Mediatization is a communication studies theory that argues that the media shapes, develops and frames the political communication and discourses in society, and, that in extreme cases, media logic, that which emerges simply from the often co-dependent commercial and ideological needs of media industries and outlets, skews rational approaches to politics and everyday issues. Media logic might be completely wrong, and simply dreamed-up to serve the commercial and ideological needs of the media, but its reach means that it comes to dominate all discourse, to the point of irrationality.
Today, the Scottish Football Association charged Celtic captain Scott Brown with not acting “in the best interests of football” after he celebrated in front of Rangers fans after his side’s 2-1 victory on Sunday in which two Rangers players were sent off for their violent reactions to him. The Rangers manager Steven Gerrard and winger Ryan Kent were also suspended in the disciplinary fall-out from the game. Kent received a two match ban for pushing/ punching Brown in the face after Celtic scored a late winner in a feisty Glasgow Derby.
Brown’s provocative antics, winding players up, celebrating in front of opposing fans have long made him an object of hatred from fans of other clubs and media shock jocks alike. That he is one of the most decorated Scottish footballers of all-time and perhaps the best Scottish midfielder of his generation is too often forgotten in the rush to portray him as a pantomime victim. The litany of condemnations of him ranging from “a wee ned” to “he brings it on himself” are rarely far from the discourse of Scottish football.
This is the latest instance of punishing the victim to satisfy the trolls and professionally offended media pundits. All the usual rent-a-quote tubes now making their money from the bewilderingly vast eco-system of sports chat – phone-in shows, pre/ post game punditry, newspaper columns, and podcasts – and who normally “deplore violence”, lined up to say they’d have “stuck one” on Brown themselves in acts of base-level hypocrisy.
Of course all of these pundits, many of whom are not-very-bright former professionals seeking to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace, adopt caricature-like personas in which one characteristic has come to dominate: the controversialist. The controversialist says the “difficult things”, “shoots from the lip” and adopts a Machiavellian position he knows will get serious attention in social media and attract callers to phone-ins. This all builds their brand and gets them gigs in an environment of dog-eat-dog precarious employment.
We see the same in modern political journalism which has been coarsened by the short attention span theatre that is rolling news.
While normally this chatter is the equivalent of “placeholder text” – nonsense created just to fill space and to be ignored when something more meaningful comes along, in this instance it forced the hand of the SFA to act to satisfy the deluge of media logic and incomprehensible ‘whataboutery’.
The SFA’s trumped-up charging of Scott Brown is a classic case of the mediatization of football issues. Media logic developed incrementally this week, eventually trumping real common sense as nauseating moralising by radio phone-in hosts and by pious columnists who declared that he should have risen above it despite the songs about his sister who died of cancer and the constant baiting of him.
That baiting of him by Rangers fans and players was particularly, and rightly, prominent in late-December when the Ibrox club comprehensively defeated Celtic in a game in which Brown was clearly second best to his opponents. Brown took the opportunity on Sunday to ‘Get It Right Up Them’, as they say in Glasgow, just as the Rangers players did in December.
And that is just how it should be: on-pitch celebrations should be as childish as possible. Rangers deserved to do it in December for horsing Celtic and making Brown look like he was ‘past it’. We should be able to leave it there though, and Brown did in December. He took it as he should have: stored it up and waited for last Sunday.
But the media logic that is required to sustain the entirely meaningless industry that is modern sports media: controversial columnists baiting social media traps that generate hits, shares and retweets; TV pundits and nauseating radio shock jocks, who all mutually rely on controversial moments for their living, spun a self-created moral panic. The SFA needed to be seen to be doing something and Scott Brown, an easy ‘folk devil’, may get suspended. Result: another empty public gesture.
Brown faces a minimum two match suspension under the SFA Rule 77 if found guilty, while the media commentators involved in pious moralising about the ‘dignity’ of the game will now spend the rest of this week and weekend voraciously replaying the actions they say they ‘deplore’ and should not be part of the game. All the while they will be indulging in a self-righteous circle jerk of phoney crusaders who are little more than the professionally outraged.
They’ll move on this weekend, or next, to another self-created moral outrage that “needs to be stamped out from our game”, creating yet more blether and pointless placeholder text to deaden the pain of people trapped in cars or lacking the imagination to see it for what it is: meaningless horse shit.
It’s just basic mediatization and media logic and by writing this on social media channels I am contributing to it. Maybe, I’m the real fool in all this.
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