Every picture sells a story (Media Pressure - fair or foul?)

Member Name: mikeb

Product:	Media Pressure - fair or foul?
Date:	20/02/01 (135 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Difficult to see any advantages

Disadvantages: Costs people their jobs and can ruin lives

There are two sides to this one, in my view. On one hand there is the kind of media pressure that is created when the press intrude on sports stars private lives. The second is the pressure they exert on stars performances by the way they do their reporting and the reaction of others to those reports and headlines.

Firstly, there are stars who seem to spend all their spare time, when they are away from their particular field of sporting action, attending media events, going to trendy bars and restaurants and generally doing things that are bound to get them noticed. If people want to live their lives like this, that’s fair enough but I don’t have much sympathy with them when they find themselves continually in the news and don’t like it.

In the majority of cases it is the choice of a sportsman or women whether they want to play the media game or not. For every sports star that seem to live their lives in the public eye there are hundreds who keep themselves to themselves and will probably go out of their way to avoid publicity, not court it. The type of person that would sell their wedding day pictures, or snaps of the rooms in their house to magazines like OK and Hello! can hardly complain when the press continue to take an interest once they’ve cashed the cheques they receive. Why any muti-milionaire sports star, or any celebrity for that matter, would want to get a few extra pounds for this sort of thing is beyond me.

There are obviously certain occasions when the media do go completely over the top and get out of control, through no fault of the star. When a sports star has a family crisis, for example, you can be certain that the media will be camped out on their doorstep and following them and their family in packs whenever they leave their house. This is totally unacceptable and is definately not justified by the usual statement of “being in the public interest”. It is very difficult to
see how you could ever control this to stop it happening and legislation in this area would be extremely hard to police. It may be that the only hope we have of any sort of control of this type of hounding is by voluntary code of conducts operated by the media themselves. The main problem with this is that if a reporter or newspaper breaks the code, the damage is already done and a small apology does little to repair the damage it has caused.

Moving on to the second sort of pressure, that relating to the media stories about sports stars, including their on field performances and off field activities. As soon as a new young star bursts onto the scene and is hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread, you know that it will not be very long before the media is trying to knock them down, either for their sporting performance or problems in their personal life. This is a paticularly bad trait among the British press, by all accounts. The most annoying thing is that the press don’t seem to care whether the stories they are printing are actually true. Whether it is a story about a non existant injury, or a footballer being transferred to another team or a personal situation that has been blown out of all proportion.

A particularly good example of the media creating this sort of pressure is the England football team. During the run up to the European Championships they built the team up to be some sort of world beaters, admittedly with Kevin Keegan’s assistance, but when they made an early exit from the tournament the press laid into them, and him, big time. England were clearly an average European team who would need a good deal of luck to reach the later stages of this competition, led by a tactically naieve manager but the press prefer to go over the top with praise beforehand and then shower the team with insults when they fail. The same thing has happened with successive managers. Bobby Robson was severely critiscised when manager b
ut this was forgotten when it looked like he may take over from Keegan, mainly because he was seen as the man to save us from the Swede Sven Goran Erikkson. I bet even now the tabloids are preparing some harsh and supposedly funny headlines for Erikkson involving vegetables, just waiting for him to fail.

Summing up, I would say alot of the media attention and pressure goes with the territory and if you are not prepared to take it, don’t go for a career in sport. Many stars bring alot of it on themselves by their own behaviour, courting the press for their own good publicity but not being happy when there is also bad publicity. I believe if someone wants their private life to remain private they have every right to keep it this way and feel the press should respect their wishes completely, especially at times of family crisis. With the pressure that the media bring on sports stars in respect of their performances and managers over results, I cannot see any way this can be improved, given that we have a free press. Altough it is often said that the England football managers job is the hardest in football, there is usually quite a few people wanting to give it a go, despite the ridiculous pressure and effects it will bring, so I suppose these people must feel the pain is worth the gain.

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