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.

Keywords:

• politicization
• domestication
• power dependency
• local orientation
• foreign news
• Beijing Olympics

Notes

^1. In fact, the Taiwanese media covered China to a much lesser extent than one might have expected given their political and economic ties as well as geographical, linguistic, and cultural proximities. While the content analysis contained 50 news items about events in China in Singaporean newscasts and 37 items about events in China in Japanese newscasts, there were only 27 items about events in China in Taiwanese newscasts and none concerning the prelude to the Olympics.

^2. The authors wish to thank Akiba Cohen from Israel, Abby Goodrum and Elizabeth Godo from Canada, Thomas Hanitzsh and Angie Vu from Switzerland, Knut de Swert from Belgium, and Lars Willnat from the United States for their help in providing the original news items for analysis.

^3. Some may argue that using these raw numbers can be misleading as the countries differed in the length of their newscasts and therefore the total number of news items they can provide to begin with. However, since the total number of items about the Olympics is rather minimal, even for those countries which covered the story relatively more frequently, it is unlikely that the amount of coverage of the Olympics was constrained by the amount of news space available. Hence, the raw number should be an adequate indicator. In any case, post hoc analysis using a percentage of all news items about the Olympics as the indicator yielded essentially the same results.

^4. Although the IOC is located in Switzerland, the Swiss project team did not treat the mention of the IOC in a news item as an indicator of the item involving Switzerland. As a matter of coding procedure, this was because of the lack of explicit mention of Switzerland (or its cities) when the Swiss news items quoted the IOC. This should be conceptually appropriate too, as many news organizations are likely to treat the IOC simply as an international organization; hence, the fact that its headquarters are located in Switzerland does not make the IOC a Swiss institution.

^5. The authors are certainly aware of the potential reliability problems of such information, but it remains the most comprehensive set of numbers available. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese

^6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Summer_Olympics

^7. www.mofcom.gov.cn/

^8. Exact information about total trade volumes in the first two months of 2008 was not available. In any case, the ratio of China trade in January and February 2008 to total trade in 2006–2008 should provide a good indicator of the importance of China trade with the various countries.