Covering Protest at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics: A “Peace Journalism” Inspired Analysis

Abstract

This paper reports findings from a study of Canadian mainstream media coverage of anti-Olympic protests around the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. The study included an experiment with a hybrid analytic approach, as we drew together Galtung’s “peace journalism” (PJ) framework with a more critically and contextually-oriented strategy. We found that articles written about the anti-Olympic protests commonly fell into the ‘war/violence’ sub-categories proposed by Galtung, which are: propaganda oriented, elite oriented, and ‘us vs them’ oriented. We also identified segments of articles that were ‘peace-oriented’ in that they offered nuanced contextual information and included perspectives of traditionally marginalized groups. We conclude by comparing our findings with other work on coverage of sport-related protests and reflect on the value of a PJ approach for the study of conflict in sport media.