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Journal of Mass Media Ethics | 2007

Sports Journalism as Moral and Ethical Discourse

Thomas P. Oates; John J. Pauly

This paper explores the marginalized practice of sportswriting to demonstrate the limited ways in which the question “who is a journalist?” has been answered within the profession. Following John Dewey and Raymond Williams, we offer an alternative view of democratic culture that values narrative as well as information. We also discuss how “New Journalists” (and other writers since), in their quest for fresh, sophisticated storytelling strategies, turned to sports as a cultural activity worthy of serious examination. Our goal is to demonstrate that sportswriting fundamentally resembles other forms of reporting and that journalism should not use sports as an ethical straw man against which to defend the virtue of its serious work. This suspension of our usual ethical judgments would deepen our sense of the moral significance of sportswriting and allow us to rethink journalisms relation to democratic culture in productive new ways.


Communication and Critical\/cultural Studies | 2007

The Erotic Gaze in the NFL Draft

Thomas P. Oates

The National Football League (NFL) draft is an annual meeting where professional teams claim contract rights to college players. It has recently become a major media event, previewed extensively by scores of magazines, newspapers, and websites, and televised in its seventeen-hour entirety by ESPN. A critical reading of these discourses finds frequent expressions of desire for the bodies of draft prospects. The paper situates this homoerotic commentary in the historical context of American white supremacy in order to explain why the mostly black prospects are available for this kind of perusal and assessment, especially given the taboos against homosexual desire that suffuse the culture of elite football; while explaining how such practices affirm inter-male dominance based on a hierarchy of race by deploying the patriarchal strategies of the male gaze.


Feminist Media Studies | 2012

Representing the Audience: The gendered politics of sport media

Thomas P. Oates

before women are able to compete; or even perhaps that the thought of women competing at all is hard to consider. It’s also notable that outrage at the incident was fairly evenly expressed along sex lines: women generally claimed it was disgraceful while men were relatively silent. There were exceptions: Lord Sebastian Coe, Chair of the Organising Committee for the London 2012 Olympics, expressed his surprise at the omission, Sports Personality of the Year editor Carl Doran concluded it was a “shame,” while Guardian journalist Zoe Williams playfully denounced any glory involved in winning such a nonsensical competition (Zoe Williams 2011). These however were exceptions that proved the rule: it seems that in 2012, women’s lack of visibility in sport remains a “women’s issue.”


Critical Studies in Media Communication | 2017

Selling streetball: racialized space, commercialized spectacle, and playground basketball

Thomas P. Oates

ABSTRACT This paper outlines plans for a research project on representations of basketball in New York City. It argues that a highly performative style of playground basketball strongly associated with racialized urban ghettos, often referred to as “streetball,” has become a significant way that basketball-related products has been marketed in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. These marketing efforts are an important source of popular fantasy about the “iconic ghetto,” and work to maintain racialized spatial relations in the U.S.


Women's Studies in Communication | 2016

Family Splatters: Rescuing Heteronormativity from the Zombie Apocalypse

Kathryn A. Cady; Thomas P. Oates

ABSTRACT Although many scholars argue that zombie narratives position the apocalypse as a new way to imagine social relations, recent cinematic and televisual examples of the genre feature the resiliency of the heteronormative nuclear family as the central formation from which a new social world is to spring. By analyzing 21st-century zombie narratives that have been among the most financially successful (e.g., Zombieland; AMC’s The Walking Dead) or innovative (28 Days Later; Shaun of the Dead), this study maps neoliberal ideological representations of heteronormative family relations as a key feature of popular contemporary zombie media. Moreover, these new familial narratives rely on strong female characters who, despite impressive survival skills, consistently embody essentialized feminine difference and ultimately choose to return to a traditional domestic sphere. Overall, we demonstrate why contemporary zombie media has yet to fulfill its potential to radically reimagine social relations in transformative ways by instead working to recenter the heteronormative family as the essential feature of a functioning society.


Popular Communication | 2016

Shifting formations: The NFL in uncertain times

Thomas P. Oates

In the past several decades, the NFL’s brand of gridiron football has come to utterly dominate live television in the United States. The game’s violent, deliberate spectacle features only 11 minutes of athletic action in an average threeto four-hour game, yet it is regarded by millions of US viewers as the epitome of excitement and draws enormous audiences (Biderman, 2010). In fall 2014, 45 of the top 50 most watched programs in the United States were NFL games, and the Super Bowl sets new records for the largest audience in US television history almost every year (Bibel, 2015). Because it is so widely popular, the NFL is sometimes taken to express an essential American identity. Sports writer Sal Paolantonio (2008), for example, argues in a recent popular book that “football explains America” (p. 17). Paolantonio invokes Davey Crockett, Daniel Boone, John Coltrane, and Father Knows Best as points of comparison, seeking to demonstrate that football expresses an essential and enduring American consciousness. The essays in this volume take a different perspective. Rather than the effortless expression of an established and stable national identity, these essays demonstrate how the ideas and values associated with the NFL must be actively shaped and carefully packaged. The game’s values and associations seem natural and enduring precisely because of this careful planning. Hegemony, as Stuart Hall once observed, requires hard work (Lipsitz, 1988, p. 146). While, with a few notable exceptions, scholars of popular media were slow to recognize the importance of sports, there has lately been burgeoning interest in the topic. But while “sport” as a general category identifies an important cultural formation with some common features, it also contains much diversity. As leagues like the NFL have grown increasingly rich and powerful, they and their media partners have crafted particular meanings to distinguish themselves from other forces in the sport/media landscape. The NFL imagines itself as an organization very much invested in the production and facilitation of media messages. More than 10 years ago, then-NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue asserted that the league is “truly an entertainment business” (“The NFL Machine,” 2003). The league promotes itself with specific strategies that seek to capitalize on the league’s distinctive place within sport, but also in the broader terrain of US culture. This special issue of Popular Communication directs a critical focus toward the league’s efforts to expand its presence and the possible obstacles to its growth. The broader context for this struggle is a set of economic/political/cultural shifts that have created new modes of producing and distributing popular culture. New forms of citizenship stress the pragmatic and often moral virtue of free markets, the importance (and fun) to be found in what Randy Martin (2002) describes as the “financialization of daily life” (p. 3). Despite claims of a new postracial, postfeminist environment, this cultural formation, as Lisa Duggan (2003) notes, “has a cultural politics” that “organizes political life in terms of race, gender, and sexuality as well as economic class and nationality, or ethnicity and religion” (p. 3). The first four articles examine new promotional techniques attempting to strategically shift the meanings and markets associated with the league. Jeffery Montez de Oca, Brandon Meyer, and Jeffrey Scholes’s opening article addresses the NFL’s partnership with the television channel Nickelodeon, to craft fandom among children. Victoria Johnson examines a league effort to both cultivate a wider


Communication and sport | 2014

The Sporting Paratext, Reception, and the Male Domain in CBS’s ‘‘One Shining Moment’’

Thomas P. Oates; Travis Vogan

Since 1987 CBS has ended its television coverage of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament with “One Shining Moment,” a sentimental highlight package that reflects on and celebrates the event. In 2010, CBS commissioned the popular vocalist Jennifer Hudson to sing “One Shining Moment’s” featured song, which had previously only been performed by men—most notably the R&B crooner Luther Vandross. Hudson’s performance elicited a flood of derision from critics and fans. In response, CBS reinstated Vandross’ version the following year. Building on Jonathan Gray’s theorization of media “paratexts”—the ancillary content that surrounds primary media texts—this essay considers how responses to Hudson’s 2010 performance and CBSs reaction to them secure the NCAA tournament as a male preserve while shoring up gendered anxieties about its commercialization. This instance of paratextual production, reception, and revision constructs “One Shining Moment” as a media ritual that can only be authentically conveyed and understood by men. It demonstrates sporting paratexts’ potential to reinforce and reconfigure sport’s cultural meanings and illuminates the impact that exchanges between audiences and industries can have on this contested process.


Journal of Communication Inquiry | 2003

Critical Essays and Reviews

Thomas P. Oates

Any textbook that is structured by historical scope works from the assumption that its readers will recognize the overview provided as an adequate account of the descriptive and analytical facts of certain phenomena in society and culture. In the case of academic texts that focus on the history of media, this arguably becomes even more of a conscious requirement for writing, because of the markedly different ways in which the evolving story of media and its sociocultural representations can be told depending on the author’s underlying interpretation and biases. This means that consideration needs to be given to the existence of a range of past media institutions and practices that complicates the largely mainstream account of the unilinear development of commercialized mass media, especially for the purposes of critical thinking skills on the part of journalism and communications students. American Media History by Anthony R. Fellow, by and large, avoids this “messier” account of the development of mass media in the United States and thereby ultimately presents a misleadingly simplified picture of American media institutions. This new text is perhaps instructive as a historical sourcebook to (especially) beginning journalism students, but it effectively fails to contribute to the ongoing and more subtle understanding of how newspapers, magazines, radio, and television have reflected and shaped the diversity of sociocultural and sociopolitical thought in the United States. To be fair, there are numerous aspects of the content and style of American Media History that can be seen as positives, especially for the textbook’s potential usage on the undergraduate level. Most importantly, in the course of undertaking an impressive coverage of American media from the earliest known colonial history to the presentday situation in the United States, Fellow does devote considerable detail to the dominance of print media in society up until the turn of the 20th century. Many interesting episodes showcasing the sociopolitical and socioeconomic influence of newspapers and, later, magazines are highlighted throughout several chapters at the beginning of the book. For instance, the author discusses the very dynamic political situation immediately before and during the Revolutionary War, when newspapers essentially acted as organs for at least three general political perspectives (the Tories, Whigs, and Patriots) that differed noticeably in their relationship to England. In Fellow’s account, standard names associated with revolutionary thought (e.g, Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine) are enlivened as important figures in the history of American media, as many of these individuals published or contributed to publications expressing political opinion. The Federalist and Anti-Federalist struggle to frame the Constitution is also


Sociology of Sport Journal | 2009

New Media and the Repackaging of NFL Fandom

Thomas P. Oates


Archive | 2015

The NFL: Critical and Cultural Perspectives

Thomas P. Oates; Zack Furness

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Kathryn A. Cady

Northern Illinois University

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