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The Importance Of Sports To Mass Communication

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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 …show more content…

As gratification research points out, we use media to serve both cognitive and affective needs. Sports fans identify with "their" teams or stars and, through media, acquire information and understanding about them and feel emotional identification with them.
Media sports center attention on specific individuals, who through this process, become larger-than-life heroes and models for successful conduct. Sports today in our mass-mediated culture provide superstar archetypes to spur the imagination and dominate the ideals of youth and adult alike. Sport lefts fans see not only great deeds but also the deflation of heroes in their bad moments, the failure of authority in crisis -- a reassuring experience for common people all too aware of their own limitations. Subconsciously we may reflect, " If Mike Tyson or Wade Boggs or Pete Pose cannot control his personal life, perhaps my life is not so bad. Sports pages today examine the heroes in details, warts and all, outlining details of greedy contracts, after-hours drug abuse, and sex lives, but sports heroes and their motivating power over others live on.
Binary Oppositions The influential French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1967) argued for the importance of identifying the fundamental two-sided conflicts, or binary oppositions in sports. One of such two-sided conflicts is a

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