ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses several playful linguistic aspects of media representation of football stars in unflattering situations. Based on data from online British popular newspapers, it traces some of the poetic linguistic forms and rhetorical figures identified in the media coverage of the ‘Becks text sex’ scandal that affected the football player David Beckham at the height of his career. The chapter argues that the popular press may use situations like these to pursue their prurient interest in sex-related matters by reveling in the negativity surrounding national sports celebrities. Since the media intentionally boost the sensationalism of their stories through constant poetic foregrounding of linguistic forms, they make a spectacle of the language that is used to report on such issues. Arguably, the indulgence in the language itself becomes as important as the news story itself.
