Opportunities and Challenges for Critical Reporting at the Olympics: Journalists’ Perspectives From Tokyo 2020

Abstract

How Olympics reporters understand the Games and their role within them has implications for what and how they report. At stake in journalists’ storytelling choices are the representations of the Olympics themselves as well as representations of the host city and country — representations that can serve to bolster powerful institutions and dominant ideologies, or to challenge them and open new opportunities for change. Despite the importance of journalists to the production of the Olympic spectacle, there has been relatively little research that examines how Olympics reporters think about what it means to report on the Games. This paper explores what journalists’ perspectives and experiences can reveal about the opportunities and challenges for reporting from a “critical stance” at the Games. I highlight three key themes from interviews with journalists who reported on Tokyo 2020 for influential English-language publications: the role of awe in Olympics reporting; impressions of what readers want; and the role of reporters’ experiences at past Olympic Games. I suggest that at Tokyo 2020 there were more opportunities for critical reporting that portrayed Olympics problems as exceptional, rather than structural, although the space for structural critique may be growing.