographic by advertisers who reach women through other means.

Furthermore, men make up over half the viewing audience for most women's sports, but they also watch men's sports where sponsors already reach them.

In the case of sports programming, the pregame analysis, camera coverage, camera angles, close-ups, slow-motion replays, the attention given to particular athletes, announcers' play-by-play descriptions, the postgame summary and analysis, and all associated website content are presented to entertain media audiences and keep sponsors happy.

In some cases, sport leagues and their governing bodies hire their own writers and commentators to produce media content, or they deny press credentials to journalists who present content that sports officials don't like.

This was an odd response coming from someone who heads an organization with nearly 800 colleges and universities that sponsor football teams on which players endure about 1500 head hits each year with some of them experiencing brain damage due to those hits. Of course, Emmert objected to the fictional violence in some video games (but not to the sexism or racism).

However, Emmert has connections with universities that offer graduate degrees for people going into game design, and it would not be out of the question for them and their faculty to design challenging esports games in which heads aren't blown off and in which there is no sexism or racism (Stuart, 2019). If such a project were funded, and entertaining games with copyrights were created and used in college esports, they might even generate revenues to rival those generated by most NCAA sports.

Media sports provide topics of conversation, occasions for social interaction, a sense of belonging and identity, opportunities to express emotions, and an exciting distraction for those who are passing time alone.

However, few studies have investigated audience experiences to see how people give meaning to media sports coverage and integrate it into their lives. Similarly, we know that media images and narratives influence what people feel, think, and do, but few studies have investigated the consequences of sport media consumption at the individual or collective level.

When children watch sports on television, some copy what they see if they have or can make opportunities to do so. Children are great imitators with active imaginations, so when they see and identify with athletes, they may create informal activities or seek to join youth sports programs to pursue television-inspired dreams.

However, participation grounded in these dreams usually fades quickly, especially after children discover that it takes years of tedious practice to compete successfully and reach the victory podium.

Researchers in many disciplines are now exploring these possibilities as the media landscape is changing in character and scope at a rate unprecedented in human history. Most of this research deals with how people use new digital media to complement or create informational and interpretive content related to sports already covered in mainstream media.1

However, there also are a few studies of people using digital media to report on sports ignored by mainstream media.

Men watched sports more than women did and were more likely to be committed sports fans, but when women were committed fans, their patterns of watching and responding to sports on television were similar to men's patterns. Gantz did find that some couples experienced conflicts related to viewing sports, but most resolved them successfully. Partners usually learned to adjust to each other's viewing habits over time, and when they didn't, it usually meant that they had general relationship problems unrelated to watching sports.

In another study of viewing habits, Whiteside and Hardin (2011) found that even though women participate in sports more often today than in the past, they don't regularly watch women's sports as media spectators. Data indicated that women's leisure time is often spent doing things that fit the interests of other family members rather than using their leisure time for their own interests. They watched men's sports because they watched with the men in their lives. Under these conditions, watching women's sports seldom became a high priority for them.

Female reporters and announcers today understand that their upward mobility in the sports media industry demands that they cover men's events in much the same ways that men cover them.

If they insist on covering only women's events or if they are assigned only to women's events, they won't move up the corporate ladder in media organizations (Bruce, 2013). Advancement also may be limited if they insist on covering men's sports in new ways that don't reaffirm the "correctness" of the coverage patterns and styles developed by men.

The companies that run fantasy sports operations today make money by charging entry fees, running advertising on their sites, and, in some cases, collecting a share of the money that people now legally bet on sports in an increasing number of states (Delventhal, 2019).

In North America alone there were about 60 million people who played fantasy sports at some level in 2019, many of whom used the ESPN sports app. Revenues for the companies that run the fantasy league was nearly $8 billion (Deshbandhu, 2019; Rodriguez, 2017). In the UK there were 6 million participants in fantasy soccer, and worldwide, there were fantasy soccer leagues in 252 countries and territories (AlliAyewOKane, 2018). Companies in India now host fantasy cricket which is growing rapidly.

Research examining the legacies of the Olympics for people in the country hosting the games has shown consistently that watching sports on television is more likely to lead to more television watching than actively playing sports

In light of this evidence it appears that a positive link between watching and doing sports may exist only when parents, teachers, or physical educators strategically connect media representations with everyday sports participation. Research is needed to explore this possibility.

New York Times writer Robert Lipsyte (1996) described televised sports as "−sportainment"— the equivalent of a TV movie that purports to be based on a true story but actually provides fictionalized history.

In other words, television constructs sports and viewer experiences. But the process occurs so smoothly that most television viewers believe they experience sports in a "true and natural" form. This, of course, is the goal of the directors, editors, and on-camera announcers who select images and narratives, frame them with the stories they wish to tell, and make sure they please sponsors in the process.

As more schools embrace esports, young people will be introduced to new technologies, streaming platforms, gaming consoles, and the most entertaining video games in the world. Research is needed to see if this moves them away from traditional media and traditional sports. Will the introduction of esports teams change the culture of schools and alter the status of students on esports teams? Will teams be gender inclusive, and will the digital divide work to the disadvantage of students from lower-income families?

In terms of this chapter, it is clear that fantasy sports, sports video games, and esports have the potential to transform the current relationship between sports and the media.

Many adults don't play the sports they consume in the media, but some do. Research suggests that those who are not regular participants use media sports as entertainment, whereas those who are avid participants are the ones who use media sports as a source of inspiration for their own participation.

In the absence of more research on this topic, we can say only those consuming sports through the media may be connected with activity or inactivity depending on the circumstances and the individuals involved.

Therefore, the public receives edited, or mediated, information, interpretation, entertainment, and interactive experiences that are constructed primarily to boost profits and maintain a business and political climate in which commercial media can thrive.

In the process, people who control mass media are concerned with what attracts readers, listeners, and viewers within the legal limits set by government agencies and the preference parameters of individuals and corporations that buy advertising time. As they make programming decisions, they see audiences as collections of consumers that can be sold to advertisers.

The possible consequences of not being able to include the play element in the media coverage of commercial sports have not been studied. For example, if the adults who organize youth and school sports, and the young people who participate in them, model their approach to sports on the basis of what they consume in the media, they may disregard a key element of sports experiences. If so, and if young people have not played informal games enough to feel and appreciate the play element of those experiences, their participation in organized sports may lack the emotional pleasure that would keep them active through their lives.

In this way, the dependence of sports on the media may change sports in a significant way.

Major North American newspapers give 25 percent of their daily news coverage to sports, more than any other single topic of interest, including business or politics. The sports section is the most widely read section of the paper. It accounts for at least one-third of the total circulation and a significant amount of the advertising revenues for big-city newspapers.

It attracts local and online advertisers and online businesses that want to reach middle-aged males with ads for tires, automobile supplies, new cars, car leases, airline tickets for business travelers, alcoholic beverages, power tools, building supplies, sporting goods, hair-growth products, sexual performance products, testosterone, and hormone therapies. Ads for these products and services are unique to the (men's) sports section, and they generate needed revenues for newspapers.

Golf and tennis are special cases for television programming. They attract few viewers and the ratings are exceptionally low, but the audience for these sports is very attractive to certain advertisers.

It comprises people from upper-income groups, including many professionals and business executives. This is why television coverage of golf and tennis is sponsored by companies selling luxury cars and high-priced sports cars, business and personal computers, imported beers, investment opportunities with brokers and consultants, and trips to exclusive vacation areas. This is also why the networks continue to carry these programs despite low ratings. Advertisers will pay high fees to reach high-income consumers and corporate executives who make decisions to buy thousands of "company cars" and computers at the same time that they invest millions of dollars for employee pension plans or 401k plans. With such valued viewers, golf and tennis don't need high ratings to sell their television rights for high fees.

To illustrate this point, think about this question: What if all televised sports were sponsored by environmental groups, women's organizations, and labor unions? Would program content be different from what it is now? Would the political biases built into the images and commentary be the same as they are now?

It is unlikely that they would be the same, and we would be quick to identify all the ways that the interests and political agendas of the environmentalists, feminists, or labor leaders influenced images, narratives, and overall program content.

his research highlights and describes exciting possibilities, but it also identifies factors that may undermine those possibilities. Powerful corporations have a high stakes financial interest in controlling new media and using it to add to their bottom line. This includes massive, monopoly-like companies that provide connectivity; mainstream media companies built around newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and film; and sport organizations that survive or prosper because of their financial relationships with mainstream media companies.

Leaders in this industry are using their resources to enter the new digital media market, and retain and extend their control over how these media are used, who benefits from their use, and how content is regulated. Therefore, they continue to lobby federal legislators on copyright law, definitions of intellectual property, public domain parameters, liability laws, and a host of other issues that they can use to prevent anyone from threatening their financial interests. At the same time, they extend their control by using digital media in strategic ways. Fantasy sports and video games are examples of how they enlist people as allies to sustain their power.

Commercial sports depend on the media, and the media have clearly increased our access to sports events. But there is a downside to this development. As sports are covered and broadcast, what once were forms of play and games are converted into businesses and brands. In this process, the play element of sports is eclipsed by a combination of spectacle, seriousness, and rationality

Lost to a great extent are the freedom, spontaneity, expressiveness, and pleasure experienced by athletes doing what they love to do. Even the most sophisticated video technology cannot capture and display these deep emotional aspects of play. They are also missing during on-the-field and post-game interviews with athletes who seldom express their personal emotions and the fun they experienced. Even if reporters and commentators ask them about this, athletes find it difficult to put into words and explain it in ways that others would understand.

Global economic factors have intensified the interdependence between commercial sports and the media. Major transnational corporations need ways to develop global name recognition, cultural legitimacy, and product familiarity. They also want to promote ideologies that support a way of life based on consumption, competition, and individual achievement.

Media sports offer global corporations a means of meeting these needs. Certain sport events attract worldwide attention; satellite technology transmits television signals around the world; sport images are associated with recognizable symbols and pleasurable experiences by billions of people; sports and athletes usually can be presented in politically safe ways by linking them with local identities and then using them to market products, values, and lifestyles related to local cultures or popular forms of global culture. Therefore, powerful transnational corporations spend billions of dollars annually to sponsor the media coverage of sports. This in turn gives global media companies significant power over sports worldwide.

In an effort to break ESPN's monopoly-like control of premium sports programming, Fox Sports launched Fox Sports 1 in 2013 as a new 24-hour sports programming channel. However, generating the revenues and viewer loyalty possessed by ESPN will be a formidable challenge.

NBC Universal (owned by Comcast) has been successful in retaining its hold on the Olympic Games through 2020. Using its cable channels, CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, and USA Network, it presented 6755 hours of the 2016 Olympic Games, not including the Paralympics.

Some cable and satellite television companies attract advertising money by covering sports that appeal to clearly identified segments of consumers. The X Games, for example, attract young males between 12 and 30 years old, which in turn attracts corporate sponsors selling soft drinks, beer, telecommunications products, and sports equipment such as helmets, shoes, skateboards, and dozens of other sport-specific products.

Over the past two decades, television companies have paid rapidly increasing amounts of money for the rights to televise certain sports, as indicated in Table 12.1. This is primarily because sports accounted for 86 of the top 100 television programs among 18-49 year-olds in 2018 with 63 of those programs being NFL or Olympics events. Additionally, rights fees are driven up due to competition from Amazon and communications tech companies that can offer platforms for streaming events, and from the rights owners themselves (NFL Network, MLB.com) who want to make money without using a media company (Siino, 2018).

Media coverage also reaffirms dominant racial ideology when whiteness is overlooked. For example, when journalists ignore the dynamics of living in a white-dominated, white-identified, and white-centered society, they unwittingly reproduce racial and ethnic stereotypes at the same time that they claim to be color blind.

Pretending to be color blind in a culture where a skin color-based racial ideology has existed for over three centuries ensures that white privilege is seamlessly incorporated into the media coverage of sports. It allows people in sports media to avoid asking why nearly all sports at the high school, college, and professional level are exclusively white or becoming so. It allows newspaper and magazine editors to never even think of publishing an article about the underrepresentation of ethnic minority athletes in most sports, even when they live in communities where hundreds of high school and college teams in swimming, volleyball, softball, tennis, golf, soccer, lacrosse, rowing, gymnastics, wrestling, and other sports are all white.

For us in the sociology of sport, these sports video games raise interesting questions. For example, if young people are introduced to a sport through a video game, are they more or less likely to play the real sport on which the game is based? If so, will their experiences in the video game influence their actions and feelings in real sport situations? Will young people be more or less likely to listen to coaches after being in control of players, game strategies, and video game conditions? Will they bring new forms of game knowledge to situations in which they play real sports? How many young people will choose to play sports video games rather than real sports? Will a high school or college student's status as a skilled and successful video game player rival or surpass a student's status as a skilled and successful athlete on a traditional sports team at their school?

Research is needed on these and additional questions related to the sociology of video games. In fact, over the next generation, there may be a time when the playoffs in the NBA 2K league attract as much attention as the NBA playoffs. This possibility leads to our consideration of the third triplet: Esports.

High schools are likely to become leaders in creating esports teams. The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) and the NFHS Network have already partnered with PlayVS, an online gaming provider, to initiate esports competition in high schools nationwide

Seventeen states approved esports as official varsity or club sports. The teams have two seasons during the academic year, and PlayVS has the rights to multiple games approved by the state association, and schools can choose which ones they want to play. Teams have no travel expenses because they can compete with other schools through the PlayVS platform. This means that any school nationwide is a potential opponent. Additionally, each school can form as many teams as they want, and they can play as many games as they want during the seasons. To make things easier for the schools, the national federation will assist them in getting started with their esports programs.

Digital media, including the Internet, have added a new layer to our media experiences. They enable us to go beyond consumption and to create images and narratives that we present to others.

Sports and the media are interconnected parts of our lives. Sports provide content and context for all forms of media, and many sports depend on the media for publicity and revenues.

When media are privately owned and organized to make financial profits, sports are selected for coverage on the basis of their entertainment and revenue-generating potential. Media images and narratives are selected to represent the event so it meets the perceived interests of the audience and sponsors. Sports that are difficult to cover profitably usually are ignored by the media or covered only with selected highlights.

Sports coverage generally consists of images and narratives that exaggerate the spectacular, such as heroic injuries or achievements. Images and narratives also invent and highlight rivalries and explain why events are important. Furthermore, they create and maintain the celebrity status of athletes and teams. Cultural studies scholar Garry Crawford explains:

At a time when television audiences are fragmented and new media capture the interests of many younger viewers, there is a collective urgency associated with certain men's sports and the Olympic Games that attracts large audiences that watch for long stretches without prerecording and editing out commercials.

Sports now account for a growing proportion of media company income. Half of the operating income of the massive Disney Company is generated by ESPN, as it collects over $10 billion from fees paid by nearly 90 million cable, satellite, and streaming subscribers and it sells commercial time to its programming sponsors. Other channels feature sports programming, but ESPN produces thousands of hours of programming and accounts for nearly half of the live sport events televised in the United States.

Even though media coverage of sports is carefully edited and represented in total entertainment packages, most of us believe that when we see a sport event on television, we are seeing it "the way it is." We don't usually think that what we see, hear, and read is a series of narratives and images selected for particular reasons and grounded in the social worlds and interests of those producing the event and controlling the broadcast.

Television coverage provides only one of many possible sets of images and narratives related to an event, and there are many images and messages that audiences do not receive (Galily, 2014). If we went to an event in person, we would see something quite different from the images selected and presented on television, and we would develop our own descriptions and interpretations, which would be different from those carefully presented by media commentators and commercial sponsors.

Sports media commentaries and images in the United States highlight action, competition, aggression, hard work, individual heroism and achievement, playing despite pain, teamwork, and competitive outcomes. Television coverage has become so seamless in its representations of sports that we often define televised games as "real" games—more real than what is seen in person at the stadium.

Temple's point is especially relevant today. The focus on profits has increased soap opera storytelling as a means of developing and maintaining audience interest in commercial media sports coverage. Sports programming is now "a never-ending series of episodes—the results of one game create implications for the next one (or next week's) to be broadcast"

The major sociological question related to new digital media is this: Will they democratize social life by enabling people to freely share information and ideas, or will they become tools controlled by corporations to expand their capital, increase consumption, reproduce ideologies that drive market economies, and maintain the illusion that we need them to provide pleasure and excitement in our lives?

The answer to this question will emerge as the struggle for control over the media unfolds. At this point the struggle does not involve a fair fight, because people who will benefit from the potential democratizing effects of new digital media are not even aware of the fight—and the leaders of corporate media are doing all they can to keep it that way.

Now think about this: Capitalist corporations sponsor nearly 100 percent of all sports programming in commercial media, and their goals are to create compulsive consumers loyal to capitalism and generate profits for themselves and their shareholders. Says media scholar Lawrence Wenner (2013):

The economic influences of media have changed sport, changed our associations with it, and have affected the stories that are told through sport, both in everyday communication and in the service of commerce." For those who are "tuned in" to the commercial media, their experiences as spectators are heavily influenced—that is, mediated—by the decisions of those who control programming and media representations

The production of sport simulation games is tricky because it requires complex licensing agreements between a sports league, the league's players association, game developers, and a distributor. The realism of the games depends on the capabilities of software and hardware (computers and consoles) and the sophistication of other technologies such as motion-capture cameras.

The importance of these things was recently demonstrated when Madden NFL, the best-selling sports video game for over 20 years, was surpassed by NBA 2K. As of mid-2019, NBA 2K had sold over 90 million copies, an accomplishment that led the NBA to extend its licensing agreement with 2K Sports (the game's developer) through 2026 for $1.1 billion (Kim, 2019).

It also would be professionally responsible for media companies to hire sports reporters and broadcasters who are bilingual and culturally informed so that they could talk meaningfully with players whose lives on and off the field are not understood by most baseball fans. These are important stories as all sports become increasingly globalized. For the media to ignore them is to ignore the reality of sports today.

The most effective way to reduce subtle forms of racial, ethnic, and national bias in the media is to also hire editors, photographers, writers, producers, directors, camerapersons, and statisticians from diverse racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds. Lip service is paid to this goal, and progress has been made in certain media, but members of racial and ethnic minorities are clearly underrepresented in nearly all sports newsrooms and media executive offices where over 80 percent of the full time reporters and editors are white

They tracked performance data on players and watched as many baseball games as they could to learn about the players they might select for their fantasy teams in the future and which players they may trade to other teams.

The one thing that prevented this game from spreading around the United States faster than it did was the tedious job of collecting performance data for the players on all the fantasy teams and calculating team scores to determine who was the fantasy winner at the end of the season.

Fantasy sports and sports video games have altered the sport-media landscape, but esports is the triplet mostly likely to transform and colonize it in the future. Bryan Graham, long-time sports journalist and current deputy sport editor of Guardian USA, covers esports and has concluded the following:

The question is not whether esports is the future of sports entertainment, but whether there's any possible scenario where it's not. The definition of esports is emerging as this third triplet grows and is increasingly embraced worldwide.

Overall, new media allow people to control when and how they consume sports content, but this changes little from the days of traditional media when content was created by a limited number of powerful sources.

The real transformational potential of new media rests in how people use them to produce content that offers alternatives to traditional media sources.

At this point, we don't know if the realism of these video games leads those people to prefer them over watching real-time sports, or if it increases their consumption of traditional sports media programming. We do know that many NFL and NBA players are hooked on the video game versions of their sport.

The realism of the latest NASCAR, Formula One, and Indy Racecar video games is so impressive that some professional drivers use games to familiarize themselves with the tracks on which their races are held. The details depicted in video games have even led tattoo artists to claim that they should receive a royalty for their original creations on the bodies of basketball players

To say that sports are "mediated" is to say that they consist of selected images and narratives. Much research in the sociology of sport has deconstructed these images and narratives and analyzed the ideas or themes on which they are based.

The scholars who have done these studies assume that media sports are symbolic constructions, much like Hollywood action films, television soap operas, and Disney cartoons.

As the Internet has become a primary source of information about big-time sports nationally and worldwide, many local, small-market newspapers have established online sites for breaking news, regular columns, and blogs.

Their print editions may contain this content, but they focus more on local sports, including high school varsity teams, small college teams, and even youth sports. Despite this, the future of these newspapers is in serious jeopardy.

Traditional patterns of dealing with gender in media coverage have been slow to change partly because sports media organizations worldwide have cultures and structures that have been shaped by heterosexual men. They've been organized and scheduled around men's sports, just like the work routines and assignments of sports reporters.

Therefore, the coverage of women's events often requires changes in institutionalized patterns of sports media work. Furthermore, the vast majority of sports media personnel are men, and the highest-status assignments in sports media are those that deal with men's sports.

In nations where mass media (newspapers, magazines, radio, and television) are privately owned, the dominant goals are to make profits and distribute content that promotes the perspectives and interests of people in positions of power and influence

These aren't the only goals, but they are the most influential. Years ago, media expert Michael Real explained that there was no greater force in the construction of media sport reality than "commercial television and its institutionalized value system [emphasizing] profit making, sponsorship, expanded markets, commodification, and competition"

Video games that simulate sports is the second of the triplets. It is the sibling closest to esports, but like fantasy sports, its other sibling, it provides fans with the illusion of ownership and control in commercial sports.

This aspect of video games was recognized over 30 years ago by Electronic Arts. Although Atari, Sega, Taito, Nintendo, and other companies created video game simulations of sports between the early 1970s and the late-1980s, it was Electronic Arts that did it the best. They began with the Earl Weaver Baseball video game in 1987 and John Madden Football in 1988, both of which used AI to provide realistic game playing experiences that set them apart from other game developers at that time.

Fantasy sports changed as it grew, and around 2010, it came into contact with two startup companies: FanDuel and DraftKings. These companies were run by entrepreneurs who created short term competitions in addition to the season-long ones. They also pushed legal and moral boundaries as they introduced cash prizes for the short term winners.

This attracted more participants and billions of dollars along with the attention of lawmakers who saw this as a form of illegal gambling. However, when the companies presented research evidence showing that success in fantasy sports depended on a participants' skills rather than random chance (as with poker and dice games), it was decided, after extended legal wrangling and the discovery of a loophole in anti-gambling laws, that their fantasy sports with cash prizes didn't fit the technical definition of gambling.

Fantasy sports is the first-born triplet, conceived in 1979 when a baseball fan created a game in which he and a few friends pretended to be the owners of imaginary Major League Baseball teams that competed against each other. In the process, they connected the passive activity of consuming traditional media with the active challenge of using their baseball knowledge to select their own "fantasy" teams from the active players in Major League Baseball and then use the performance statistics for their fantasy players to determine a score that could be compared to the scores of their friends' teams during and at the end of the season.

This converted them from relatively passive fans into team managers and active competitors in a league of their own. This fantasy game added a new dimension to their roles as fans. Now they read baseball coverage in newspapers and magazines more carefully to learn about individual players on all teams, not just their team.

The most significant positive change that has occurred recently is that when women's sports are covered, the quality of coverage has improved: it is more likely to be serious, and less likely to involve sexist jokes or comments that trivialize and sexualize women athletes. However, some coverage today remains characterized by a "gender bland sexism" as women's sports and female athletes are described with less excitement, urgency, and historical significance than is the case in coverage of men's sports and male athletes

This difference may fade as more women with broadcast media experience cover women's sports and as their male peers learn to appreciate women as athletes and women's sports as exciting, even if it isn't gymnastics or figure skating during the Olympic games.

There are exceptions to this pattern, but when people have tried to use mass media to challenge dominant ideologies, they encounter difficulties. This discourages transformational programming and leads people who create media content to self-censor it in ways that defer to the interests of the powerful.

This does not mean that those who control mass media ignore the truth and "force" media audiences to read, hear, and see things unrelated to reality or their interests. But it does mean that, apart from content that individuals create online, average people influence mass media only through consumption and program ratings.

We use media images and narratives as we evaluate ourselves, give meaning to other people and events, form ideas, and envision the future.

This does not mean that we are slaves to the media or passive dupes of those who produce and present media content to us. The media don't tell us what to think, but they greatly influence what we think about and, therefore what we discuss in face-to-face and virtual conversations. Additionally, our experiences are clearly informed by media content, and if the media didn't exist, our lives would be very different.

In 1986 the NFL received $400 million in television rights fees, and in 2019 it received $8.1 billion. Similarly, the rights fees paid to televise the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles amounted to $287 million—ten times more than was paid to televise the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal, and five times less than the $1.42 billion that will be paid to televise the 2020 Olympic Games.

This growth in television rights fees makes commercial sports more profitable for promoters and team owners and increases the attractiveness of sports as sites for national and global advertising. Increased attention allows athletes to demand higher salaries and turns a few of them into national and international celebrities, who then use their status to endorse products sold worldwide.

The sports journalists most likely to avoid such stereotypes are those who have worked to learn about national and ethnic histories and those parts of the world in which teams and athletes live.

This is what all good journalists do when they cover events and people. For example, when 28 percent of MLB players are Latino and more players are coming from certain Asian countries, it is reasonable to expect the journalists covering baseball to do their homework and learn about the cultures and baseball histories in those countries, and about the experiences of the athletes who have grown up there.

Mainstream media also emphasize elite, commercial sport events. For example, US newspapers and television networks increased their coverage of professional sports through the twentieth century and decreased coverage of amateur sports with the exception of college football and men's basketball.

This shift was accompanied by a growing emphasis on the importance of winning, heroic actions, and the desire to attract corporate sponsors and a mass audience. It's important to understand this process and the ways that particular images and narratives in media coverage inform popular ideas about sports and about social relations and social life in general.

In the case of sports, the recent proliferation of mobile devices and growing connectivity change the way many of us access and respond to sport media content. Additionally, many people now have the ability to produce and distribute sport content and commentary.

We can interact with fellow fans, ask questions of players and coaches, follow them on twitter, identify scores and statistics, stream events on demand, and play online games that either simulate sports or are associated with real-time sport events around the world. This transforms media experiences and mediated realities in dramatic ways.

NCAA president, Mark Emmert, is not as excited about esports as Coach Haskell at Boise State, even though the recent League of Legends World Championship had over twice the number of media viewers as the 2019 Men's Final Four games (Heilwell, 2019). When asked if the NCAA would include an esports division, he proclaimed the following:

We don't particularly embrace games where the objective is to blow your opponent's head off

Traditional media now have a 21st century set of digital triplets that they have cautiously adopted. This digital threesome—fantasy sports, sports video games, and esports—have grown so fast that many people in the sport-media realm, especially those over 40 years old, don't know what to make of them. Like real-life children, they are exerting significant influence on their traditional media parents and forcing them to make adjustments in what they do. At this time, it is difficult to know if these new triplets will grow up to challenge or complement their sport-media elders.

What we do know is that they are changing audience demographics in the media-sport realm, altering how audiences define and consume mediated sports, and disrupting the meaning and organization of sports. Each one of these triplets has unique characteristics that are changing as they grow and gain experience. Their stories are compelling and important to consider from a sociological perspective.

Media coverage of women's sports has never been a media priority, and research suggests that this has not changed over the past three decades. In fact, longitudinal research done by Cheryl Cooky, Mike Messner, and their colleagues at the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California shows that sports news and highlights about women's sports have declined since data were first collected in 1989

When Messner and his colleagues issued their first Gender and Televised Sports report in 1990, they found that 5 percent of sports news and highlights were devoted to women's sports, but they incorrectly predicted that this percentage would increase as more girls and women played sports (Duncan et al., 2005). Despite significant sports participation increases among girls and women over the next 20 years, the media coverage given to women's sports actually declined.

As choices for sports television viewing have increased, audiences have fragmented and ratings for many sports have declined, especially during prime-time hours, even as the total number of people watching television sports has remained relatively steady. This means that rights fees for the very large events will remain high, but fees for other events, including "special-interest" events such as bowling, in-line skating championships, and international skiing races will be limited.

When interest in special events is especially strong among particular viewers, pay-per-view (PPV) sports programming can push rights fees to high levels; this continues to occur for championship boxing, professional wrestling, and mixed martial arts. PPV can generate massive revenues, but events must be chosen selectively because most people are not willing to pay upfront for a single event on television. In the meantime, pay TV has become part of people's lives in the form of subscription fees for cable and satellite connections and special sports channels and packages.

They avoided talking about social class, race, and jobs and focused on "where they were from"—talking about roads, towns, and other features of the landscape of western Pennsylvania. For them, watching the Steelers on television was a social occasion for interacting with others who reaffirmed their sense of home and their regional identities, despite living over 1200 miles away from where they grew up.

When media scholar Walter Gantz (2013) studied male-female married couples in the United States, he found that they often watched televised sports together and that this usually was a positive activity in their relationships

Commercial forms of sports and traditional media have always had a close relationship. Long before television, newspapers provided sports information, interpretation, and entertainment. Radio did the same.

When television began to show people video images of the action, newspapers and radio, including sportswriters and announcers, were forced to change their approach to maintain sales and ratings. There are similar challenges for traditional media today as they compete with a nearly infinite supply of on-demand, interactive digital programming as well as privately produced content.

Most people don't think critically about mass media content

When we watch sports on television, we don't often notice that the images and commentary we see and hear have been carefully presented to create engaging narratives, heighten the dramatic content of the event, and emphasize dominant ideologies in our society, especially those that reaffirm the interests of sponsors as well as the media companies.

Overall, the media audience for esports in 2019 was about 454 million people with expected growth to 645 million by 2022 (Pannekeet, 2019).

With 1.5 billion people, mostly young people, who are aware of esports worldwide, the 2022 Asian Games designated esports as a medal event, and the International Olympic Committee is considering the inclusion of esports in its medal events in the future—a move that they hope will make the Olympic Games more attractive to young consumers globally.

At the same time, sport organizations such as MLB, the NFL, the English Premier Football (Soccer) Division, and others have become more active in managing media representations of their sports so they can directly control information, analysis, and entertainment to promote themselves on their terms.

a $116 per year subscription to access real-time coverage of all regular season games on multiple devices. The site also provides game previews, highlights, statistics, and general commentary, among dozens of other video, audio, and text materials on baseball. This enables MLB and other professional sports to provide media content and control the ways that their brands are represented.

Sports rivalries are hyped and used to serialize stories through and across seasons; conflict and chaos are highlighted with a predictable cast of "good guys," "bad guys," and "redemption" or "comeback" stories;

and the story lines are designed to reproduce ideologies favored by upper-middle-class media consumers—the ones that corporate sponsors want to reach with their ads.

At this point, esports...

are organized, competitive video games played according to agreed-upon rules by individuals and teams. In mainstream media discussions, there is a distinction made between the corporate-sponsored esports leagues and tournaments that involve professional gamers competing for millions of dollars of prize money, and local esports clubs and the rapidly expanding esports teams sponsored by high schools and colleges. The former is attracting attention from investors who see esports as a potential commercial rival of professional sports.

Research on new media representations of these activities is sorely needed. Videos of parkour have made it a global phenomenon as young men (for the most part) have become....

aware of the possibility of using the physical environments around them as "sport spaces" in which they can develop skills, express themselves, and even gain widespread recognition by doing things and posting videos that catch the attention of other PK athletes.

At the same time, blacks, latinxs, Asian Americans, and Native Americans are reminded that mainstream sport cultures have been shaped by the values and experiences of white men, and sport organizations and media companies are controlled by white men.

his is simply a fact, and it is not meant to be an indictment of white men. But it does create tension for ethnic minority athletes and unique social dynamics in sports where players are racially and ethnically mixed. This in itself is a newsworthy story, but it would make many people, especially powerful white men, uncomfortable, and it would be difficult for most journalists to tell without being censored.

Media research in the past often distinguished between print and electronic media. Print media included

newspapers, magazines, fanzines, books, catalogues, event programs, and even trading cards—words and images on paper.

In some cases, young people use new digital media to represent sports involving transgressive actions such as skating in empty private swimming pools at night or doing

parkour ("PK"), an activity in which young people use their bodies to move rapidly and efficiently through existing landscapes, especially in urban areas where walls, buildings, and other obstacles normally impede movement

Electronic media included

radio, television, and film. But digital media and the devices used to consume, create, and distribute content have nearly eliminated the dividing line between these media forms.

Although commercial spectator sports depend on media, most have a special dependence on television because television companies pay for the rights to broadcast games and other events.

rights fees" provide sports with predictable, significant, and increasing sources of income. Once "rights contracts" are signed, revenues are guaranteed regardless of bad weather, injuries to key players, and the other factors that interfere with ticket sales and on-site revenue streams. Without these media rights contracts, spectator sports seldom generate much profit.