The media industry globally, and here I am including advertising, could be said to thrive on the four Ss: Sex, Sin, Scandal and Sport. The four are linked, and advertising draws on them for most of its images. Ads for perfumes, watches, luxury cars – the list is long – often use sportspeople, with sex and sexuality implied, and with that the possibility of sin and scandal. When it comes to the editorial content, the glories of sport get about as much play as the fall from grace.
In South Africa it’s no different. Sports figures have long been amongst the leading newsmakers, competing on an equal footing with politicians and corporate heavyweights. Local tabloid newspapers could even be said to consist of reports of soccer matches and the scandals of sport celebrities, interspersed with those from the music and television world. Any space left is for politics and advertisements.
Even in the so-called quality papers, especially the Sunday papers, the chief delinquent of the soccer world Jabu Pule competes for news space with President Thabo Mbeki, soon to be South Africa’s first two-term president of a multi racial democracy, and Patrice Motsepe, a leading member of the country’s black business elite. (Motsepe is himself now the proud owner of a soccer team).
And in the last few years South African rugby has become better known through the media for a series of scandals, including the infamous and subtly sexualised Kamp Staaldrad, than for the prowess of the Boks on the field. The odd cricket star has also been linked in the media to sex scandals of the more direct kind.
So media consumers will have noticed how sports coverage has increased on television in the last ten years. There’s a bouquet of dedicated channels on DStv, the regular soccer slots on e.tv, and even the public broadcaster will gladly cut its main news bulletin to 15 minutes, with little or no apology, in order to accommodate cricket matches. In fact, I’m quite sure SABC and e.tv wouldn’t mind being allocated a license for a 24-hour sports channel.
The increase has been seen in print too, with several newspapers upping the number of pages allocated to sports. Better still, some newspapers have gone to the extent of providing supplements twice a week, including supplements of the Champions League, which is considered the prime example of excellence.
Sport has grown this much as a media institution because it guarantees large audiences, and for advertisers has the added advantage of being politically and ideologically uncontroversial. And again, apart from holding the excitement of the contest, which is entertainment in its own right, it also has titillating off-the-field offshoots in sex, sin and scandal – the same audiences for the game are carried over into this equally exciting menu. No wonder advertisers jump in.
But being uncontroversial in the eyes of advertisers does not mean sport itself is neither political nor ideological. Sport is intricately connected to patriotism, nationalism, jingoism and sometimes xenophobia. It’s interesting that journalists and the media can get whipped up into a nationalistic fervour when it comes to sport, yet ordinarily they shun these values as inimical to editorial independence and dispassionate journalism. Quick to note this are politicians, who often wish to use sports for political ends, especially as a way of promoting nation building.
Modern day commercialised sport is also deeply ideological in that it supports the capitalist motive to make a commodity of everything, including the sports people, the media and the audiences. One could add, if one were deeply sinister, that we all appear to be so thoroughly entertained by the fours Ss yet we seldom ask who really benefits.
Professor Tawana Kupe is head of media studies at Wits University’s School of Literature and Language Studies.