ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates a range of sport media issues over the last twenty years and argues for more research that engages critically with the varied interactions across the production-text-audience nexus. This is imperative given the growth in innovative digital technologies providing multiple platforms for such interactions, which increasingly blur boundaries between production and consumption. Significantly, this has potentially shifted power balances between media professionals, sport stars, and their audiences. This chapter focuses on a number of issues such as sport media’s regulation and perpetuation of patriarchal values of sport, the ways in which social media platforms provide opportunities for the public and sport stars to shift power away from traditional media outlets, and the impact the media can have on sport stars and sport participants. As media interactions become ever more multifaceted and challenging to determine, it becomes increasingly important to develop varied approaches that promote greater understanding of the usages and meanings generated and circulated across the sport media complex. Thus, the relevance of a hermeneutic framework to provide a more in-depth methodological approach for researching sport media interactions is revisited here. Consideration is given to ways in which the media has, and can, transform images of sport and how critical pedagogical interventions by educators and coaches can help trainee sports journalists, young sports participants and athletes interact more judgementally and analytically.
