Double Crisis: Sport Mega Events and the Future of Public Service Broadcasting

Abstract

Covering sport mega events is a pivotal strategy for public service broadcasting (PSB) to claim audience support and public legitimacy. However, these mega events are subject to considerable controversy due to their association with doping or corruption. This raises the question for the PSB of how to satisfy the audience of the Olympic Games: by looking closely or by looking away? Conducting two empirical studies, this article investigates how German public service broadcasters reported the sociopolitical problems related to the 2016 Olympic Summer Games and whether the coverage has met the expectations of the audience. The results of a content analysis suggest that a substantial amount of coverage was dedicated to the problematic aspects of the Games. A conjoint analysis shows that German public service broadcasters did not meet the expectations of different audience segments: Neither the core audience nor event-driven spectators and certainly not the outsiders of media sports were fully satisfied by the Olympic program menu of German PSB.

Journalistic Framing of Finnish Ice Hockey Club Jokerit in the Russian-Led Kontinental Hockey League

“…Opposing interpretations of consumer interest in socio-political reporting have also been made. A German study by Lünich et al (2021) revealed that one-quarter of the broadcasting time allocated to the Rio de Janeiro…”

Mediatized Engagements with Technologies: “Reviewing” the Video Assistant Referee at the 2018 World Cup

“…Twitter’s impact on the transformation of sports (e.g., Highfield, 2013; Wenner, 2014) and, more specifically, on football communication (Billings et al, 2015; Bruns et al, 2014; Vimieiro, 2017) are well-established research fields. The scholarly interest in social media controversies (e.g., Burgess et al, 2016; Marres & Moats, 2015), however, has so far only inspired studies on political controversies during sports mega events (e.g., d’Andréa, 2016; Lünich et al, 2019; Meier et al, 2019). The little research on technological controversies so far is based on interviews with fans to understand their general attitude towards refereeing technologies (Stoney & Fletcher, 2020).…”

Enhancing #TdF2017: Cross-media controversies and forensic fandom during live sports events

“…While there is some research on political controversies in the context of mega events in sports (e.g. D’Andrea et al, 2015; Girginova, 2015; Lünich et al, 2019; Meier et al, 2019) or on moral or political missteps of teams and players (e.g. Brown and Billings, 2013), the cross-media dynamics of sports’ competition-related controversies is under-researched.…”

“…The little research on controversies focuses on scandals and on political controversies during Olympics or other mega events (e.g. Brown and Billings, 2013;D'Andrea et al, 2015;Meier et al, 2019;Lu ¨nich et al, 2019). Going beyond this, we want to show that sports systematically produces controversies and thus triggers what in the context of fictional content has been called 'forensic fandom' (Mittell, 2012(Mittell, , 2015, referring to how fans use, scrutinize and modify available media material to create evidence and to prove a point.…”