Media have transformed sport Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Media have transformed sport - Essay Example Now, with the help of media, live broadcasts have become very famous among people from all walks of life. Mass communication and mass media came into existence and became popular by the end of 19th century. Examples would be; print media, cigarette cards, cinema newsreel, radio and the latest television era. Then came the tabloid revolution, new men’s magazines, advertising and electronic media like satellites. In the era of print media, social commentators played an important role, new guides and sports magazines began to be published and ‘graphic revolution’ of 1961 as referred to as by Boorstin. Pulitzer established the first ‘sports department’ in New York Times in1883 (McChesney 1989: 53). Sports news has been dominated by national newspapers and has outsourced multi sports magazines (Horne, 1992). As for the cigarette cards; they were invented in France. Cinema brought movement and hence sporting action to the audience for the first time (Aldgate 1979: 17). In Britain, the first cinema performance held in public was in 1896, and there came into being around 4000-5,000 cinemas by 1914. Radio had its own advantages. It was a medium that provided listeners with immediacy. 1922 is the year when this happened in the UK and thus British Broadcasting Corporation was formed. After the formation of BBC in 1927, sport broadcasts became a well known element in the schedules (see Whannel 1992). Next development was in the form of the television; which was established in the 1930s but received more recognition in the 1950s to 1970s. By 1965, BBC had established Sportsview (1954), Grandstand (1958) and Match of the Day (1962) as regular programmes, ITV had launched World of Sport, and in the USA, ABC Sport had launched Wide World of Sport, with its subtitle "the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat", and adopted its slogan "up close and personal" (Powers 1984: 118-21). These developments transformed the nature of sport stardom. Stars and