Television Studies

ABC Sports shaped how the world consumes sport. The American Broadcasting Company's sports division is behind some of network television's most significant practices, celebrated personalities, and iconic moments. It created the weekend anthology Wide World of Sports, transformed professional football into a prime-time spectacle with Monday Night Football, fashioned the Olympics into a mega media event, and even revolutionized TV news. Travis Vogan's cultural and institutional history of ABC Sports examines the development of network sports television in the United States and the aesthetic, cultural, political, and industrial practices that mark it. ABC Sports traces the storied division from its beginnings through the internet age to reveal the changes it endured along with the new sports media environment it spawned.

ESPN: The Uncensored History traces the first 24-hour sports network from its inception through its evolution into a slick media outlet reaching more than 60 million homes via more than 26,000 cable providers. Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, ESPN, has blazed a stunning path of achievement with its expansive coverage of broadcast sports--spinning off into ESPN2, ESPN Classic Sports, ESPNews, and ESPN Magazine--but has also experienced its share of controversy. ...

In Baseball Weekly's list of things that most affected baseball in the twentieth century, television ranked second--behind only the signing of Jackie Robinson. The new medium of television exposed baseball to a genuinely national audience; altered the financial picture for teams, owners, and players; and changed the way Americans followed the game. Center Field Shot explores these changes--all even more prominent in the first few years of the twenty-first century--and makes sense of their meaning for America's pastime. ...

Friday Night Fighter relives a lost moment in American postwar history, when boxing ruled as one of the nation's most widely televised sports. During the 1950s and 1960s, viewers tuned in weekly, sometimes even daily, to watch widely-recognized fighters engage in primordial battle, with the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports Friday Night Fights being the most popular fight show.

NFL Films changed the way Americans view football. Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media traces the subsidiary's development from a small independent film production company to the marketing machine that Sports Illustrated named "perhaps the most effective propaganda organ in the history of corporate America."

Despite the increasing number of popular and celebrated sports documentaries in contemporary culture, such as ESPN's 30 for 30 series, there has been little scholarly engagement with this genre. Sports documentaries, like all films, do not merely showcase objective reality but rather construct specific versions of sporting culture that serve distinct economic, industrial, institutional, historical, and sociopolitical ends ripe for criticism, contextualization, and exploration. Sporting Realities brings together a diverse group of scholars to probe the sports documentary's cultural meanings, aesthetic practices, industrial and commercial dimensions, and political contours across historical, social, medium-specific, and geographic contexts. ...

In Television Sports Production, Jim Owens walks you through the planning, set-up, directing, announcing, shooting, and editing involved with covering a sports event. This manual gives you the tools to effectively cover sports ranging such as football, soccer, and basketball.

To celebrate their 30th anniversary, ESPN commissioned 30 films about sports. These are those films.

This fully illustrated atlas charts and profiles the world’s major competitive sports and the profits that flow from their commercial development.

There has been an explosion in the quantity of sports history literature published in recent years, making it increasingly difficult to keep abreast of developments.

An eye-opening examination of the obstacles women sports journalist faced as they fought to break in to the "boys club" of the professional sports locker room, "Let Them Wear Towels" chronicles the formidable barriers female journalists faced.

From the award-winning producers of 30 for 30, this exceptional set celebrating the 40th anniversary of Title IX features nine documentary films about women in sports , directed by an extraordinarily diverse group of female filmmakers.

Sports and media emerged as a significant object of scholarship and research in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, when it became abundantly clear that modern professional sports was deeply dependent on its consistent, widespread mediation, and that the institution of media was deeply reliant on sports for content and audience attraction. The relationship between these institutions, both the products of modernity and its rationalization of play and communication, has been analyzed in contrasting terms as “a marriage made in heaven” and as an entrenched battle for institutional power.

Amateur and professional sports play a significant role in society and popular culture, and scholars have increasingly used sports as a backdrop for studying both human and mass communication processes. Studies in sports communication have addressed subjects such as audience reactions to mediated sporting contests; communication between coaches and athletes; media portrayals of athletes based on considerations such as gender, race, and nationality; and the professional routines of sports media practitioners. ...

This is the main article index for the field of Communications and Mass Media.

This index covers over 300 journal and magazine titles for film and television reviews, scholarly and critical analysis of cinema and television, and articles of popular interest about film and television. About half the journals and magazines are film periodicals and the other half cover film and television with some regularity. Subject coverage includes film & television theory, preservation & restoration, writing, production, cinematography, technical aspects, and reviews.