Introduction

The study of mediated sport has evolved in near lockstep with the emergence and growth of media studies as a distinct field. While both disciplines gained footing in the 1970s, work on sports media was primarily undertaken by scholars in departments outside of media studies, such as communication, sociology, and kinesiology.¹ Particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, they were dedicated to creating spaces in international academic organizations, presenting groundbreaking empirical work on the technological and production particularities of sports media.² Publishers soon realized there was a viable and growing market for these discussions about sports media's mythmaking and marginalizing aspects, and a wave of foundational texts first appeared—in particular, edited collections such as Lawrence Wenner's Media, Sports, and Society (1989) and Susan Birrell and C. L. Cole's Women, Sport, and Culture (1994). This early, often interdisciplinary work engaged with not only the social and cultural impact of media on sports but also the conditions under which mediated sports are created and embraced as hyper-commodifed and inequity-engendering aspects of society.

Media studies scholars, as relative late arrivals to the scholarly field of play (pun intended), have greatly benefited from this first wave of work, building on and contributing their own unique methodologies and modes of inquiry to the critical study of mediated sport. They've employed critical-cultural frameworks to better account for sports media constructions of difference via gender, sex, and race and athletes' abilities to contest those differences; have deftly examined the media industries' economic and ideological dependence on sports; have mined a wealth of underexplored repositories and sources; and have foregrounded the reception and consumption of the sports genre.³ While this work placed sports media squarely in the foreground, others have used sports as a case study to illuminate broader trends in media practices, institutions, and industries. Recent scholarship has revealed the key role sports broadcasts played in the innovation and diffusion of color television, for example, or how broadcasting, licensing, and franchising rights were essential to the conglomeration and consolidation of cable networks and providers.⁴ Other scholars have expanded understandings of sports fans and audiences by contributing to a body of literature that has primarily been dominated by social science approaches.⁵ Media studies scholars are also establishing even more spaces to share and legitimize their work—for example, the Sports Media Special Interest Group, established in 2019 within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

To introduce a wider audience to the work emerging from these spaces, the eighty-seventh issue of the Velvet Light Trap offers up a rich blend of yet more histories and critical analyses from yet more diverse perspectives. In their articles, Steven Secular and Taylor M. Henry consider the transformation of sporting events into media texts, from presentation to packaging, discourse to distribution. Secular uses the conglomeration of the National Basketball Association (NBA) in the 1980s to explore the (re)packaging of basketball games as television programs. Highlighting the development (and vertical integration) of NBA Entertainment and NBA International, Secular's "Beyond Basketball: NBA Entertainment and the Sports League as Global Media Empire, 1982–1990" investigates the league's increasingly sophisticated practices and contracts with broadcast networks, cable channels, and satellite providers alike, providing a global perspective on the evolving markets and modes of sports mediation. Along similar lines, Henry's "From the Tribune to the Tube: The Development of Sports Punditry on Cable Television" traces the evolution of sports punditry from its roots in newspaper columns to the popular and controversial sports talk radio shows to the rise of television sports commentating on ESPN and ESPN2. Through this historical trajectory, Henry argues that the economics and markets of "narrowcasting" in the 1980s and 1990s precipitated a shift away from journalistic objectivity toward entertaining personality. Both articles evidence the reciprocal exchange between sports institutions and media industries, as well as the corporate logics and racial tensions embedded within and exercised through that exchange. By calibrating the personalities of their (white) commentators, the representations of their (Black) players, and the optics of their (global) brands through new media forms and distribution outlets, corporate entities like ESPN and...