Are Media Sports Pure Simulation Imposed On The Public?

Sports do suggest distinctions that postmodernism may otherwise ignore. The sporting event, such as an Olympic competition, has an externally situated reality that pure entertainment programming does not; in this it resembles news programming more than scripted drama.

Michael Oriard in his excellent historical and critical study, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (1993), has argued this point against Jameson.

Jameson (1979), following Baudrillard, contends that there are no primary texts in mass culture, only repetitions. Against this, Oriard sees football as a primary text, ultimately unpredictable no matter how complete its packaging may be.

Never denying the hype and manipulation of late capitalism, Oriard nonetheless argues that ‘the games themselves are authentic in ways that no Technology and Postmodern Sport commodity can be” (p. 9): real people perform real acts, are injured, and win or lose in a story that has a reality beyond that of popular movies, music, and literature and is the source of the sport’s cultural power.

His detailed account of the negotiations in the late nineteenth century that resulted in what North Americans know as football manages to foreground this essential reality of the human contest, a contest that was being variously interpreted by journalists and others at the time.

Football was, therefore, not artificially imposed by a single commercial power as seen in pure postmodernism.

Football’s cultural narratives and meanings, Oriard argues, were not imposed or arbitrary but “were created by an interplay of producers (rule makers, college authorities, players); consumers (spectators and readers); intermediary interpreters (sportswriters); a medium of communication (the daily press and popular periodicals); political, social, economic, and cultural contexts; and the inherent qualities of the game itself” (p. 119).

No single interest owned football in the beginning; today its media presentation is bundled into a pastiche alongside the most disparate alternatives.

Football’s High Holiday, the Super Bowl (Real, 1977), like the Olympics, has a commercial infrastructure and is suffused with pastiche style and the drive to commodity. But in the case of football, there is a primary text the game and it was not imposed from outside onto the public by a single vested interest.