ABSTRACT
The growth and influence of the mass media have expanded to the point where the affiliated professionals, whose work in the past mainly involved a narrow focus on the reporting of sport results, are now part of an institutional complex of enormous economic (e.g., television rights fees), social, organizational, cultural, and political importance (Pedersen, 2013; Rowe, 2004). While over the years the symbiotic and influential relationship between sport and the mass media has been strengthened at all levels, this relationship is particularly noteworthy in major sport because, as noted by Wenner (2015), “there could be no big-time sport without big-time media” (p. 629). With the integration of the two institutions of sport and the mass media, terms such as mediasport (Wenner, 1998), mediated sport (Maguire, Jarvie, Mansfield, & Bradley, 2002), and mediatization (Frandsen, 2014) have been adopted to describe the sport-media nexus within various academic fields (e.g., sport sociology, sport communication). Given the mass medias often serve as the voice for telling sport stories, “mediasport strategically reaches out to us to narrate understandings of sport in the context of broader social relations” (Wenner, 2013, pp. 83-84). The influence of the mass media – as well as social media – on the growth (e.g., economical) and significance (e.g., societal) of sport has resulted in a proliferation of research into how sport behavior is framed and understood.
