The Importance of Sports to Mass Communication

The Importance of Sports to Mass Communication

Understanding of mass communication without attention to sport coverage is practically impossible. Through the mass media, millions and even billions of viewers, listeners and readers are brought into the experience of a great sports performance. The emotional power of sports performance enchanted by slow-motion video and musical sound track, can take you to breath away or bring tears to you eyes.

There are a lot of massive spectacles like the Super Bowl, the World Series, the NBA play-offs, the Olympic Games, College Football Games. Each of these sports activities takes in many millions of dollars from television revenues and dominates national sports news for days or weeks.

Cultural Importance

Media sports provide dominant myths in modern culture. Rituals are the repeated activities that act out myths. There are a lot of important rituals for people who found of sports activities. One of the such rituals come to dominate for a few hours or days or weeks the life of traditional village, so the televised football, baseball, basketball, hockey, or other major game takes on central importance for whole communities and regions during specific periods. Fans schedule their lives on certain days, especially Saturdays or Sundays, around televised sports.

The economic impact of media sports illustrates the central importance to our culture. For example: Statistics shows that Americans spend more than 60 billion of dollars annually on sports (it is between 1% or 2% of Gross National Product). Being a star in media sports in America means receiving a temporary income in 6 or 7 figures.

Personal Identification and Heroes

Sports fans often identify themselves with teams, players, a...

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...sometimes make efforts to combine them. One can find spectators in arenas with radio earplugs, binoculars, and television sets to add on the media experience.

Another valuable distinction is clarification of differences between print and electronic forms of sports communication media. Electronic media allow instantaneous, real-time participation in a sport through television or radio. Print media allow delayed re-presentation of sports events and facts through newspapers, magazines, and books. In fact, the various media mutually support each other in sports coverage, and fans usually follow a mixture of electronic and print media.

Different studies and analysis opens up many of the inner dimensions of the experience of sports and media. Understanding sports, media, and spectacle reveals both details and generalizations about our culture and our general humanity.