The Role of Mass Media in Sports Tourism Development

In accelerated global process, media and communication technology has progressed by unimaginable speed and they have all human activity levels on it’s dominates. The aim of present study is to investigate the attitudes of managers and sport experts, tourism and sports media about the role of mass media in sports tourism development. Research samples are consisted of the managers and sport experts, tourism and cultural heritage and sports media in Tehran Province that by considering the 500 managers and experts in each field using Cochran formula with 0.05 error factor, 306 cases were chosen as a statistical sample involving 102 experts in each field. Research tool, due to lack of standard questionnaire that is compatible and consistent with the purposes of this study, was a researcher designed questionnaire which distributed between 30 people in a Preliminary study after the validity confirmation by professors of sport management (). After questionaries’ distribution and collection, the 267 returned ones analyzed by SPSS V.21 software Kolmogorov–Smirnov and Friedman test. Kolmogorov - Smirnov Results showed the data distribution was not normal. Friedman test was used for ranking the mass media in sport tourism development components. The test results showed that most effective roles of the mass media respectively are "human training" with average ratings of 5.79, and "marketing" with average ratings of 5.63