When the result isn't important: the culture of celebrities in sport mass media's coverage

Abstract

The speech of mass media, postmodernity´s time, is increasingly linked with the consumption of sports products. The spectacle construction of sporting events in the media, on several occasions, serves this purpose. The objective of this project is to research and analyze, based on monitoring of sports media printed, the various ways in the popular imagination, the construction of the spectacle of sports competitions. For this, we will analyze the coverage to be performed by the six brazilian´s major print media in the 2012 Olympics Games in London. Our intention is to demonstrate how the construction of the sporting event for print media seeks to transform athletes into celebrities. Guidelines dedicated to personal and behavioral aspects of athletes take up more space in media than sports´ factors like training and competition´s results. The purpose of this preference in media discourse, we will intend to prove, is to become the sports´ events in spectacle, to reaffirm the culture of sports consumption, increasing its economic importance. (AU)