The Olympics, Media and Society

Kim Bissell, Stephen Perry, Stephen D. Perry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138944329
• eBook ISBN: 9781317976875
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

When the general public follow the Olympic Games on television, on the internet, even in the newspapers, they feel like they have themselves experienced the performances of the athletes. This book explores whether it is ever possible to experience the Olympic Games as an athletic event without considering the effect of the media. It addresses a multitude of ways in which the intermediary of media production alters the experience of the Olympics.

Spectators watching Olympic events from the stands are less subjected to the language of the commentators, journalists, and even the athlete interviews as they form impressions and understandings of the games. However, even those who sit in the stands for the opening ceremonies or walk down the streets of the Olympic Village and the host city are treated to media spectacles that are intentionally produced to display the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the host country and its Olympic Committee. This book performs the important task of analysing ways in which the media serves as both an integral component and an arbiter of the Games for society.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Mass Communication and Society.

Introduction Olympics, Media, and Society

Kim Bissell

Institute for Communication and Information Research University of Alabama

Stephen D. Perry

Department of Communications Illinois State University

When we think about the Olympic Games, the facets of those Games that touch media and through the media have an influence on society, are many. Submissions for this special issue spanned topics from how doping problems and policies are covered, to concerns with accurate portrayals of the security of the Games, to the relationships between journalists and their home country athletes, to how documentaries on the Olympics present a one-sided, rose-colored view of the Games. In the end, none of those topics made it into this publication, but several of the original 40-plus topic submissions were accepted. The wide range of interests that were represented by the initial submissions suggests that the field of Olympics, Media, and Society is one ripe for additional research. We are happy to produce a venue where some of that research can be presented.

Submissions for the special issue often focused on more recent Olympiads. The 2008 games in Beijing are represented by four of the articles selected for publication in this issue. Three manuscripts focus on the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver. But only one manuscript was accepted from earlier Olympiads—and that was much earlier. The 1936 Olympics, known mostly for the successes of Jesse Owens in track and field, provided the background for an analysis of how an Olympian’s image is not necessarily his (or her) own to control. Owens’ story became larger than the reality, in many ways, and the person of Owens may have been lost amidst the larger cultural understanding of the mediated Owens. That story is told well in the work of author Mike Milford.

Of those articles covering the Beijing Olympic experience, one addresses the audience’s consumption of the games through both traditional and newer media platforms. Authors Roger Cooper and Tang Tang argued that there are two types of consumers for the Olympics. They look at the fan and the non-fan separately and find that non-fans were as likely to consume the Olympics in the online mediated platform as were fans. Delivery methods of Olympic Games frequently require much consideration from broadcast networks serving a country half a world and several time zones away from the games. This research is useful in understanding how different dissemination methods may in fact serve different purposes for audiences.

Robert Moses Peaslee and Shu-Ling Chen Berggreen examined what is perhaps the grandest spectacle of the Games each quadrennium, the opening ceremonies. They analyzed their importance at the 2008 Beijing Summer Games from three perspectives: the artistic selections and planning that represented China, the publicity surrounding the opening ceremonies as extolled by the Beijing Olympic Committee, and the discourse of the NBC broadcast that commented on the ceremonies as they unfolded. Their analysis clearly articulates the intentional national image that the event was designed to reveal—a discourse of harmony between the old and new China. Their findings also reveal the use of the opening ceremonies as an attempt to dissolve national boundaries between China and the rest of the world.

Many scholars approach questions of the Olympics and Media with an eye toward promotion of national image. Some would probably call this a manipulation of national image. In fact, that is the picture that Peaslee and Berggreen paint well, though they suggest no ill intent in that manipulation. Mei Hua and Alexis Tan include a look at how national pride and cultural values are portrayed through the interviews with gold medalists, showing stark differences in portrayed causes of victory. They show that for American winners there is often a nod to their own motivation to win, personal characteristics like athletic ability, and their individual style. National pride is frequently mentioned, but is less pronounced than personal characteristics and falls far short of its frequent mention by Chinese victors. Chinese athletes are more likely to reflect the collectivist thinking common in Asian countries, attributing their success to social support structures including their national pride most often, followed in frequency by the expectations of others, training, and the support of their coach and teammates.

The fourth manuscript related to the 2008 Olympic Games is authored by Bu Zhong and Yong Zhou. They look at an unstudied area of the effect of weather and pollution on journalists’ reporting of the Games. Zhong and Zhou find that journalists are more likely to use positive words when the weather is better and the pollution is lower. As these conditions decline, journalists can be seen to write more negatively, using terms that may reflect negative personal moods that may be experienced by the journalists personally. This finding, while specific to the Olympics here, has implications for understanding journalism at large.

Studies of the Winter Olympic Games have received comparatively less attention than the Summer Games; however, three of the articles in this issue examine different aspects of the Vancouver Winter Games. Karen-Marie Elah Perry and Helen Hyunji Kang investigate the potential negative effect created by the Olympic committee’s control of published images of the Games and of the host nation. In this work the authors studied the efforts to silence anti-Olympic speech and demonstrations held in the area of the Games. Their critical analysis acknowledges compelling questions about where an appropriate balance might lie between protecting the interests of countries, investors, and the Olympic brand vs. the rights of local residents, businesses, and sub-populations that are physically, legally, and through hegemonic power, pushed into the thin margins of society to have any place at all to express their viewpoints.

Amy Jones and Jennifer Greer address perceptions of masculinity and femininity of winter sports—sports where athletes’ bodies are less of a focus since they are usually wearing significantly more clothing than sports played during the Summer Games. This piece contributes to the body of work in gender and sport communication because of their study of a sport not often included in earlier studies—the sport of snowboarding. They found that camera angles and commentary often followed traditional gendered expectations with men shown from low camera angles and described as powerful while women were shown from high angles and described as more graceful. However, they found that the audience was not as discriminating. Heavy viewers were more likely to apply the commentary about the sport to athletes of both sexes, saying both male and female athletes were more graceful as well as more aggressive. This finding was unexpected.

In a similar study, Kelly Poniatowski and Marie Hardin examined the commentary during women’s ice hockey at the Vancouver Olympics. This study, added to this special issue after being accepted through the normal journal review process, noted that hockey is a traditionally violent sport where women are often seen as intruders into a male world. The commentary compared women to male role models, but never compared men to female role models nor rarely to other men, revealing the continuation of a masculine hegemony. Women were often noted as playing for college teams after starting by playing with boys’ teams. Ultimately, they conclude that gendered expectations were reinforced, marginalizing female hockey players in the Vancouver games. While the findings of the coverage are similar, though perhaps more severe than those identified by Jones and Greer in the coverage of snowboarding, Poniatowski and Hardin do not look at the audience’s resulting perceptions. It would be interesting to know whether the audience applies attributes of the commentary to players of both sexes as happened with snowboarding, or whether they maintain a distinction between women and men players in this more violent team sport.

We would like to thank the panel of reviewers who reviewed multiple manuscripts in a short window of time to critique and rate them for publication in this special issue. They include Lindsey Mean, Andrew Billings, Phil Chidester, Marie Hardin, Erin Whiteside, Bryan Denham, Michael Butterworth, Lawrence Mullen, Scott Reinardy, and Bradley Schultz. Several others reviewed individual manuscripts, and many of those same people regularly review other manuscripts for the journal. As always, the service of reviewers is crucial to the successful peer review process that our manuscripts must undergo in order to be properly vetted for publication in the academic environment.

This special issue on the Olympics, Media, and Society displays a wide breadth of contribution to the field. The notions of how iconic athletes of the Olympic Games become an image and a representation beyond the actual person could only have been studied using someone whose memory has stood the test of time. But the ability to otherwise present several areas of study that converged on a single Summer and Winter Game set should prove useful to scholars in the field. It is our hope that this special issue will provide a strong reference point from which others will study the 2012 Olympics and beyond.

The Olympics, Jesse Owens, Burke, and the Implications of Media Framing in Symbolic Boasting

Mike Milford

Department of Communication and Journalism Auburn University

One of the most enduring figures of the Olympics is Jesse Owens, the track and field athlete who won four gold medals at the 1936 Games in Berlin. Although Owens’s athletic achievements were impressive, he is more remembered for being the athlete who singled-handedly brought down the Nazi’s theories of Aryan supremacy. This aspect of Owens’s identity owes less to his performance and more to the Olympic media’s ideological framing. Over time Owens was transformed from a world-class athlete to a transcendent hero. The Olympic media framed Owens as a communal hero, boasting of his accomplishments as if they were their own, infusing him with ideological significance. A Burkean examination of the media’s framing surrounding Owens shows that the ideological image eventually outshined his identity.

Introduction

At the 1936 Olympics Jesse Owens single-handedly dismantled Nazi ideology in 10.3 seconds. Owens was an African American track and field athlete who claimed the title of “world’s fastest man” en route to four gold medals in the 100 meters, 200 meters, 4 [notdef] 100 meter relay, and long jump at the 1936 Olympiad in Berlin. Through media accounts that combined his remarkable performances with his race, Owens’s achievements were transformed into a refutation of the Nazis’ theory of racial superiority. As Schaap (2007) summarized, “While the western democracies were perfecting the art of appeasement, while much of the rest of the world kowtowed to the Nazis, Owens stood up to them at their own Olympics, refuting their venomous theories with his awesome deeds” (p. xv). Through of the mediated spectacle of the Olympics, Owens’s performance was conceived as an ideological victory, one that promoted dominant social and political beliefs. The Olympic media framed Jesse Owens as a communal hero, and the nation boasted of his accomplishments as if they were their own, infusing Owens with considerable ideological import. A critical examination of the media’s framing of Owens shows that the ideological image eventually outshined his identity.

Central to Owens’s apotheosis was the Olympic setting. It is oft assumed that the Olympics were created as an apolitical international competition, but this is not the case. D. C. Young (1984) argued that the Olympics were created to promote amateurism as a form of socioeconomic elitism disguised as idealistic competition (pp. 25–27). Over time, through the lens of the Olympic media, the competitions became less about amateur ideals than competing national ideologies. As media outlets “exaggerated ideological rifts” in an effort to dramatize events for readers, the Games were transformed into a cultural competition (Eagan, 1955, p. 266; Pope, 1997, pp. 46–47; C. Young, 2008, pp. 87–88). The American press in particular worked to transform Olympic athletes into “middle-class icons who showed the decadent Old World the strength of an emerging world power” (Pope, 1997, p. 41; Riggs, Eastman, & Golobic, 1993, p. 254). In this manner the athletes’ performances became enactments of their nations’ mythologies, using the medal count as the scorecard (Butterworth, 2007b, p. 232; Pope, 1993, p. 329). Because of this history the Olympics are perhaps the strongest confluence of media, sport, and ideology (Kraft & Brummett, 2009, pp. 11–12; Schultz & Sheffer, 2008, p. 181).

The 1936 Summer Games in Berlin are among the best examples of this integration. These were the first Games to generate significant worldwide media attention because of the spectacle provided by the image-conscious Nazis (Farrell, 1989, pp. 162–163). For example, the torch relay from Olympia, now a staple of the Games, began in 1936, a product of the Nazi propaganda machine (Large, 2007, p. 4). This attention to pageantry combined with the significance embedded in sport and ideology established the Berlin Games as a powerful event. Within those Games the representative example was Jesse Owens, “an emblem of democracy juxtaposed against Hitler’s racist call for Aryan triumph” (Riggs et al., 1993, p. 254; Spyropolous, 2004, p. 70). Although other Olympiads have had their share of political intrigue (the Mexico City Games of 1968, the Munich Games of 1972, the Moscow Games of 1980, the Los Angeles Games of 1984), few matched the ideological power of the Berlin Games. Heeding Butterworth’s (2007a) call to “engage more critically with the discourses of sport as they intersect with global culture and international politics,” I offer as a case study the symbolic boasting of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin (p. 199).

The Owens’s case not only provides insight into the ideological forum of the Olympics but also elucidates the construction of the communal hero in mediated sport. Kenneth Burke makes a strong case for understanding collective identification through the symbolic boasting of a communal hero. Communal heroes are a powerful rhetorical tool for the creation and reinforcement of ideological principles because their performances can be used as models of social and political beliefs. Symbolic boasting, the celebration of another’s accomplishments as one’s own for ideological purposes, is the means by which a community asserts its principles through a hero’s actions. This is often displayed in how media storytellers engage in apotheosis, the raising and maintaining of heroes. However, as the case of Jesse Owens will show, the creation of a communal hero has serious side effects on the individual’s identity. Reducing the hero to an ideological enthymeme effectively erases the individuality of the person resulting in rhetorical fossilization. I begin by examining symbolic boasting as a unique variant of identification and its implication on a community’s ideology through the creation of a communal hero. Then by examining the mediated Owens I demonstrate how symbolic boasting functioned to reframe a historical event into a powerful ideological statement. Finally I discuss the fossilizing effect that framing had on Jesse Owens’s life.

Symbolic Boasting

Identification is the central term in Kenneth Burke’s rhetoric. Burke (1969b) argued that it is endemic in symbol use, incorporating both explicit and “unconscious” factors that shape a community’s substance (p. 21; Hochmuth, 1952, pp. 7–8). These factors coalesce around symbols that create “substantive identification” between the community’s members (Gaines, 1979, p. 200; Heath, 1986, p. 209). Burke (1937) wrote that people identify “with all sorts of manifestations beyond” themselves, that the “so-called ‘I’ is merely a unique combination of partially conflicting ‘we’s’ ” (p. 264). This desire to be part of something beyond ourselves “reflects our fundamentally social, political, and historical makeup” and acts as the impetus for communal identification (Wolin, 2001, p. 93). Hence the “ultimate condition sought by rhetorical endeavor” is corporate identification, a rally around communal symbols (Carpenter, 1972, p. 19).

Symbolic boasting, then, is the development and repetition of symbols that provide consubstantiality to the corporate unit through a sense of collaboration (Burke, 1969b, p. 58). Burke (1937) wrote, “He identifies himself with some corporate unit (church, guild, company, lodge, party, team, college, city, natio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1.Introduction: Olympics, Media, and Society
• 2.The Olympics, Jesse Owens, Burke, and the Implications of Media Framing in Symbolic Boasting
• Part I: The 2008 Summer Games
• Part II: The 2010 Winter Games
• Index