ABSTRACT
New Zealand won the rights to host the 2011 Rugby World Cup (RWC) on the back of a slogan – A stadium of 4 million – that implied almost that the entire country would support the event. What transpired was a media frenzy of coverage that discursively supported the ‘truth’ of the slogan. In this article, I interrogate public responses to the Cup, taking a bottom-up approach that focuses on those whose voices and experiences were silenced in the public discourse. The results indicate not only the power of media coverage to influence individuals’ perceptions of how others feel but its marginalizing nature for those views that are not represented. One consequence of the 2011 RWC coverage was that New Zealanders who were disinterested in, or actively resistant to, the Cup found themselves alienated from the dominant discourse and without a public space to speak their truths. Ultimately, despite some private contestation of the media’s ‘truth claims’, the lack of public challenge left the articulation of rugby and nationalism not only intact but even further entrenched.
