ABSTRACT
I opened the morning newspaper and was greeted with a front-page, banner-size headline and photo touting the dramatic win of the city’s professional football team. The account of the game bristled with excitement. In smaller print at the top of the page was a report on the winning ways of a local basketball team. It was only in the nether regions of the page that I discovered reports on national and international affairs, all properly phrased in the monochromatic tones of impartial objectivity. Struck by the attention given to matters of sport, I became curious about the general content of the newspaper. Interestingly, the sports section proved to be substantially larger than the first and principal news section. The entertainment section also exceeded the size of the financial section. If I subtracted the advertisements from the pages, the portion of the paper devoted to playful matters was more than twice that of what one might call serious news. A few months later, an editorial in the paper opined that the name of this winning football team “is not only a piece of the town’s; it also conjures its essence”.
