ABSTRACT
In this chapter we consider the relationship between mega-events and the media, principally through the event-based popular cultural forms (or, more emphatically, the event-based popular cultural ‘social movements’) of sport in general and of the Olympic Games in particular. There are three main steps in the discussion. The first section exemplifies the ‘dramatological’ dimension of mega-event analysis. Here we consider some of the most influential available perspectives on the relation between the media, mega-events, and sport-in particular ‘media-event’ analysis, ‘multi-genre’ event analysis, and ‘media ritual’ event analysis. The second section exemplifies intermediate and longer-term ‘contextual’, political and political economic dimensions of mega-event analysis. Here we consider the theme of ‘media sport’ and its regulation, looking in particular at sport in the corporate strategy of the Murdoch media organisation in the 1980s and 1990s. We also look at the implications of the development of this strategy for cultural citizenship and policy in the UK and European sporting and regulatory contexts in the contemporary period. Finally, in the third section we discuss the particular genre of media sport, namely the Olympics as a media event which, along with World Cup soccer, attracts the biggest global TV audience of viewers in the contemporary period. In this section we look in particular at some detailed studies of the 1988 Seoul Olympics and the 1992 Barcelona Olympics as case studies in the construction of the Olympics as media sport and and as media mega-events.
