The discourse ethics of sports print journalism

Abstract

Relationships between sport, nationalism, militarism and violence have often been alluded to by exponents of various social-scientific disciplines. Faure, for example, defines sport as 'the euphemistic representation of the latent violence of the Western mind' and sport's role as a socializing agent is viewed as the creation of 'agonistic personalities' whereby: 'It does not create the conditions for war, but it does maintain the possibility of those conditions, and adds its own efficiency to the other forces which produce a social order in which trials of strength are seen as part of the natural course of things.' Particularly since the 1985 Heysel Stadium soccer massacre, even some sports journalists have begun to view violence in sport as problematical. Dwyre, for example, reflecting on a long career as a reporter of sporting events in the US, concluded: 'Sportswriters tend to view sports-related violence such as fights between opposing team members, vicious boxing matches, and assaults on players as part of the game rather than an intolerable and offensive incident. Violence in sports should not be so easily tolerated'. Writing in Sports Illustrated, Wulf, in similar vein, lambasted the president of the US national ice-hockey league for denying that the league was too prone to violence while at the same time marketing videos with titles like: 'Brand New. Part 4. Hockey's Bloodiest Fights and Knockouts', or '165 Hours of Good Quality Hockey Fights'. Likewise, Weisman referred to American professional football in the title of an article as 'The Maiming Game', which goes on to report two studies: one by academics which estimated that 66 per cent of National Football League players who played after 1970 retired with some form of debilitating injury, and another by an actuarial consultant who found in a survey of 1,800 players who spent at least five years in the same league between 1921 and 1959 that their group life expectancy was 12 years below the national average for men. Such expressions of disquiet and ethical concern remain, however, relatively rare. In particular, the linguistic medium itself of sports reporting has been largely ignored.