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Pride and Prejudice

2015; Routledge; Volume: 17; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1461670x.2015.1019550

1469-9699

Kaori Hayashi, James Curran, Sunyoung Kwak, Frank Esser, Daniel C. Hallin, Chin-Chuan Lee,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

AbstractThe Olympic Games are one of the most popular global mega-media events. However, the ways in which the opening of the 2012 Olympic Games in London were reported varied significantly from one country to another. In order to compare how different countries represented this event, we conducted a qualitative discourse analysis of three days of television news coverage from 10 channels in five countries: the United States, China, Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom. We explored whether different locations, political systems, and television systems affect how the same event is reported. We found that while European public service broadcasters (BBC and ARD) were more serious, critical, and political than their commercial counterparts (ITV and RTL), the Japanese commercial broadcaster's coverage of the event was more critical than that of the public service broadcaster, which was popularized and nationalistic throughout. In China, the more market-oriented Dragon TV was more evaluative in its reporting than the state-run CCTV. NBC, which monopolized the broadcast rights in the United States, emphasized the universal values of the Olympics and avoided nationalism. In light of our results, future attention should be directed toward the role of commercial broadcasting in a contemporary globalized world in which ideological constellations are changing.KEYWORDS: comparative media studiesmedia systemmega-media eventsnews framingOlympic Gamessporting nationalism Notes1. Exceptions include de Moragas Spà, Rivenburgh, and Larson (Citation1995) and, more recently, Luo and Richeri (Citation2009).2. We selected two channels from each country: one public and one commercial, if applicable. For the United States, we selected two commercial channels instead: NBC (the broadcast rights holder of the Games) and CBS (which did not have broadcast rights), as we expected that the dynamic created by exclusive broadcast rights might affect the channels' news coverage. For China, we analyzed the Beijing-based national channel, China Central Television (CCTV), and Shanghai-based Dragon TV. Dragon TV has a regional focus, is more market-oriented, and places second to CCTV in size and audience reach.3. It should be noted that in Japan most nightly news programs are aired only on weekdays. Therefore, NHK's News Watch 9 and TV-Asahi's Hōdō Station were not aired on Saturday, July 28 or Sunday, July 29. To supplement this lack of data, we instead analyzed weekend news programs from the respective channels: NHK's News 7, which is broadcast at 7 pm daily, and TV-Asahi's Hōdō Station Sunday, which airs at 10 am on Sundays. For the American coverage on CBS, July 26 was excluded from our analysis because the full episode on that day is not available on the program's official website.Additional informationFundingThis research was supported by the Kikawada Foundation and the Mitsubishi Foundation.