ABSTRACT
The Olympics are the rare event that can be described as both a vast and a narrow media product. In the argument for the vastness of Olympic media, the scope of the Olympics is unparalleled and still growing. The 2008 Beijing Summer Games reached a global audience of 3.6 billion unique viewers (International Olympic Committee [IOC], 2008), yet the 2012 London Summer Games easily surpassed that total with 4.8 billion unique viewers at least sampling some portion of the Games (ImgAce, 2012). The dollar amounts involved are equally staggering. A total of $3.914 billion was spent to relay broadcast coverage of the London Games (Olympics. org, 2012), with nearly a third of that coming from just one nation (Collins, 2012) – the United States – from the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). People witness the widest swath of nations they likely experience the entire year and do so through a mediated lens, where coverage is often completely saturating. For instance, NBC’s 2012 Olympic aggregate television and Internet coverage totalled 5,535 hours of programming (Deitsch, 2012) – approximately seven and a half months of coverage if viewed in entirety. It is little wonder that the Olympic Games are now referenced as the “biggest show on television” (Billings, 2008, p. 1).
