Contesting the Super Bowl

With her heart set on exposing the Super Bowl as a ""celebratory junction of corporate capitalism, masculinity, and power that hegemonically affirms and perpetuates inequality,"" Schwartz, an associate professor of journalism and mass media at the University of Minnesota, dispatches a team of photojournalists into downtown Minneapolis to cover Super Bowl XXVI. Her agenda: to prove through the camera lens, as well as through a collection of press releases, newspaper clips and other primary sources, that the NFL and corporate America enjoy a lucrative partnership at the expense of minorities, women and average tax-paying citizens--a partnership celebrated annually in the media orgy that is the Super Bowl. Well, no news there, at least none worthy of the lengthy discourse Schwartz devotes to it. A few of the images and anecdotes are mildly interesting, such as when the chair of the Transportation, Logistics and Security Committee compares preparing for the Super Bowl to ""planning an event that is only exceeded in size by World War II or the Second Coming."" Had Schwartz let such evidence speak for itself, instead of burying it within pages of pontification, this might have been a droll little expose. Instead it reads more like a grad school paper with a grudge, indulging Schwartz's open bias against football (""a controlled, commodified spectacle [crafted] out of a spontaneous, aggressive game"") and disqualifying her as an objective researcher. (Jan.)