Recent Submissions

  • Caught in the spotlight: media themes in the build-up to the Beijing Olympic Games

    Whannel, Garry (International Centre for Olympic Studies, 2008)
  • Beer sponsors football: what could go wrong?

    Horne, John; Whannel, Garry (Peter Lang, 2009)
  • Understanding the Olympics

    Horne, John; Whannel, Garry (Routledge, 2011)
    The Olympic Games is unquestionably the greatest sporting event on earth, with television audiences measured in billions of viewers. By what process did the Olympics evolve into this multi-national phenomenon? How can an understanding of the Olympic Games help us to better understand international sport and society? And what will be the true impact and legacy of the London Olympics in 2012? Understanding the Olympics answers all of these questions, and more, by exploring the full social, cultural, political, historical and economic context to the Olympic Games. It traces the history of the Olympic movement from its origins in ancient Greece, through its revival in the nineteenth century, to the modern mega-event of today.
  • Culture, politics and sport: blowing the whistle, revisited

    Whannel, Garry (Routledge, 2008)
    Garry Whannel’s text Blowing the Whistle: The Politics of Sport broke new ground when it was first published in 1983. Its polemical discussion brought sports as cultural politics into the academic arena and set the agenda for a new wave of researchers. Since the 1980s sport studies has matured both as an academic discipline and as a focus for mainstream political and public policy debate. In Culture, Politics and Sport: Blowing the Whistle, Revisited, Garry Whannel revisits the themes that led his first edition, assessing their 1980s context from our new millennium perspective, and exploring their continued relevance for contemporary sports academics.
  • Reflections on communication and sport: on mediatization and cultural analysis

    Whannel, Garry (Sage Journals, 2013)
    In this essay, Garry Whannel reflects on why research on media and sport has often been disdained by traditional academia and liberal intelligentsia. The first section argues that mediated sports are an important constituent part of popular culture, making its discourses worthy of scholarly study. The second section considers how early studies of mediated sport set in the tradition of British cultural studies opened the door to a inquiry that has grown in importance in both critical sport and media studies. The central section focuses on the complexities of “sport analysis, snobbery, and anti-intellectualism.” Considered here is the early and continued resistance to the study of media and sport and its derogatory stigmatization as a “Mickey Mouse” subject even in the face of excellent scholarship that has developed around the cultural and political analysis of sport. The article closes with suggestions for future work and ways to change narrative constructions of the field.
  • News, celebrity, and vortextuality: a study of the media coverage of the Michael Jackson verdict

    Whannel, Garry (Duke University Press, 2010)
    This paper examines the transformation of news as a cultural commodity and a social process by the expansion in the range, volume, and circulation speed of media production. It introduces the concept of vortextuality and illustrates the vortextual effect with reference to the coverage of the verdict announcement in the trial of Michael Jackson. The nature of “news” has been transformed by new media technology, the erosion of the division between public and private, and the growth of a celebrity culture. during the last two decades the volume of information in circulation, and the speed of circulation and feedback of information have increased dramatically. These tendencies have given rise to an effect I term vortextuality, whereby major news stories have the power to dominate the news media to such an extent that all attention appears, temporarily, to be directed towards them. Editorials, cartoons, columns, features, phone-ins are all focused on the same issue. As with vortex-based natural phenomena, however, the vortextuality effect is unpredictable and short-lived. This paper illustrates some of the processes of vortextuality at work in the media coverage around the world of the announcement of the verdict in the Michael Jackson trial.
  • Television and the transformation of sport

    Whannel, Garry (Sage Journals, 2009)
    Sport played a significant part in the growth of television, especially during its emergence as a dominant global medium between 1960 and 1980. In turn, television, together with commercial sponsorship, transformed sport, bringing it significant new income and prompting changes in rules, presentation, and cultural form. Increasingly, from the 1970s, it was not the regular weekly sport that commanded the largest audiences but, rather, the occasional major events, such as the Olympic Games and football’s World Cup. In the past two decades, deregulation and digitalization have expanded the number of channels, but this fragmentation, combined with the growth of the Internet, has meant that the era in which shared domestic leisure was dominated by viewing of the major channels is closing. Yet, sport provides an exception, an instance when around the world millions share a live and unpredictable viewing experience.
  • Winning and losing respect: narratives of identity in sport films

    Whannel, Garry (Taylor and Francis, 2008)
    This essay examines sport films in terms of respect, identity and individualism. It suggests that a common narrative structure in films featuring sport based stories involves the winning, or sometimes losing, of respect. Success in narrative terms is not so much associated with sporting victory as in winning the respect of others. Through these narrative structures, issues of identity are explored. In particular, the narratives trace the ways in which characters respond to challenges by changing. In this sense these films are rooted in an ideology of competitive individualism which is a distinct product of capitalism as it developed in the United States of America. So while women, Jews, Afro-Americans and British Asian girls all find fulfilment through the narrative journey of these films, it tends to be within the terms of the competitive individualist ideology. Only where the concept of respect and its association with sport performance is challenged or questioned do sport films tend to raise more profound questions about the individual in society.
  • Delight in trivial controversy? questions for sport journalism

    Whannel, Garry; Boyle, Raymond; Rowe, David (Routledge, 2009)
  • The ‘caged torch procession’: celebrities, protesters and the 2008 Olympic torch relay in London, Paris and San Francisco

    Horne, John; Whannel, Garry (Taylor and Francis, 2010-06-29)
    Along with the opening and closing ceremonies, one of the major non-sports events associated with the modern Olympic Games is the torch relay. Although initiated in 1936, the relay has been subject to relatively little academic scrutiny. The events of April 2008 however will have cast a long shadow on the practice. This essay focuses primarily on one week (6–13 April) in the press coverage of the 2008 torch relay as the flame made its way from London to Paris in Europe and then to San Francisco in the USA. It discusses the interpretations offered in the mediated coverage about the relay, the Olympic Movement, the host city and the locations where the relay was taking place, and critically analyses the role of agencies, both for and against the Olympics, that framed the ensuing debate.
  • News, celebrity, and vortextuality: a study of the media coverage of the Michael Jackson verdict.

    Whannel, Garry (Bloomsbury publishers, 2010-03)
    This paper examines the transformation of news as a cultural commodity and a social process by the expansion in the range, volume, and circulation speed of media production. It introduces the concept of vortextuality and illustrates the vortextual effect with reference to the coverage of the verdict announcement in the trial of Michael Jackson. The nature of “news” has been transformed by new media technology, the erosion of the division between public and private, and the growth of a celebrity culture. during the last two decades the volume of information in circulation, and the speed of circulation and feedback of information have increased dramatically. These tendencies have given rise to an effect I term vortextuality, whereby major news stories have the power to dominate the news media to such an extent that all attention appears, temporarily, to be directed towards them. Editorials, cartoons, columns, features, phone-ins are all focused on the same issue. As with vortex-based natural phenomena, however, the vortextuality effect is unpredictable and short-lived. This paper illustrates some of the processes of vortextuality at work in the media coverage around the world of the announcement of the verdict in the Michael Jackson trial.