As early as the last decades of the 19th century, international sports journalists felt the need of an organisation that would give them a sense of direction, help them exchange ideas, raise their status and also assist them in furthering their knowledge about the rapid expansion of sports activities in the developed world. Even in our islands, Britain’s sporting legacy to the Empire was immediately felt in the 1880s with the setting up of football, cricket, polo and waterpolo activities scattered all over Malta and Gozo including a cricket club at Delimara and Fort Chambray, in Gozo as evidenced in the newspapers Garrison Gazette and Public Opinion published in that period.
It should be recorded that in 1896, the year of the first modern Olympics, Public Opinion of July that year, under the heading ‘The Olympic Games’, announced that the Buffalo Bill Circus (Bill Cody) was at Qui-si-Sana in Sliema with his troupe encouraging participation in shooting and cycling. The events were open for women.
The first spark for the setting up of an international association for sports writers was ignited at the Antwerp Olympic Games in 1920 immediately after World War I. Belgian Victor Boin and Frenchman Frantz Reichel, both notable personalities and active sportsmen, discussed the idea and later approached various journalists in Europe and the United States to attend at the founding of the AIPS (Association Internationale de Press Sportive) held in Paris at the 1924 Olympic Games. The statute was approved and Reichel and Boin became president and general secretary respectively at the first congress.
The success or failure of a professional team still depends primarily on the coverage it gets in the newspapers
Various top sports personalities served in these prestigious roles including those of my generation, namely Frank Taylor, Bobby Naidoo, Enrico Crespi and Massimo della Pergola. They all helped in the worldwide expansion of this association, which holds official status with the International Olympic Committee, the committees that are responsible for the Mediterranean Games and the Commonwealth Games and similar institutions.
I am sure that very few Maltese people are aware that the president of the Maltese Sports Writers’ Federation, Charles Camenzuli, is the life general secretary of this global association, a role that brings him in touch with high-ranking personalities in the top echelons of sport.
The relationship between the media - the image makers – and sports entrepreneurs originally sold radio time and newspapers to the public. In recent years, this affinity has become more significant as huge blocks of television time is being devoted to sport, with some of the events selling commercially at over €400,000 per minute.
A symbiotic relationship exists between the mass media and sport that is beneficial to both social segments. In this regard, we should be grateful to our national television channel for offering major sports events like the recent Olympic Games and the World Cup to local viewers at no extra charge.
Since the late 1950s, television has had a significant impact on Maltese society. It has influenced family life, study habits of students, books read, leisure time pursuits and general lifestyle.
Our technological society is filled with visual and auditory stimuli from the sports media. In the 1980s, television programmes progressed from black and white to colour and sophisticated electronic recording devices. This ushered in the era of snooker and also brought about certain changes in the laws of various games.
Through the electronic eye of television, we have become accustomed to specific segments of athletic performances, sometimes blown up, slowed down, repeated and, occasionally, also detached from the overall sport event.
Through devices such as instant replay, sport can present heroic images.
This new reality poses a new responsibility on television directors who may be tempted to minimise or overemphasize an action according to their leanings.
In this context, sport plays a major role as it takes up a big slice of the television bonanza prompting us to discuss what obligations and responsibilities the sports media have to the viewer, listener or reader to fulfill his/her needs.
Media analysts all concur on the fact that the sport media should contribute to the cognitive needs of the individual by strengthening information and knowledge while fulfilling his affective needs by possibly providing an aesthetic, pleasurable and educational experience.
Sport can also fulfill man’s integrative expectations, consequently, the sports reporter should instill credibility and confidence in sport to meet man’s escapist needs by assisting in the release of tension and discovery of self. Most sportswriters, announcers, commentators and analysts are keen sports enthusiasts. Their reading, listening and viewing public expect them to fulfill this supportive role towards sport by providing a good press.
While television and radio can show and broadcast a sport event they rarely tell us the inner story. For that we need words to read and pictures to see. Instant replays on television can help to recall what happened but the significance of the action comes only when recalling it in tranquillity, preferably with the aid of photographs by people who know what to look for. The stunning pictures in Times of Malta of Robin Van Persie’s flying header in the World Cup and the recent image of Frank Lampard’s stern face after scoring the equaliser against his old club Chelsea with the title “Score a smile” are worth a thousand words.
Despite the spectacular growth which television made possible for sport, the success or failure of a professional team still depends primarily on the coverage it gets in the newspapers. The best thing that can happen to a national team is to have the local papers write enthusiastically.
Of course, fans enjoy their team’s success through television but the opinion they form stems principally from what is written about them.
There are periods when the credibility and the values of sport are severely questioned: doping, hooliganism, corruption and commercialism.
At times, media people are accused of giving a negative and distorted image to sport by accentuating and exaggerating certain misdemeanours and behaviour. In fact, in the late 1990s, the Council of Europe was not at all satisfied at the way the international press was presenting sport stating: “The social significance of sport is in this way ridiculed and is seen in a biased fashion”. It also accused the sports media that the positive aspects of top-level sport and sport in general are not dwelt on sufficiently and, sometimes, completely ignored because they do not have any media value.
It is hoped that the international seminar for sports journalists being in Malta next week will contribute to the better understanding of sport for all sections of our people and help in the setting up of a Sports Media Academy in collaboration with the University of Malta.
Lino Bugeja is a former general secretary of the Malta Olympic Committee.