Global Media Events Research Articles

Cognitive rhetoric in super sports reporting: unveiling perspectives through multilevel analysis of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics from five international media outlets

ABSTRACT This study utilizes the Event-Domain Cognitive Model (ECM) within cognitive linguistics to analyze narrative construction in international news media coverage of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Through qualitative analysis of 1673 news articles from five diverse media outlets, the research outlines a multilevel cognitive rhetoric framework to explore the integration of cultural, historical, and emotional factors in media discourse. At the macro level, cultural and historical contexts influence the selection of event subdomains. At the meso level, cognitive reference points shape portrayals of international diplomacy. At the micro level, rhetorical strategies, especially metaphorical language, reveal media knowledge structures and emotional responses. The study highlights the media's dual role in reinforcing shared humanistic values and exposing geopolitical rivalries. Findings indicate the Olympics as a global stage for uniting cultures through common values and manifesting political and ideological differences, with varying narratives reflecting each outlet's cultural and political context. The study underscores the importance of cross-cultural media literacy to develop a critically aware public and contributes to international media studies, cognitive linguistics, and communication by providing a comprehensive model for analyzing media narratives and encouraging further research into global media events.

ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF GLOBAL ATTENTION ON SUBREDDIT COMMUNITY PRACTICES: THE CASE OF /R/HONGKONG

What happens to internet communities after a global media event puts them in the public spotlight? Does the flood of new members change a given community's practices, structures, and discussions? Do things go back to normal? These questions lie at the heart of our research project, which examines how a local subcommunity on the popular website Reddit changed as its matter of focus became a global discussion subject. Specifically, this study analyses changing posting practices on /r/hongkong, a local subreddit whose popularity skyrocketed in 2019, with the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement garnering worldwide media coverage. Now, with global attention shifting away from the protests and the 2020 Hong Kong National Security law, the subreddit no longer exhibits the same level of activity. But what can be learnt beyond simply looking at the numbers? Can a qualitative change be observed on /r/hongkong? In this extended abstract, we examine the existing research on subreddits as a community, consider the potential significance of media events and subsequent influxes of new users for community practice, outline our methodological approach, and highlight some preliminary findings.

Developing digital team ethnography of global media events on social media

The live character of suddenly breaking global media events along with the massive volume of digital traces they produce pose considerable challenges for research in the current communication environment. In this methodological article, we use the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks as an empirical context for methodological reflection. We suggest a new type of ethnographic investigation of events—a digital team ethnography augmented by computational methods for studying media events. We show how “fieldwork” and the related “field” are constructed as part of the empirical workflow and present a four-phase model to structure the research process: (1) research readiness, (2) mobilization of fieldwork, (3) exploring the computationally organized ethnographic field, and (4) deep dives that enable thick description on social media. We conclude with a reflection on the benefits and limitations of the proposed methodological approach for the study of global media events.

When the theatre of terror emerged

ABSTRACT What began as the 1972 Munich Olympic Games quickly became a global media event, a live broadcast of a deadly terrorist attack that changed the future of modern terrorism. Broadcast to an audience of over 900 million, the event was a game changer that changed the relationships within the triangle terrorism-media-public. The ‘new’ terrorism, following the Munich massacre, has adapted the new rules of the game, the rules of media-oriented actions. Media-oriented terrorism is the use of pre-planned attacks that are wittingly designed to get media attention and coverage and consequently to reach the general public and decision makers. This article presents two powerful concepts in communication and terrorism paradigm that emerged from this tragic event: the notion of The Theatre of Terror and the notion of Coercive Media Events. Finally, it examines post-Munich trends and especially how terrorists’ migration to social media and online platforms has preserved and refined their lessons from the Munich attack.

From “Crisis” to Imagination: Putting White Heroes Under Erasure Post-George Floyd

In the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, global protests against racialized police brutality targeted statues and other public art forms symbolizing racism. Either framed as a “weird global media event” or “global iconic event,” Floyd’s murder forced a reckoning with histories of oppression and systemic racism, with a potential enduring social effect and a transnational historical significance by inviting resonance and global solidarity. This article focuses on the U.K. context and spans a decade to invite a rethinking of ideas of crisis, history, and hero through a consideration of the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue and its pushing into the Bristol Harbour on June 7, 2020, by Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters, and Yinka Shonibare CBE’s artwork Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (2010–2012), commissioned for the “Fourth Plinth” temporary exhibits in Trafalgar Square. Such consideration bears on this contemporary moment when we are witnessing globally connected protest actions calling for the decolonization of public material culture.

How Soccer Becomes Politics: A Case Study on the Communication of a Transnational Popular Media Event

In this case study, the authors elaborate on the narrative structure oftransnational popular media events. Drawing from Dayan and Katz’s concept ofmedia eventsand Julia Sonnevend’s exceptional work oniconic global media events, they argue that fundamental changes in the way occurrences are being reported on and news is structured must be considered. Allowing for recent technological advancements, the role of the consumer and the compression of time in media use, the authors develop a methodological and theoretical framework fitting a more mundane and everyday life–based approach. They derive their results from the analysis of the “Podgorica Media Event,” a news cycle emerging from a racist incident during an international soccer game between England and Montenegro. Based on the body of 250 international news pieces, they identify aprimary mother narrationand adistinctive narrationas the typical ways of storytelling on a transnational level. While differing greatly in content, aspects of transnational popular media events serve to protect and reify the cultural background they are grounded in on a national level. Thus, we assume that sport, or, more specifically, soccer, may become political in media communication not by the impact of state government but by the consumers themselves choosing and developing a popular media event in the first place.

A rare dance

The enormous success of The Last Dance, the sports documentary on Michael Jordan’s career, and especially his last season, is the result of a rare confluence of factors, each of which is a unique and rare phenomenon in the history of sport. Their combination has already turned the mini-series into a global media event of the kind that is usually reserved for live broadcasts of extraordinary events. A basketball player with unusual personal and professional abilities, supported by a highly polished and well-oiled marketing system; the specific window of time in which his star shone – the late 1990s, when the era of media commercialization and globalization flourished, yet before the emergence of social media and their typical critical discourse; the rise in sports documentaries in recent years; and encasing all of these is the time of the documentary’s broadcast, when sports life across the world ceased due to the coronavirus. The mini-series, which seemingly deals with a single season in the career of a single player in a single sport, is actually so much more. It is a composition reflecting much wider social, sports and media phenomena.

Media events and translation: The case of the Arab Spring

Abstract This article contributes to the growing research on transnational and global media events by focusing on the role of translation in the process of mediated meaning-making of the so-called Arab Spring. Furthermore, the article focuses on the role of traditional media channels (television), and questions conflation of the Arab Spring and the Arab world. Therefore, a database was created of the English television coverage on Egypt’s and Syria’s uprisings done by ‘Russia Today’ and ‘Al Jazeera’. The coverage was analysed using narrative and discourse analysis focusing on the role of media reports translation. This analysis included different translations and also considered the impact of these translations on the overall framing of the media event. It demonstrated how translation positioned the narrative structure of media events and their internal dynamic; how these dynamics were reconfigured through recontextualization; how participants were repositioned; and how the competition impacted the further dynamics of the media event.

A Sound and Fury Signifying Mediatisation: On The Hong Kong Protests, 2019

This article examines the massive protests and global media event known as the “anti-extradition protests” in Hong Kong during 2019. The protests became the most live-streamed movement ever, and were narrated globally, though not in China, as an exemplary, brave demand for democracy and freedom against the P.R.C.'s intrusions. I argue that the event and movement can also be read as an apt example of mediatisation, or the media direction if not command of the geo-political sphere. From one perspective the movement was a spectacular success in garnering media sympathy and attention, even generating American legislation in support of Hong Kong's “freedom.” And yet the mainland's refusal to intervene into or pacify the conflict, despite deliberate, extreme provocations to make it do so, also suggest strong limits to global mediatisation. The movement may have triggered a new approach for Chinese resistance to mediatisation.

'Your light switch is your vote'

This paper applies some of the major concepts and methods that Ron Scollon developed in order to analyse how discourses of environmental citizenship, sustainability and climate change are mediated in a global media event. ‘Earth Hour’ began in 2007 in Sydney, Australia, and in 2009 it was proclaimed a successful global event. The event focused primarily on citizen awareness, participation and solidarity in mitigating climate change. In its sister campaign (‘Vote Earth’), the discourse of representative democracy was deployed to constitute an imaginary global electorate. The paper focuses on the analysis of: (a) the intense drive to visualize and spectacularize (mediational means) the simple act of switching off the lights and the consequences of such an act; (b) the massive infrastructure of discourse to synchronize the collective performance of a global ‘climate public’; (c) the discursive ‘memory work’ to archive and memorialize the hour, e.g. on YouTube; (d) the attempt to inculcate a ‘global citizen’ who is concerned with the environment/climate and whose anticipatory mediated actions in relation to it are prefigured by the event; and (e) the resistance to the circulation of this new mediated discourse.

The October revolution as a global media event: Connective imaginaries in 2017

This article analyses the proliferation of imaginaries of ‘revolution’ present in global media around the October Revolution’s 100th anniversary in 2017. The October Revolution stands alongside the French Revolution as a model that has guided sense-making about revolutionary moments since. Yet this anniversary fell against a backdrop marked by a set of highly contested recent revolutions, notably the post-Cold War Colour Revolutions in post-Soviet countries and Arab uprisings, and voluminous public analyses of contemporary Russian politics. Taking media as resources for informed citizenship, analysis of 114 English language news stories of the centenary from 26 countries demonstrates that audiences were offered varied and ambivalent representations of both revolution and its mechanisms and of Russia and its relations with other countries. Following Moretti I argue that, together, these formed a textual ‘world effect’ of 1917 as an event that constituted a global experience entangling all societies – and that 1917 is unfinished, either due to continued direct effects on migration, geopolitics and economics, or by continuing to inspire visions of political transformation beyond the West.

Sport or politics? Critical discourse analysis of European media coverage of Sochi Olympic Games 2014

This paper examines how media and news reports in particular contribute to the construction of images on a particular event. For the purpose of it, the Winter Olympic Games 2014 in Sochi were chosen as a global media event owning to its controversial nature and various issues connected with these Games. The data were gathered from two prominent English-speaking news bureaus in Europe and examined to establish how centers of traditional Olympic stream and Western ideology comment on the Games hosted by an ideologically, politically and culturally different country. In attempt to address the aim, the research explores the thematic organisation (topics coverage) and the resources of appraisal in the articles dedicated to Sochi 2014. Despite its manual nature, the research combines both qualitative and quantitative approaches to the analysis of data. The findings revealed that all news bureaus constructed a negative evaluation of Sochi 2014 by means of the use of emotive language and selective coverage of topics relating either to the Games or to the host country. The paper is aimed to contribute to the existing research of critical discourse analysis and systemic functional grammar and present a pioneering study on the Olympic discourse by means of these two theoretical models

Dead missionaries, wild Sentinelese: An anthropological review of a global media event

This article aims to shed light on the background to a media event that occupied the world press, and even more the digital media, for a few weeks at the end of last year. The trope of the violent ‘murder’ of a white missionary by one of the last ‘uncontacted tribes’ is likely to evoke a variety of Western projections. Ultimately, it is about power over images, interpretations and how we want to behave towards isolated groups of people in today’s world: leave them alone? Protect them from the culture of violence at the fringe of their territories or contact them now and support them in the long term? An anthropological reading of the case does not lead to a simple answer to this question, but it might help in getting a more informed perspective on a complex subject matter.

Scale shift in international tax justice: comparing the UK and Australia from 2008 to 2016

ABSTRACTInternational tax justice issues, such as corporate tax avoidance, have gained particular salience over the past decade in an environment of financial instability and government austerity. Civil society involvement has ranged from trade unions and NGOs calling for parliamentary inquiries to civil disobedience by less established actors. Since the international financial crisis, how have levels of contentious collective action around these issues waxed and waned? Is contentiousness associated most with domestic politics or global media events like the Panama Papers? This paper uses an original hand-coded dataset from five national newspapers in the United Kingdom and Australia between 2008 and 2016. Political claims analysis (PCA) was used to collect all instances of claims around international tax justice and compare the types of actions and the different frames used by civil society actors. In both countries, mobilising grievances are generated most strongly in the period after domestic austerity policies are introduced. The qualitative coding provides evidence of accompanying frame alignment in these periods, as international taxation is problematized in terms of national revenue, demonstrating scale shift from the global to the national political stage.

Watching the 2016 Olympics on Brazil’s alternative media: From platform hijack to discourse autonomy

This article analyses the alternative media coverage of the 2016 Olympics from the perspective of an emerging literature on ‘platform hijack’ of media events. By conducting a frame analysis (n = 60), we explore the extent to which alternative media producers have sought to seize the attention from the Olympics to their agendas or issues. While they expectedly appeared emphasising the damaging effects over communities, results otherwise suggest no intent to directly ‘hijack’ the Olympics’ platforms, as seen in past episodes of disruptive activism. Instead, we propose interpreting the evidence as indicative of discourse autonomy, which adds nuances to the way in which alternative media producers prefer to remain tied to their local issues even during global media events.

Non-Fiction Transmedia: Seriality and Forensics in Media Sport

The article uses two examples (from 1908 and 1966) to analyse in greater detail why and how sport’s transmedia dynamic is very much fostered by the close interrelations between the seriality of sport events and the forensic attitude of fans. Two arguments are of special importance: (1) While social media add to forensic fandom’s proliferation, it was sport’s strongly serialized evaluation of performances that actually triggered the “spreadability” of sport-related topics across different media, first doing so at the end of the 19th century. What is more, modern sport owes its very existence to the cross-media circulation of its events. (2) So far, transmedia has mainly been researched with respect to fictional content, yet existing research on documentary transmedia forms and social media seriality has shown that the inclusion of non-fiction can broaden our knowledge of how storytelling sprawls across media and takes advantage of their specific affordances. This, I want to argue, ensures that sport is an insightful and important example for the understanding of transmedia world-building.

Crafting Resonance in a Sports Media Event

Through studying the turn from conflict to function in one of the most expensive media events in history, the Beijing Olympics, and by building on Jeffrey Alexander's cultural pragmatics theory, the article proposes a theoretical framework for studying mega-events as a transnational social drama, i.e, a strategic contest whereby media engage social institutions in stylistic but contentious public performances. Eventually, which performance stands out as resonant is contingent upon the script, the actors, the audience, the mise-en-scène, and social power. Initially, the performance of Free Tibet protesters was judged to be more authentic through coherent media framing. But the subsequent redress phase saw a return of the affirmative narrative made possible by the redefinition of the mise-en-scène following the Wenchuan earthquake and authorities’ enhanced capability in controlling symbolic production. The Chinese performance came to be seen as more or less authentic, hence strategic public diplomacy was transformed into a ritual-like experience. The article reads media events as neither a mythical system functioning in a consensual way nor merely an ideology serving instrumental interests. An interactional approach focusing on the contention among performers in which conflict may be ritualized, with media playing a crucial but not determining role, comes closer to explaining the course of the Games and similar global media events to come.

The appeasement effect of a United Nations climate summit on the German public

As a global media event, COP 21 had the potential to enhance understanding and motivate political action. This study shows that although media coverage reached the German public and promoted conference-specific knowledge, this did not translate into active engagement. The annual UN climate summits receive intense global media coverage1,2,3, and as such could engage local publics around the world, stimulate debate and knowledge about climate politics, and, ultimately, mobilize people to combat climate change. Here we show that, in contrast to these hopes, although the German public were exposed to news about the 2015 Paris summit, they did not engage with it in a more active way. Comparing knowledge and attitudes before, during and after the summit using a three-wave online panel survey (quota sample, N = 1,121), we find that respondents learnt a few basic facts about the conference but they continue to lack basic background knowledge about climate policy. Trust in global climate policy increased a little, but citizens were less inclined to support a leading role for Germany in climate politics. Moreover, they were not more likely to engage personally in climate protection. These results suggest that this global media event had a modest appeasing rather than mobilizing effect.

Global media and time: A conceptual and historical perspective

This paper addresses the role of time and meaning-making in the global mediascape. Particular attention will be paid to the role of past and future narratives, connections of messages with a global outreach and time as a topic of communication. The empirical analysis will use a comparative approach to explore these different dimensions by analysing three global media events, such as, the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination US President John F. Kennedy and the Fukushima Daiichi incident. The main findings of the paper will show that time is a constitutional part in the process of meaning-making in global communication.

Media events and cosmopolitan fandom: ‘Playful nationalism’ in the Eurovision Song Contest

Academic literature on media events is increasingly concerned with their global dimensions and the applicability of Dayan and Katz’s theoretical concept in a post-national context. This article contributes to this debate by exploring the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) as a global media event. In particular, we employ a perspective from ‘inside the media event’, drawing upon empirical material collected during the 2014 Eurovision final in Copenhagen and focusing on the experiences of fans attending the contest. We argue that the ESC as a media event is experienced by its fans as a cosmopolitan space, open and diverse, whereas national belonging is expressed in a playful way tied to the overall visual aesthetics of the contest. However, the bounded and narrow character of participation render this cosmopolitan space rather limited.