Media Activities and Reflexivity: The Case of Czech Sports Actors

Contemporary scholarship dealing with the relationship between the media and sports has mainly been focused on critical analysis of media messages relating to sport, on the political economy of the media and on the transformation of sports cultures as a consequence of the processes of globalization, commercialization and spectacularization. Yet less attention has been given to the ways in which sports actors actively approach or reflect upon the media. This paper contributes to filling this gap by analyzing different forms of the sports actors’ active usage and reflexivity about the media. Therefore, sports ― and the term does not refer only to elite and high level sports, but also to recreational and competitive forms ― is not exclusively presented in a subordinated position to the hegemony of the system of the media. On the contrary, drawing on an ethnographic study within three Czech sports associations (football, handball and sailing), the analysis explores different modes of active and reflexive approaches towards the media that appear in the sphere of sport. This analysis thus enriches the research agenda of sports media studies diffused within the framework of sports sociology. Moreover, it empirically substantiates the growing stream of research on sports within media studies.