Panel 2 – Televised sports Outubro 27, 2010

The second panel goes further in the theme of coverage in mega events, specially the coverage made by television.

The afternoon’s panel concerning televised sports started with Thomas Horky who presented a study on ‘Structures of large Football tournaments on television: A longitudinal and fine analysis concerning the quality of TV-broadcasts of large Football evenings’. The study was based on German’s media coverage of football events. The World Cup in particular is one of the most significant events in the world. To prove it is the fact that the WC final between Germany and Spain had 82% of share in Germany. The speaker also talked about new ways of analysing and broadcasting events like pre-events, moderating and post analysis.

Then Mark Stauff’s study on ‘Translating Space and Time: The Contribution of Sport’s Mega Events to Television’s ongoing Transformation’ was presented. The author said that sports mega events are used to introduce new media and explained the many possibilities that HDTV offers regarding sport events.

The presentations continued with the paper ‘”Us and them?” European Identity in the German and British Television Broadcasts of the Football World Cup 2010′, by Cordula Nitsch and Dennis Lichtenstein from Universität Augsburg. Nitsch and Lichtenstein began by saying that the community builds in function of sports and gains a collective identity. The authors analysed British and German TV commentaries during 2010′s World Cup and reached the conclusion that these TV comments give more information on European identity, and only a small minority focus on non-European characteristics. Although the majority of the commentaries refers to European identity, they don’t give advantage to the European teams or identity.

The panel closed with the presentation of Karin Becker about ‘Constructing the Image of the Fan – The World Cup 2010′. Becker said that TV has a primordial role on creating image of the events and the participants on those events. Facebook, Twitter, TV and media parks are sites in which fans identity is build. “Social identity is strongly noticed than individual and it can be noticed in all fans within different nations”, said Becker.