Bread, butter and gravy: An institutional approach to televised sport production

There has been a paucity of research that has examined the processes involved in the production of televised sport. Frequently, the content of texts has been used to develop arguments about the political and economic context of media production and the labour process involved in creating televised sport. Recent work, however, has maintained that the conditions of production cannot be inferred by merely scrutinizing the programme, that is to say the text. The use of text to draw conclusions about the labour process means that much of what has been written has been based upon a narrow understanding of how the images and discourses that are broadcast are actually constructed. R. Gruneau has maintained that this textual focus is inadequate in understanding the pressures and limits that structure the production of sport for television. He suggested that: