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.

During the Rio 2016 Olympics, veteran political reporter Roger Cohen (2016) wrote in the New York Times:

… I am tired, very tired, of reading negative stories about these Brazilian Olympics — the anger in the slums, the violence that continues (including the armed robbery of four American swimmers), the enduring gulf between rich and poor, the occasional organizational hassles, the Russian doping and the Brazilian mosquito, money that could supposedly have been spent better than extending the Metro that now runs from the center to prosperous Barra da Tijuca (so, among other things, enabling the poor to get jobs out there).

He berated his fellow journalists, suggesting they were over-emphasizing negative stories because Brazil was a “developing country,” and stated: “These Olympics are good for Brazil and good for humanity, a needed tonic. Watch Usain Bolt or Simone Biles and feel uplifted.” Implicit in Cohen’s writing is the claim that the Olympics are not the time or place for journalism as usual. Cohen constructs the Games as a space for humanity to celebrate and feel uplifted, an exceptional space somehow removed from pesky problems such as “the enduring gulf between rich and poor.”

A week later, Cohen’s New York Times colleague, Michael Powell (2016), disagreed emphatically in his own column: “The greatest honor we can pay to a nation is to take its maladies seriously.” Spotlighting problems with previous editions like Salt Lake City 2002 and London 2012, he argued “the Olympic model is fractured” and outlined possible reforms. Five years and one pandemic later, two articles in the New York Times ahead of Tokyo 2020 explored whether the Games have (or should have) a future in the 21st century, given the social, environmental, and political tolls they can take on host cities (Branch, 2021; Streeter, 2021). While neither article addressed the role of the journalist as explicitly as Cohen and Powell’s pieces did, they modeled a critical stance that went further than Powell’s proposal for reforms, interrogating the purpose and value of the Olympics project as a whole. Clearly, not all journalists agree with Cohen that the Olympics should be a break from reporting as usual.

Beyond the debates traceable in the pages of the New York Times, 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. These representations produce public meanings (about place, inequality, power, politics, culture, and identity) that can serve to bolster powerful institutions and dominant ideologies, or to challenge them and open new opportunities to imagine and enact alternatives. 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 (with notable exceptions including Miah, 2017; Steen, 2012).

To address this relative dearth of insight, I interviewed 10 journalists who reported on Tokyo 2020 for influential English-language publications. In this paper, I explore what journalists’ perspectives and experiences can reveal about the opportunities and challenges for reporting from a “critical stance” (Dayan & Katz, 1992) at the Games. After brief overviews of relevant literature and my methodological approach, I first highlight the range of interviewees’ perspectives across three themes: the role of awe in Olympics reporting; impressions of what readers want; and the role of reporters’ experiences at past Olympic Games. Then, I reflect on what counts as critical reporting, which cannot be taken as a given. What journalists point to as evidence of critical approaches suggests it is possible for journalists to ‘check the box’ for reporting critically without necessarily interrogating the full Olympics project. Certain narratives tend to dominate at the Olympics, offering up popular (and often important) targets for journalistic critique while displacing or overshadowing other storylines. 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.

Media Event Spectacle Meets Sports Journalism

News media and sports rely heavily on each other for financial survival; it is together that they produce audiences to sell to advertisers. The power of the sports/media complex (Jhally, 1984), however, cannot be understood solely in economic terms. Jhally describes sports as “an explicit celebration of the idealized structures of reality” (51), in which we encounter teams as “symbolic communities,” values such as winning, competition, and discipline, and ideologies that frame hard work and playing by the rules as the keys to success. Mediatized sports events become a spectacle, defined by the power of images to mediate “a social relation among people” (53). While audiences are not passive “dupes” (Tomlinson, 2002, p. 55), the spectacle’s embodiment of “contemporary society’s basic values” (Kellner, 2003, p. 2) can function to (re)socialize audiences into the dominant power structure(s). Sports media scholars must be attuned both to how celebratory spectacles can bolster systems like capitalism, and to the alternative and sometimes contradictory ways that people make meaning out of the events.

The Olympics are a particularly potent spectacle. “It is the convergence of star, narrative, national identity, live-ness and uncertainty that gives the Olympic Games this unique power as a cultural event” (Whannel, 2012, 268), a cultural power that fuels multi-billion dollar economic transactions and capital accumulation. Dayan and Katz (1992) suggested that such massive live media events endow audiences with a sense of historical significance, while broadcast journalists “suspend their normally critical stance and treat their subject with respect, even awe” (7). Scholars have since shown that event coverage is not monolithic across time or space (Couldry et al., 2010; Puijk, 2000; Rivenburgh, 2010), and that the media event is co-produced by many voices beyond the official broadcasters, with legacy print media, digital publications, and social media offering potential avenues for alternative narratives and contests over meaning (Bacallao-Pino, 2016; Bailey et al., 2017; Sebastião et al., 2016).

Yet sports mega-event scholars continue to find that reporting on the Olympics skews toward celebratory narratives (Gaffney, 2014; Horne, 2017; Lenskyj, 2000; Miah, 2017). Miah (2017) writes:

The media voluntarily — though as a result of financial and political relationships — locate themselves within a situation in which their capacity to report the Games in full is compromised either because they don’t have enough resources to tell other stories or because they have a pre-designed Games-time reporting agenda that focuses only on celebrating the Games while minimizing the use of resources. (133)

Miah emphasizes structural relationships and the need to routinize newswork (Tuchman, 1973) rather than intentional censorship of critical stories as factors driving the media toward celebratory on-the-field content. Similarly, in much of the mega-event literature, the claim is not that there are no skeptical journalists and no critical coverage, but that the overall corpus of coverage has the effect of promoting the spectacle while downplaying or drowning out concerns about the event’s negative impacts. While the event’s build-up phase often does attract critical coverage, this content is typically sidelined once the sports event begins (Robertson, 2018).

Beyond the Olympics, sports journalism in general faces charges of falling short of journalistic norms. On the one hand, sports journalism in many countries has faced “long-standing denigration” as “the trivial back-page filler that props up more serious, substantive content” (Weedon & Wilson, 2017, p. 1375). On the other hand, critical sports scholars take sports and sports journalism seriously (Donnelly, 2011), yet have argued that the field too often sticks to a narrow focus on on-field competition or athletes' personal lives (McEnnis, 2018; Rowe, 2007; Weedon & Wilson, 2017). In this perspective, sports reporting suffers from a lack of “problem-orientation” (Rowe, 2007). Rowe argues the “identification and critique of significant problems and issues in the area under examination” is “the pivotal point at which journalism departs from orthodox public relations, promotion and marketing” (388). When sports reporting does take on a problem-orientation, it still often produces “run-of-the-mill ‘sports talk’” (e.g., about players’ injuries) instead of “incisive, critical analysis” (389) that engages “social, political and ethical matters” (Weedon & Wilson, 2017, p. 1383). In 2011, a survey of sports coverage across 22 countries found that 2.7% of the articles studied focused on sports politics and 3.1% on sports finance and economy. Highlighting a lack of sources and limited off-field reporting, the researchers summarized: “Seen in its entirety, sports journalism is of low quality” (Horky & Nieland, 2011), echoing the 2005 survey edition’s conclusion that “fundamental journalistic ideals are routinely abandoned” in sports journalism (Jørgensen, 2011). The 2005 edition found challenges to critical reporting included perceived reader preferences for game analysis and celebrity-driven narratives, commercial needs to maximize limited resources, and sports institutions’ tight control of press access.

Besides the practical constraints and incentives impacting reporting, there are also particular temptations offered by sport. Coakley (2015) has used “the Great Sport Myth” to denote the “pervasive and nearly unshakable belief in the inherent purity and goodness of sport” (403). Where the Great Sport Myth goes unchallenged, sports media may scrutinize specific institutions and practices but often take for granted that sport itself is a source of goodness and positive development. And then there is the challenge of reporting from a frenzied sports arena. Although Steen (2012) argues sports journalists strive to get “to the heart, i.e. truth, of every story” (213) just like other reporters, he still concedes that sports reporters’ immersion into the stadium atmosphere may “lead to the suspension, or outright surrender, of one’s critical faculties” (215).

The Olympics are therefore a collision of potential pitfalls for reporters. They are an intersection of the challenges of reporting on a media event spectacle and the challenges of sports journalism, an intersection where economic incentives and cultural power feed on each other to produce the spectacle. How, then, do reporters think about their role and the place of critical reporting at the Games?

Methodological Notes

I conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 journalists who reported on Tokyo 2020 for five major English-language publications headquartered in either the U.S. or U.K. — agenda-setting newspapers, wire services, and NBC. Speaking with journalists from major publications increased the likelihood that my interviewees’ work was visible, relevant, and perhaps influential within the broader field of Olympics reporters. While the patterns and themes I explore in this paper may not be applicable beyond the contexts of U.S. and U.K. mainstream media, the trends of English-language news reporting have outsized relevance to the aspirations of the host city/country and International Olympic Committee (IOC) to use the Olympics to communicate messages to global audiences.

I sought out reporters who did not just write about what was happening on the pitch, but who produced at least some work with a problem-orientation that connected the Games to social, political, and ethical matters tied to the host city. Given the dominance of pandemic concerns in the lead-up to Tokyo 2020, just discussing Covid-19 was not enough to qualify someone to be interviewed. I looked for people who covered additional social, political, or ethical matters, too. While some interviewees featured in television or podcast segments about the Games, the bulk of their published work was written text, with a mix of event coverage and broader feature pieces. Focusing on text-based journalists at major publications limits what we can generalize from these interviews. One factor enabling some reporters to take a problem-orientation to issues off the pitch was their double-digit numbers of colleagues covering other elements of the Games, many of whom focus more narrowly on on-field action. What was possible for my interviewees may not have been for many of their colleagues. Still, by talking to reporters whose work reflects some of the journalistic ideals that the literature suggests are in short supply in sports reporting, we can access insights from those who have likely bumped up against — but sometimes overcome — obstacles to critical reporting at the Games. We can access information about the opportunities as well as the barriers, a useful step toward recalibrating sociological research’s tendency to focus on bad sports reporting and overlook the good (Weedon et al., 2018).

Using Google Alerts to monitor mainstream English-language news coverage of Tokyo 2020 since early 2019 allowed me to develop a shortlist of 25 reporters to contact by email or Twitter. Of the 10 who agreed to an interview, six were sports reporters based primarily in the U.S. or Europe, and four were correspondents who cover Japan regularly for U.S. or U.K.-based publications. Four were women and six were men. Four reporters had Japanese heritage. Each reporter published several pieces on Tokyo 2020 during the main event and several more pieces in the months beforehand. All interviews took place between August and November 2021 to ensure the Tokyo Games were still relatively fresh in interviewees’ memories.

My interview guide contained questions about interviewees’ experiences at the Games and assessments of Olympics journalism, as well as tailored prompts about the reporting process for two or three stories each journalist had written about a social or political issue tied to Tokyo 2020. Using specific stories to “reverse engineer” the production process “can help uncover and understand journalists’ logic behind their news items, including priorities, considerations, judgments, norms, resources, and (other) constraints” (Reich & Barnoy, 2016, p. 2). Any interview only allows us to access an individual’s selective account of their recollection and interpretation of events, an account that is contingent on interview conditions and co-constructed in conversation with the interviewer (Nunkoosing, 2005). Using multiple interviews does not fully address these limitations, but it does enable us to find patterns across journalists’ comments that signal ideas and interpretations that are salient among this segment of the Olympics press corps.

Most interviewees agreed to talk on the condition of confidentiality. While this condition means I have excluded some details that are relevant to the paper out of concern they might expose someone’s identity, it seems to have facilitated frank conversations that might not have been possible otherwise.

Treating the Subject With Awe?

Toward the end of each interview, I shared that researchers in the 1990s suggested that at events like the Olympics, journalists “suspend their normally critical stance and treat their subject with respect, even awe” (Dayan & Katz, 1992, p. 7). I asked interviewees: what do you think about this quote? A wide range of responses resulted. One journalist rejected the quote as a sweeping overgeneralization, arguing instead:

You go in with the same mentality as you would go in covering an election or any other major story that you would be covering as a political news reporter. I don’t think you’re suspending anything … Nor are you in awe of something.

For this individual, the Olympics do not mark a departure from journalism in other contexts; the spectacle does not compromise critical coverage. As a reporter who often covers the political or business implications of sport, he sees the big event as just another job, for him as well as for most of his peers. In contrast, two journalists argued Dayan and Katz’s claim was still true for many Olympics reporters today. Reflecting on the overall body of Tokyo Olympics reporting, one said:

Does [IOC president] Thomas Bach get the same amount of scrutiny … as a leader of some country or a leader of the World Health Organization? I think the fact that he heads a sports organization gives him a huge amount of cover, right? And people don't look at it through a critical lens, usually. And I think that's really, really problematic.

Reporting on her first Olympics, this correspondent said her own approach was to treat the Olympics “as a business.” Her suggestion that Bach’s association with sports gives him “cover” among other reporters echoes the Great Sport Myth concept, implying that many in the Olympics press corps ascribe an innocence to sport, holding sport apart from the regular objects of journalistic scrutiny.

What the prior two quotes have in common is a conviction that taking a “critical stance” is as essential for reporting at the Games as for reporting in other contexts. But two other interviewees pushed back on the premise of Dayan and Katz’s quote, suggesting instead that a “critical stance” is not necessarily “normal” or always appropriate. Sports, health, and lifestyle reporting constitutes journalism too, one correspondent based in Japan argued, adding: “You want to know if [baseball player Shohei] Ohtani had a home run today or not, and that’s okay too. That’s part of journalism too.” Another sports reporter stated:

Let’s face it, the Olympic Games is a spectacle. So I think it’s only natural when you’re confronted with a spectacle to write about it sort of like it’s a spectacle. With some sort of awe or reverence. I think we’re going to see another awe-inspiring ceremony in China. I was there in 2008 with the 2,008 drums, and that was pretty awe-inspiring. So to not write about it with some measure of awe would be kind of journalistically irresponsible, right?

Elsewhere in our interviews, these two journalists discussed their aims to hold the IOC accountable, cover the perspectives of marginalized groups like Tokyo’s unhoused residents, and explore the ethical conundrums of doping. Their comments were therefore not a rejection of critical reporting, but a rejection of the simple binary Dayan and Katz drew between a “normal critical stance” and reporting from an exceptional place of awe at media events like the Olympics. For the latter journalist, the event produces a sense of awe for the individual journalist-witness, who is not overcome by it but has a responsibility to report that feeling to distant publics; the spectacle is something to be “written about.”

The concept of awe caught the attention of other interviewees, too. Several pushed back on the idea that individual journalists treat the Games with awe but identified other problems in newsroom choices and reporting practices. “I don’t see reverent attitudes among my colleagues,” one correspondent based in Japan reflected, before adding:

I guess one could say the fact of sending 40 people to cover one sporting event as opposed to sending 40 people to cover starvation in a certain country or civil war, suggests that there is some validity to that criticism. Maybe not in terms of the reverence but in terms of the priority or the investment.

Here, the reporter shifts the focus away from the individual reporter onto the decisions of the newsroom and the priorities of the news media industry. In this view, regardless of exactly what content is published, the news media collectively create the importance of the Olympics (and relative unimportance of other issues) through the sheer number of journalists who are sent to cover it. Contrary to the previous reporter, this correspondent’s comments allow more room for recognizing how journalism co-produces the spectacle, communicating societal values by the very act of its extensive coverage.

Another interviewee said that important critical stories get drowned out at the Olympics, and stated: “I don’t know that it's necessarily the awe as much as the spectacle is what’s before your eyes, and to look for stuff beyond the spectacle takes more effort.” Between the Main Press Center and the mixed zones at events, it is possible to report on the Olympics from within the spaces that have been carefully orchestrated by the local organizing committee and IOC. While most interviewees shared an interest in escaping the official press venues and finding less-covered subjects, they acknowledged this was not necessarily possible or preferable for all of the Olympics press corps. Long workdays extending into unusual hours to manage competing time zones can make writing about a televised event more feasible than venturing out into the city. This was particularly true at the Tokyo Games, where access beyond official venues was limited due to Covid-19. At least three interviewees had planned to go to Fukushima’s coastline during the Games to report on the ongoing struggles of people forced from their homes by the 2011 earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster, but said they were prevented from doing so by Covid-19 restrictions or concerns. The official spectacle — of the sports, the athletes, the apparatus of pandemic precautions — is always more accessible, offering ready-made narratives with spokespeople on hand to provide quotes.

For most interviewees, any shortage of critical stories has little to do with individual journalists being overcome by awe. Instead, the practical demands of reporting and the well-oiled Games media apparatus facilitate stories on the dramas of athletes’ lives and performances over stories off the beaten track. Major newsrooms co-produce the spectacle by devoting extensive resources to the Olympics overall and to those elements promoted by the official event apparatus in particular. Whether the resulting coverage contains enough scrutiny, and whether a “critical stance” is always desirable, were points of disagreement among the interviewees.

What Readers Want

Multiple journalists mentioned that the Olympics sports and athletes simply provide “great stories.” Describing athletes who sacrifice a lot to “do what they love,” one sports reporter said: “there are great stories there.” Another said “there are great stories from all over the world” at the Olympics, in part because “athletes feel pure in a way that we don’t see as much in professional sports. They’re easy to root for.” For these two interviewees, the fact that many Olympics athletes are unpaid and possibly precarious intensifies the stakes beyond the basic sports drama format. Not only is it often more work to look beyond the packaged sports spectacle at the Olympics, the stories officially presented as part of the spectacle — stories of the sports competitions and of the athletes — are also particularly compelling stories.

Multiple journalists suggested that these “great stories” are what their readers want from an Olympics. “There are certainly some people who just want to be left alone so they can watch and see what happens with [U.S. Olympic swimmer] Katie Ledecky,” one interviewee who had covered multiple Olympics reflected. “And ‘God, don’t tell me that Katie Ledecky’s a bad person because I don’t want to deal with that.’ Because we want this to be pure.” The idea of the “pure” athlete or sport, expressed in the previous two quotes, reenforces the relevance of the Great Sport Myth, as the interviewees associate (amateur) sport with purity and goodness. Reporting that disrupts the myth can have consequences, generating negative feedback from readers. On coverage about athletes’ on-field successes, one sports reporter said: “I think that’s what a lot of readers want too.” They added:

With gymnastics, we spent a lot of time writing about mental health issues. And I got a lot of readers who said, you know, ‘Why don't you just lighten up and watch the sports?’ […] It’s tough to find the right balance. I'm always thinking about that. […] A lot of people just say, ‘Hey look, I go to the sports page to get away from daily life, why are you bombarding me with this?’

In this case, the stories this reporter refers to did center athletes and issues connected directly to competition, given top gymnast Simone Biles’ decision to withdraw from some events due to mental health struggles and the associated physical risks. Yet in this reporter’s experience, even these athlete-centered stories generated responses that scolded journalists for traversing an imagined boundary around what ‘should’ constitute sports reporting. Several other reporters shared similar stories of receiving harsh feedback on athlete-centered stories pertaining to doping or transgender Olympians’ participation, as well as on stories pertaining to the broader Olympics context, from Covid-19 to the costs of hosting. These anecdotes all came from writers at agenda-setting newspapers and wire services, and it is unclear how the experience might compare for TV or tabloid reporters with different audiences. In today’s digital age, however, negative feedback may come from beyond a publication’s regular reader base, as anyone may weigh in on social media, sometimes reacting to a headline rather than a full story. No interviewee said they would avoid reporting a specific story for fear of reader feedback, but some acknowledged that they did not want to be seen as reporters who were always negative. Others admitted that negative feedback from readers took a toll on them over time.

Even in cases where journalists do not directly receive negative reader feedback, the assumption that what readers want is on-field drama and uplifting success tales may shape reporters’ choices around what stories to tell. As Rowe (2007) has written about sports reporting more generally, “its practice is governed by ingrained occupational assumptions about what ‘works’ for this readership, drawing it away from the problems, issues and topics that permeate the social world to which sport is intimately connected” (400). At the Olympics, these assumptions about sports fans collide with assumptions about what domestic audiences are willing to read about events thousands of miles away. Referring to the demolition of dense neighborhoods built around narrow lanes, or hutongs, ahead of Beijing 2008, one sports reporter pondered: “How do you get somebody who just wants to watch the Olympics in America to care about the hutongs in Beijing?” This kind of local sociopolitical issue may get coverage, but may be confined to one feature article if reporters and editors gauge there is not an appetite for more from their audience. Notions of what readers want is only one of several potential factors influencing coverage decisions, but my interviews suggest it is a factor that is front of mind. It is unlikely to fully deter or decide whether an issue will get coverage at all, but can influence the quantity and emphasis of coverage.

The Olympics Veteran

Among my interviewees, three reporters were covering their first Games, three were returning for their second or third Olympics, and the rest had covered four or more editions, the Olympics having become a regular feature on their biennial calendar. Reporters who rarely cover sports found themselves cramming baseball terminology, standing in a mixed zone waiting to talk to a medalist, or using athletes’ activities as hooks for their story pitches. Meanwhile, most sports reporters were expected to go beyond the sports to give distant readers a sense of place. At large publications that send double-digit-sized cadres to the Games, there is often a useful collaboration between long-time Olympics reporters who bring experience and knowledge of the Olympics system, and on-the-ground correspondents who offer local context and connections. The interplay between forms of expertise is sometimes publicly visible through joint bylines, but interviewees also described more informal moments of learning from colleagues — quick tidbits passed from one desk to another in a bureau or at the Main Press Center, for example, or stories from Olympics past recounted over beers.

Each interviewee who was at their first or second Games brought up the role of the veteran Olympics reporter. One recounted how conversations with her Olympics veteran colleague led her to view the athletes as being used by the “whole machinery” of the Olympics. “That’s what sitting across from [him] taught me because he has seen it over and over again with all these Olympics,” she reflected. Similarly, a Tokyo-based journalist reporting on their first Games said that “one of the benefits of having [colleagues] who’ve been to so many events is they’re not like, ‘Oh wow, this is so amazing.’” For these interviewees, veteran reporters were less susceptible to being awed by the Olympic spectacle than newer colleagues.

For the veterans themselves, some deliberately looked for issues they had observed at past Games. For example, one photojournalist sought out unhoused residents in Tokyo because they had witnessed forced clearances for the Rio 2016 Games. This photojournalist’s work ended up informing at least two reporters who wrote about Tokyo 2020's impact on homelessness in mainstream publications. Two other interviewees also described how their experience at Rio 2016 made them think more skeptically about the Olympics in general, and influenced the kind of stories they chose to write in Tokyo.

However, when less experienced Olympics reporters brought up their veteran peers, it was not always to compliment them. Three of the younger interviewees shared the impression that older reporters who were veterans of several Olympics were more likely to be invested in maintaining the five-ring machine, because their identity and sense of purpose as journalists were entwined with it. One sports reporter told me his group of friends — younger reporters relatively new to the Olympics — referred to some of their older colleagues who often could be found together at the Games as “the Olympic mafia.” In this reporter’s opinion, members of this group were “overselling the virtues” of the Olympics because their job and professional identity depended on it. Yet he also described the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins as a notable counter example — an established Olympics veteran whose columns he thought modeled critical analysis about the IOC. Still, other interviewees suggested that being relatively new to the Olympics meant they were more likely to question the Games’ purpose, to find the pomp of Olympic rituals to be funny or absurd, or, in the words of one reporter, to spend time wondering, “the fuck are we doing here?”

Common throughout the interviews was the idea that Olympics experience was a marker of status, separating some reporters from the broader press corps. But interviewees painted competing pictures of the relationship between quantity of experience and critical reporting. On one hand, longevity can be the basis of professional socialization into Olympics press corps norms, promoting identification with the values embodied by the spectacle and a personal investment in maintaining the Great Sport Myth. On the other, longevity means years of witnessing contradictions and developing myth-busting analyses. The newly initiated can be awed by the spectacle’s grandeur and scale, or can roll their eyes at its perceived absurdity, reactions that may or may not influence the content of their coverage. The relationship between experience and critical reporting merits further investigation through content analysis.

The Scope of ‘Critical’ Reporting

Every reporter I talked to identified in some way with values or practices that we might associate with a critical stance, whether in the sense of taking a problem-orientation to social, political, and ethical matters, in terms of holding powerful actors accountable, or through a commitment to seeking out marginalized perspectives and counternarratives. But for at least two interviewees, their credentials as a critical reporter were contested by their peers. For example, one interviewee who stated they were one of the most critical voices with regards to the Olympics was named by two other interviewees as an example of someone whose work uncritically reproduced official Tokyo 2020 and IOC talking points. This discrepancy reflects the ambiguity surrounding what it means to do critical reporting. We cannot take for granted that ‘critical’ means the same thing for everyone.

One sports columnist called his negative review of a coach’s game strategy an example of critical reporting. This use of ‘critical’ falls short of taking a problem-orientation to a social, political, or ethical situation. Three other interviewees pointed to the IOC and the Tokyo Organizing Committee’s daily press briefings for examples of critical reporting. They recounted that many journalists would ask questions that the IOC or the organizing committee probably did not want to answer, and would push for more information if spokespeople avoided the initial question. “Going to the daily press conference,” one veteran sports reporter said, “you only need to come in once and hear that there are several critical voices in that room every day, questioning a lot of things.” Similarly, a correspondent based in Japan said:

All you have to do is go to one of those press conferences and hear the questions that people are asking. And we were endlessly asking, what are you gonna do about China? Are you really gonna make your athletes complicit in human rights violations?

The image of the boisterous or tense press conference contradicts the notion of journalists treating the media event with undue awe or respect. But the presence of critical questioning at press briefings does not guarantee equally critical coverage. Moreover, according to interviewees, critical questions during Tokyo 2020 press conferences tended to focus on specific topics: Covid-19 and human rights violations tied to the then upcoming Beijing Games. These are hot button issues that, while important, do not cover the full range of structural problems entangled with the Olympics. For example, anti-Olympics activists in Tokyo were tying the Games to issues like radiation and greenwashing in Fukushima, the privatization of public spaces in Tokyo, crackdowns on political activists, and the eviction of public housing residents to clear space for Tokyo’s new Olympic stadium (Ganseforth, 2020; Hangorin no Kai and No 2020 Olympics Disaster Okotowalink, 2020; Singler, 2019; Suzuki et al., 2018). When we consider this broader range of potential critical issues, we can begin to see how so-called tough questions about Covid-19 policies and human rights violations in Beijing can function as a performance of critical journalism that checks a box. These topics can dominate media coverage, leaving relatively less space for other topics.

A clear example during the Tokyo Games was the displacement of Fukushima’s ‘recovery’ as a central narrative of the Olympics. Throughout the years of Olympics preparations, Tokyo 2020 organizers made the reconstruction of the Fukushima region a key justification for hosting: they claimed it would be a chance to show the coastline’s ‘recovery’ to the world, reinvigorating the local economy and bringing hope and “cheer-up” to the battered yet resilient evacuees rebuilding their lives (Anon, n.d.). Prior to the Games, both before and after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, select domestic and international journalists called the government’s claims about Fukushima’s ‘recovery’ into question. They pointed to high radiation levels and ghost towns, quoting residents and researchers who argued Olympics construction in Tokyo had diverted funds and resources away from Fukushima (Anon, 2016; Thorbecke & Trotter, 2021; Zirin & Boykoff, 2019). By the time of the Olympics, however, the ‘Recovery Games’ moniker was no longer primarily a reference to Fukushima, but a claim about humanity’s resilience in the face of Covid-19. Unsurprisingly, Covid-19 pervaded Olympics coverage. Journalistic accounts of quarantine and empty stands became part of the spectacle. While some reporters dropped plans to report on Fukushima because of logistical challenges tied to Covid-19 restrictions, others told me they did not report on Fukushima because it had become less newsworthy in comparison to Covid-19.

The issue here is not simply that one storyline displaced another. At stake is also the kind of questions and analysis each storyline engenders. Reporting on the alleged ‘recovery’ of Fukushima lent itself to comparing the realities on the ground with Tokyo 2020 organizers’ long-term legacy promises and justifications for hosting, provoking questions about who and what the Olympics project serves. In contrast, the Covid-19 pandemic was an unexpected turn of events to which Tokyo 2020 organizers had to respond. It was a stroke of bad timing, a force beyond the control of Olympics organizers. Considerable coverage questioned whether the Olympics should take place given the pandemic. Much of this coverage raised the specter of the Olympics as a superspreader event, and cited experts and opinion polls challenging the plans to forge ahead with hosting the once-postponed Games in 2021. While this line of reporting clearly took a problem-orientation to a matter that was social, political, and ethical, it often centered the exceptional context of the pandemic as the problem, rather than interrogating the Olympics project in itself.

The other topic mentioned by my interviewees — human rights violations in China amid preparations for Beijing 2022 — carries similar risks. Boykoff (2022) analyzed major U.S. publications’ coverage of Beijing 2022 and found no shortage of critical reporting, but suggested the IOC got off relatively lightly given the quantity of articles highlighting China’s human rights abuses. Journalists could have used either Covid-19 or the Beijing context as a springboard to scrutinize the broader Olympics project — its ongoing relationship to human rights violations, the unequal distribution of costs and profits/benefits — and some reporters did so. But considerable media coverage by U.S. and U.K publications kept the focus on Covid-19 as an exceptional context, and Beijing, China, as an exceptional host. It was critical coverage, no doubt. But critical coverage of the exceptional can displace critical coverage of the structural. The former can result in fewer resources and less attention for the latter, allowing journalists who aspire to critical reporting to feel like they have done their job.

Journalists whose articles did ask more fundamental questions of the Olympics project — such as what it is for and how we might justify its costs — received pushback not only from readers but also from colleagues who expressed their disagreement or disappointment with their articles, including in two occasions within my interviews. While debates on Covid-19 policies and human rights violations in Beijing pull some aspects of the Olympics into what Daniel Hallin (1986) has called the “sphere of legitimate controversy” (at least within U.S. and U.K mainstream media), more structural questions about the Olympics’ purpose and value are still often stuck in the “sphere of deviance,” viewed by some as “unworthy of being heard” and beyond the “limits of acceptable political conflict” (117). But the emergence of some articles asking these questions in agenda-setting newspapers suggests a shift might be slowly taking place.

Conclusion

Drawing on interviews with just 10 journalists, this paper is a call for further research that explores Olympics journalism by paying attention to its producers. The themes identified here, for instance, could inform surveys that solicit the perspectives of many more reporters, including those who may not have produced critical Olympics coverage for agenda-setting publications.

In this small sample, reporters describe an Olympics context in which they and their colleagues are not transported from a typical critical stance into a state of reverence and awe, but may end up deprioritizing critical off-pitch stories because of other factors: newsroom-level priorities; incentives to tell the conveniently “great” ready-made stories; the extra work required (in the context of limited resources) to look elsewhere for alternative stories; or, for some, an alleged sense of professional identity tied to the perceived importance and value of the Games. These factors are a combination of economic incentives and practical considerations alongside the allure of sport and spectacle’s cultural power. Regardless of what the individual journalist sets out to do, the sheer size of the press corps is part of the spectacle, indirectly affirming the values embodied in that spectacle through the decision to ascribe to it such importance. Meanwhile, the Great Sport Myth appears alive and well, sneaking into some journalists’ comments about the purity of Olympic sport, even as others criticize their peers for letting the myth inflect their coverage.

Nonetheless, critical stories are published during the Olympics media event, albeit at a significantly lower pitch than in the months of build up to the Games. Certain dominant storylines emerge and provide those journalists who have the necessary resources and flexibility with ample opportunity to bring a critical lens to important off-field issues at the Games, regardless of the negative feedback they may receive. But the presence of critical reporting at the Olympics does not guarantee coverage of the diverse range of issues that may merit attention. The opportunities and challenges for reporting from a critical stance may fluctuate with the topic and approach. Reporting that takes a structural approach to questioning the existential value of the Olympic project — asking the “the fuck are we doing here?” questions — may encounter additional barriers compared to reporting on topics where greater consensus exists around the legitimacy of the debate. In 2022, journalistic critiques of the Beijing Winter Olympics and the FIFA World Cup in Qatar abounded. For Qatar as for China before it, some U.S. and U.K.-based media approached problems of human rights violations and exorbitant costs as problems of an exceptional host, implying that a World Cup or Olympics in another location would avoid the bulk of the challenges. As the biggest sports mega-events shift away from Asia and toward Western Europe and the United States in the coming decade, the distinction between the structural and the exceptional will be key. Will the opportunities for critical reporting on structural problems with the Olympics blossom or fade? Media scholars and journalists alike must reflect upon and assess not only the presence or absence of problem-oriented reporting on social, political, and ethical matters in sports journalism (or journalism more broadly), but the type of critical stances taken in such work, and what and whom they render as legitimate objects of critique.