Need to change my Sunday newspaper...

[f4f3]

Although Scotland on Sunday and The Sunday Herald are good, if stodgy, reads I usually buy The Observer. Partly because I've always bought the Observer, since the days when Clive James was their TV columnist, and it was the only left-of-centre Sunday broadsheet, and partly because I like to get the UK political news in more depth than the Scottish news. Unfortunately from time-to-time I get reminded that, despite it's pretensions to being a national paper, the Observer is only an English one. Mostly this comes up in sports reporting, and mostly when England lose at something. Yesterday Wales secured a Triple Crown (beating the other home nations in rugby union's Six Nations tournament, a rare achievement) and Scotland beat England in rugby's oldest international fixture, winning the Calcutta Cup (an even rarer accomplishment - I think that was the third time they've won since the mid-Nineties). Cause for celebration for half the UK, you would think. Coverage of this was bumped off the front page of the sports section in favour of an English FA Cup match, and an English athlete trying to get back into the Olympics.
 The next two pages were basically a whine about how badly England had played, and something about an English player being dropped for having a lemonade in Dover Street on Wednesday night.  It was "A horrible game, a blot on the Six Nations",  and "An ugly game, one of the ugliest played at this wind-swept stadium". Little was said about an English forward sliding in with his knees up to hospitalise Rory Lamont, and nothing at all about one of the most horrible body checks I've ever seen in the international game. England were, indeed, ugly, slow and inept, but Scotland played out of their skins to make them look that way. Oh, and if you move on to the next two pages you can discover that Wales didn't win the triple crown, a "tame" Ireland fell short.

You could say that sport is a small matter, but since I can get coverage of UK politics in the Scottish papers, I think I'll be picking up Scotland on Sunday next week, where my country's sport will be covered, instead of England's.

Comments

Mmm, dim sum...

[mhaithaca.livejournal.com]

You remind me of the scoffing when USA Today hit the newsstands. Everyone thought a nationwide newspaper in the US was a crazy idea, but just as people appreciate the predictability and consistency of McDonald's, people appreciate a newspaper that's the same wherever they go. Believe it or not, they achieved success despite the lack of comics in the paper!

It helps that USA Today is published by Gannett, who have small-town, city, and regional newspapers all over the country. They can pluck little bits of news coverage from everywhere, so chances are there'll be a small tidbit of news or sport from a town whose name you recognise, even if it's not your town.

But, most people still get their sport from the local papers. I doubt I'd enjoy the coverage of this weekend's hockey in any of the New Hampshire rags.

Re: Mmm, dim sum...

[anthrokeight.livejournal.com]

You know what drives me nuts about USA Today is, the fact that it's written for an average reading capability of about 4th grade. So it's available and consistent, but also... 4th grade? (or at least, so says an Accessibility Design prof here at IU)

I suppose that's not all that, since a lot of content in non-NYT papers are written at an 8th-grade reading level in the US.

f4f3, there's a huge body of anthropological literature out there on sports and their social significance. Football and rugby get a lot of attention because of their current global and past colonial significance. There's also a really famous ethnographic film on cricket that is a classic:

http://www.berkeleymedia.com/catalog/berkeleymedia/films/arts_humanities/trobriand_cricket_an_ingenious_response_to_colonialism

http://classes.yale.edu/03-04/anth500b/viewing_notes/VN_Trobriand-Cricket.htm

Seeing as how I am professionally interested in the trivial and day-to-day experiences of humanity, and how they so often are tied into bigger, out-of-the-ordinary things. "Small matters" is not the same as "unimportant matters."

This was an interesting post to read!