National lenses on a global news event: determinants of the politicization and domestication of the prelude to the Beijing Olympics

Abstract

This article utilizes a 14-country comparative data set and analyzes how different countries' television news has covered the events and controversies surrounding the Beijing Olympics in the months before the Summer Games. Conceptually, the focus is on the notions of domestication and politicization. However, rather than simply illustrating the presence of these phenomena, the analytical interest resides mainly in uncovering their “determinants”. More specifically, following the arguments that the mainstream news media are generally power dependent on the one hand and have a strong local orientation on the other, it was hypothesized that a number of relationships exist between degrees of domestication and politicization in television news in different countries and the countries' social, cultural, and political characteristics. The empirical results show that the degree of domestication can be explained by a country's level of participation in the Olympic Games and the size of the country's ethnic Chinese population. The degree of politicization, meanwhile, can be explained by the type of political regime and the country's economic relationship with China. The implications of the findings are discussed.