Prof Raymond Boyle
Professor of Communication and Director of the Centre for Cultural Policy Research at the University of Glasgow. He has written widely on sport and media and his latest book, The Talent Industry was published in 2018 by Palgrave.
Twitter: @raymondboyle67
Section 2: Media Coverage & Representation
- Twitter conversations on Indian female athletes in Tokyo
- ”Unity in Diversity” – The varying media representations of female Olympic athletes
- The Olympic Channel: insights on its distinctive role in Tokyo 2020
- How do we truly interpret the Tokyo Olympic ratings?
- Between sexualization and de-sexualization: the representation of female athletes in Tokyo 2020
- Reshaping the Olympics media coverage through innovation
- An Olympic utopia: separating politics and sport. Primary notes after analyzing the opening ceremony media coverage of mainstream Spanish sport newspapers
- What place is this? Tokyo’s made-for-television Olympics
- The paradox of the parade of nations: A South Korean network’s coverage of the opening ceremony at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics
- Tokyo 2021: the TV Olympics
- Why we need to see the “ugly” in women’s sports
- “The gender-equal games” vs “The IOC is failing black women”: narratives of progress and failure of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics
- Ghana: Poor local organizing, and absence of football team dampens interest
- Megan Rapinoe: The scary Bear for many Americans?
- Temporality of emotionalizing athletes
- Fandom and digital media during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games: A Brazilian perspective using @TimeBrasil Twitter data
- Media wins medal for coverage of athletes as people, instead of entertainers
- Media frames and the ‘humanity’ of athletes
- Reporting at a distance. Stricter working conditions and demands on sports journalists during the Olympics
- New Olympic sports: the mediatization of action sports through the Olympic Games 2020 Tokyo
- Simone Biles, journalistic authority, and the ideology of sports news
- Representations of gender in the live broadcast of the Tokyo Olympics
- Americans on ideological left more engaged in Summer Olympics
- Nigeria: Olympic Games a mystery for rural dwellers in Lagos
- National hierarchy in Israeli Olympic discourses
- Equestrian sports in media through hundred Olympic years. A roundtrip from focus to shade and back again?
- Reshaping the superhuman to the super ordinary: The Tokyo Paralympics in Australian broadcasting media
- Is the Paralympic Games a second-class event?
- The fleeting nature of an Olympic meme: Virality and IOC TV rights
- Tokyo 2020: A look through the screen of Brazilian television
- Is the Paralympic Games a second-class event?
- How digital content creators are shaping meanings about world class para-athletes
- How digital content creators are shaping meanings about world class para-athletes
- The male and female sports journalists divide on the Twittersphere during Tokyo 2020
- Super heroes among us: A brief discussion of using the superhero genre to promote Paralympic Games and athletes
- “Everything seemed very complicated”: Journalist experiences of covering the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games
- Representing high performance: Brazilian sports journalists and mass communication professionals discuss their philosophies on producing progressive Paralympic coverage
- Representations of gender in media coverage of the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games
‘A Games like no other’ appeared to be the mantra surrounding the Tokyo Olympics. In terms of media coverage, it was for the BBC certainly an Olympics like no other in terms of the restrictions in live broadcasting. For those viewers who had grown accustomed to the plethora of choice regarding accessing live sport across the BBC’s digital platforms in 2012 and 2016, these Games differed significantly. The complex rights deal with Discovery meant that for the first time the BBC only carried two live events at any one time (one on television, the other online via the iPlayer), with catch up content being available via the red button and the iPlayer.
Perhaps fortuitously for the Corporation the time difference between the UK and Japan negated some of the impact of this, unless you were a diehard who were happy to stay up all night to catch live action, rather than snack on the catch-up programmes available during the hours of UK daylight.
Yet a new generation of sports fans has grown up with an expectation that sport only really matters if its live. This lack of live coverage of so many Olympic sports on the BBC, played out in some distinctive ways.
For example, watching the Games in Northern Ireland on the BBC meant that while the ubiquitous team GB coverage was extensive, indeed at times it felt like the Team GB Channel rather than one covering a multi-national, multi-sports event, coverage of Team Ireland was only available via catch up. Given the cultural complexity of Northern Ireland, around thirty athletes travelled to Tokyo from here representing Team GB, but others such as Rory McIIroy in golf, Eilish Flanaghan in track and field and Mark Downey in cycling all represented Team Ireland. Previous BBC Olympic coverage since Beijing 2008 has allowed access to live sports and hence highlighting Irish competitors was part of the digital service.
This time around, with only two live sports at any one time and an unrelenting focus on Team GB athletes, it was more difficult to follow Team Ireland. Indeed, such was the nature of the rights issues that unless you had access to RTE coverage (the Republic of Ireland Olympic broadcaster whose signal spills into Northern Ireland’s border counties) or you paid your subscription to Discovery, following Team Ireland live in Northern Ireland was impossible via the BBC. Those viewers in Northern Ireland that access RTE via subscription services such as Sky, also found RTE’s Olympic coverage geo-blocked, as part of the very particular IOC rights regime which mean they only cover those regions that enter the games. Hence, RTE get the 26-county coverage for the Republic of Ireland and the BBC, get GB and Northern Ireland coverage (including the 6 counties in Northern Ireland).
I hope you are keeping up.
In short, not for the first time, catering for the needs of the Northern Ireland population, did not appear to be very high up the broadcasting agenda when the rights to these games were being thought through.
The restrictions on live coverage also meant we had the tension between the BBC’s news drive to report live sporting results, while lagging in terms of its ability to show the actual event live. So, BBC sport tweets the result of the Team GB Taekwondo contest with Bradley Sinden, ten minutes before the end of the contest being watched on BBC television, prompting some consternation on Twitter.
Another consequence of the rights regime was the focus on Team GB, that at times felt like it was squeezing out the wider sporting culture and the non-GB stories that are always part of the rich tapestry of the Games. With less live sport to show, naturally the BBC were going to hone this to Team GB related events and stories, but for some older viewers such as myself (my first TV Olympics was Montreal 1976) the Games were also about discovering all these athletes, and sports, that I would know little about, but have their stories revealed by the television coverage.
Of course, in those days a British gold medal at the Games was a rarity, lest we forget that the medal glut for Team GB is a relatively recent phenomenon.
For some these games seemed to signal the end of the free-to-air unlimited access to the Games that audiences across the UK had become accustomed to enjoying via the BBC. As reduced live coverage of the next summer Games in Paris in 2024 also looms, we ended these Games in the UK with a call from Ofcom (the UK regulator) for the government to update the legislation protecting free-to-air major international events in its proposed new broadcasting bill.
The danger is that ‘these games like no other’ may become, in terms of access to live Olympic sports the norm for future UK viewers unwilling to pay extra for the privilege.
