ABSTRACT
While the lack of critical media attention is alarming, it is not surprising. The ability of the Sydney news media to cover the bid and its implications in a critical or even interrogative way was effectively nullified by its co-option onto the organising committees. The media are among the institutions through which the nation is constructed and they constitute the primary processes through which discourses of nationalism are deployed and disseminated. The media's independence is compromised not only by the institutional alignment with government which the Electoral and Administrative Review Commission report describes, but also by the media's industrial identification with the interests of business. As journalism's authority has declined, the various media have attempted to repair the effects of this in different ways. In television, there has been the obsession with 'colour and movement' and the construction of viewer identification with the program presenter.
