Clearly, then, the greater the value of the football writing available, the less obviously ‘good’ it is,
either subjectively in terms of quality, or objectively in terms of variety. The more a consumer pays,
the more likely they are to get news properly presented as possibility rather than fact, stories which
embrace larger narratives rather than jump on bandwagons of controversy, a wider variety of
material, more original, or less re-hashed, material, and ‘intelligent’ writing rather than weak puns,
short sentences, and splashy personality pieces. However, they also get less of it for their money, by
a staggering degree. If someone were to buy The Independent and The Daily Star every day for five
days, by the end of that week The Daily Star would have delivered about thirty-five times as much
football writing by cost.
There is a similarity here, albeit a passing one, with the practices of consumption noted by Pierre
Bourdieu in Distinction. Writing about food, he notes that generally speaking, foods that are fatty
and heavy and available in large quantities for little cost are more the preserve of one socioeconomic group than leaner, more expensive food. Obviously there are significant difficulties in
making sweeping generalisations about class and reading habits, but it is likely that research would
substantiate the view that consumers of tabloid writing are more akin in background to consumers
of fatty, cheap foods, and broadsheet readers are more likely to consume leaner, more expensive,
and more varied food. Tabloid writing is analogous in this respect to fatty food: big in volume, low in
quality, but delivering lots of value. The point that Bourdieu makes is that “taste is…a forced choice,
produced by conditions of existence which rule out all alternatives as mere daydreams”. He stresses
vehemently, as do I, that this is not an excuse for “a class racism which associates the [general]
populace with everything heavy, thick and fat”. But he is saying that the system in which people exist
determines their choices for them to a great extent. He also states that “the idea of taste, typically
bourgeois, since it presupposes absolute freedom of choice” is a construct of those free to choose
since they are the ones who can create a narrative rather than being forced to live within one. There
is a lot in Bourdieu’s writing to be anxious about, but the central idea that matters of taste seem
determined from above and systemic in their enforcement seems true and borne out by the
differences in style and quality of football writing, as shown above.
Football writing is a product of the media machine, by and large, and its differences are reinforced
rather than challenged by that machine. If you see print media as a whole, rather than discrete
elements, the ‘culture industry’ as Theodor Adorno termed it, then it is not hard to see how it is in
the interests of various newspapers to continue to serve up varying degrees of quality to enforce the
social distinctions the machine believes it needs to cater for. As Adorno said, “The culture industry
misuses its concern for the masses in order to duplicate, reinforce and strengthen their mentality,
which it presumes is given and unchangeable”. The culture industry suggests that it gives people
what they want, but, in fact, it tells them and enshrines this in the practices of production and
dissemination of cultural phenomena. As Arnould and Thompson posit, “consumer culture – and the
marketplace ideology it conveys – frames consumers’ horizons of conceivable action, feeling, and
thought, making certain patterns of behaviour more likely than others”. These patterns of behaviour
obviously include media consumption itself: if you repeatedly serve up the same sort of product,
people will eventually demand that product, even if the face of better media elsewhere. The recent
redesign of The Daily Mirror shows that a proclaimed smartening and modernising just gives the
same sort of approach; changing a painting’s frame does not alter the painting itself. This mirage of
progress hampers the ability of consumers to choose better or more varied writing and enforces the
myth that it is not available.