The sports press: the “active mirror”

The society we live in is undoubtedly a very angry and violent one, where extreme competition, associated with the decreasing availability of resources and their unequal distribution, result in a high level of frustration and aggressiveness.

The violence surrounding many supporting events is a reflection of a general social trend. The press is often blamed for overexposing violence, in all its forms. Violence makes the news, it attracts readers. And so when dozens of supporters fight in the streets, or sing anti-Balotelli chants in some Italian football stadium, fighters and ‘singers’ appear in newspapers with a full description of their detestable gestures, and their faces on TV.

Are the media, by doing that, offering racist supporters an additional and wider stage, then? They are, but the argument, if it is used against information, is rather flawed. The media report facts and it is their duty to do it as comprehensively and freely as they can. In other words, they are a (more or less faithful) mirror of society.

What I would like to argue in this article is that information plays in fact a much more powerful role. It cannot be relegated to a ‘mirror of society’ role unless we regard it as an ‘active mirror’. This can be especially true for the sports press, which is ‘the’ key link between the most dynamic supporters and sports events and the reference.

Over the last few years, the increasing coverage and emphasis on sport events of an international scope, such as the World Cup, the Olympics and international tournaments in all sports, has naturally brought more attention to social, political and economical considerations. As a consequence, the sports press has been increasingly investigating into all that is social, political and economic around sport.

The simple fact of treating such phenomena as racism, violence or doping, and giving them an exposure that was simply unthinkable in the not too remote past, makes the sports press an active player in the social scene. The motto of the International Association of Sports Newspapers (IASN), which gathers the leading voices in the sport press at the international level, is indeed “sports press for sports in society”.

The sports press is ideally placed to describe what happens on and around a sport ground. By showing that some obtuse supporters are racist, chances are that some equally obtuse individuals will follow in their footsteps but the vast majority will rather have an opportunity to reflect on racism, and possibly expand their knowledge on the matter. By describing how far violence can go for a sport result, or we should better say ‘far’ from a sport result, because that has little to do with sport itself, some might be inspired to perpetrate the same violence but many others will find it abhorrent and avoid it, or teach their children to avoid it.

Like all weapons, the press’s leverage is a double-edged sword. Leverage calls for responsibility. The objectivity of the content and an appropriate use of the language must be an imperative for a sports press that aspires to actively convey all the positive values intrinsic in sport, as opposed to simply representing and reproducing its flaws.

This article also appears in Sport and Citizenship’s eleventh edition Sport and Media and has also been published in French newspaper Le Monde. It is reprinted on www.playthegame.org with kind permission of the author.

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