The cost of attending the upcoming Rugby World Cup in New Zealand has resurrected the aura of venality surrounding the professional sports world. FIFA seems to be having a spot of bother too - as did the IOC.
There is something much more wholesome about folk running about a field and hurting each other simply because they enjoy it rather than the money driven spectacle of professional sports. The odd bit of amateur partisan violence not withstanding. Story here this weekend about the coach of a local professional Rugby team being kicked unconscious and into hospital during an on-field altercation between his and the opposing team - missed by the cameras and somewhat of a mystery as it appears he wasn't on the pitch at the time - although the prevailing rumour is that one of the opposing team's (presumably soon to be banned for life) players left the on-field fracas and kicked the shit out of him for good measure as they were behind on points. Standing or sitting around in an inclement climate seems unjustified by any form of sporting event especially if an errant player could leave the game at any moment and beat an unsuspecting adjacent onlooker senseless.
I concluded long ago that any sport played outdoors, or indoors for that matter, is best watched on television and if attendance is unavoidable, for political, economic or employment reasons, then watched from the confines of a corporate box - where the game is also viewed on TV - while eating Smoked Salmon and Prawns washed down with someone else's money. Given the choice between one pair of eyes and the elements or 16 cameras covering the game and warmth its not hard to work out the sensible choice. On the topic of Sports reporting - I have always marvelled at the ability of Sports reporters to cover such a broad range of activities with such a limited vocabulary. Never have so many read so much out of so few words. Unfortunately this skill has now spread to news coverage in general.
It is understandable that Sports, being a limited arena of professional hitting, kicking, throwing, running and jumping in assorted combinations, requires and limits the usable quantity of apposite words - not so the rest of world events - you'd think. While I've endured close proximity to grown men interviewing 12 year old athletes about their life experience and listened to 19 year-old sporting millionaires explain what they've discovered from 16 years of intensive natural ability enhancement coaching I'm yet to hear a three syllable word. This affliction also applies widely to the overall Celebrity market - many of whom need professional writing assistance to compose a Twitter message. Not surprisingly then that the reporters assigned to cover these activities need to reduce their choice of words to those with a chance of being understood by their stock-in-trade. This would include the sports-fan.
Many of the ingredients of modern News reportage can be traced back to Sports coverage - Videotape, slow-motion, instant-replay, animated graphics, banal commentary and, not forgetting, excessive hype leading to a high degree of self-importance if not self-worship. And it was all a roaring broadcasting success. So much so that one day an American TV Network made their Sports boss their head of News. Not so many years later we're watching the result. News is a sporting event with Winners and Losers - bereft of subtlety, insight or any real information we watch not only the superficial observations of those paid to provide them but also those provided by the participants themselves. Like any sporting event we want to see all the competitors and support just one. Where is the entertainment if only one side shows up? Like an Iso-cam following a kick on goal we follow a cruise missile or smart-bomb into a building and expect, shortly thereafter, a close-up of the damage on the ground. Why is an irrelevancy. Why do Arsenal play Man. United or the Cowboys play the Redskins.
We're now limited to "Rooftop" and "Embedded" Journalism or the Press Bus interspersed by material and (dis)information provided by those with a vested interest in "spinning" the story. There are now more people employed in PR than there are Journalists. While assorted military forces are fighting their wars they are also in combat in the "Information Battle-Space" - as they call it. In an attempt to provide some credence to this we have the News equivalent of the Half-time Show. Self-professed experts, commentators and former players (Political, Economic, Military and Academic) expound the virtues of the game and the skills of the participants. They might even touch on the rules of the game every so often but why the game is being played at all is never brought-up.
In the days before a 24 hour News channel - a 24 hour Sports channel came first - somebody had to decide what went into a 30 minute daily news program agenda. So the amount of time given to a particular news story was, usually, based upon it's importance ranking within the time available - not so when there is relatively unlimited space to fill. Gone is the time for your reporter and camera crew to wander off to learn and practice their craft when "updates" are required every 30 minutes or so. The time when a crew could return to base saying "there is no story" have vanished. Whatever else it is it is a story. This is simply the result of financial pressure to fill airtime as cheaply as possible. It also leads to the need to confect news value when there is nothing else available or when you have committed your news gathering resources to a story that has no legs but needs to keep running. Whatever the explanation for the ADHD news coverage we get we are not being well served.
In a similar way to Einstein's theory of the inseparable intertwining of space and time into Spacetime the media have their own version - Moneytime. It is not what it is worth but what it costs and who pays that decides the information we get - pick any definition for any of those words.
