Communicating about Sports Media

Participation in sport is truly an international enterprise. The coveted sports of each nation may change, but the obsessions remain constant for sizeable proportions of each country's populace. Communicating About Sports Media: Cultures Collide is about people who participate in sport without playing it at the highest levels. Media advancements help sports fans follow their teams via deluxe television packages, Internet chatrooms, and text message updates. In the process, sports media possesses a tremendous amount of power as gatekeepers that can shape stories and advance storylines that impact our perceptions of important societal issues including notions of gender, politics, history, and deviance. Basketball coach John Wooden once argued that “sports do not build character. They reveal it.” This book is about what is revealed within the multi-layered communications among fans, athletes, and media entities. Understanding how dramatically sport can impact our everyday lives is critical for sports media literacy-making the fan into a conscientious consumer in the process. Through the analyses of sport production, consumption and enactment, author Andrew Billings presents an important primer for anyone who loves sport-or for anyone wishing to understand its seemingly intractable pull on modern society.