Ph. D. Thesis


The foundation of ethics and socio-ethical issues in sport media journalism


Man-Soo Choi


Department of Kinesiology
Graduate School
Yeungnam University
(Supervised by Professor Dong-Kyu Kim)


ABSTRACT


A new field called sports media was created by combining sports and media. The sports media is a type of media specialized in sports that has increasing roles and responsibilities by greatly influencing consumers. Whereas the sports media was limited to televisions, newspapers and magazines in the past, it has now formed diverse and large-scale industries with the advancement of information and communication technologies(ICT) such as the internet. The sports media plays an important role in terms of society, economy and culture by drawing interest and attention of the public. Especially in the contemporary society, sports have significant influence on the life of people as huge cultural contents. From this perspective, the sports media must keep in mind its social responsibility to prioritize public interests. As the influence of the sports media increases, there is greater responsibility imposed on sports journalism. However, values of traditional journalism have been faded as the media quickly transformed into an enormous and complex convergence media. Although the scale has been enlarged, this is closely related to the press environment in which the media with weak autonomy is bound to be swayed by money and power. After securing a solid position based on the mass media, sports journalism is playing positive roles of purifying the society and emotion by fulfilling educational functions and desire for education at the same time. Nonetheless, the yellow journalism phenomenon of the sports media is receiving social criticism in connection with commercialism. Media ethics have primarily been focused on the journalism level, and ethical issues on the management level were seldom discussed. Despite the fact that the sports media needs to pursue properties of traditional journalism such as fairness, honesty and objectivity, the fundamental nature of journalism is being damaged by emphasizing corporate goals such as economic profit and efficiency over publicness, which has been recognized as an ideal goal of the media. Sports media companies are the main bodies of economic actions pursuing profit in the media industry. Accordingly, the issues related to ethical management of ordinary companies such as transparent management also apply to sports media companies. If sports media only stresses corporate goals like economic profit, efficiency and performance instead of publicness, the fundamental nature of journalism is lost. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to propose socio-ethical issues of sports media journalism and tasks to achieve ethics of sports media journalism. First off, commercialism, fairness, human rights in sports and ethical management were discussed as socio-ethical issues of sports media journalism. Neoliberalism in the media market is pointed out as the direct cause of commercialism, but this property cannot be neglected for the legitimacy of pursuit of profit for the survival and permanency of the media. Even then, sports media companies must contribute to the society through ethical management with pursuit of balanced profit while spreading high quality journalism, which is the fundamental duty of the media. In particular, the sports media handles fair competition in the process and thus requires fairness on the scenes and in company management. The sports media is a media that covers sports as a common language of people around the world. The sports media has been contributing to the development and peace of the humankind by delivering intrinsic values of sports such as sportsmanship, fair play, humanism and peace. The recent attention to human rights issues in sports is a desirable trend. The sports media has a responsibility to lead the efforts to settle down a humanistic culture by paying greater attention to human rights in sports. Lastly, early tasks to achieve ethics of the sports media were proposed as follows. First is the recovery of traditional journalism. The recovery of traditional journalism that covers facts in a fair and objective way will be the direction of sports media journalism complying with the behavioral norms of journalists and fulfilling duties as public figures. Second is the realization of public interests. The media is bound to fall behind in the market unless it is supported by the public. Thus, the sports media must be coherent about public interests and social justice. Third is the implementation of humanism. The sports media needs to be devoted to protect human dignity. The sports media must place utmost efforts to accomplish dignity of athletes, coaches and the public. Fourth is self-purification efforts of the media. The fundamental role of the sports media is to make good programs and provide high quality journalism. The sports media can only execute its roles as a social public entity by constantly showing self-purification efforts such as compliance with the code of media ethics and reinforcement of vocational ethics.