Dr Carolyn Jackson-Brown
Senior Lecturer in Journalism & Sports Journalism
Leeds Trinity University
Former broadcast television video editor, she is the author of Disability, the Media and the Paralympic Games (2020) and her research focuses on media production and representations of difference.
Twitter: @carolynbrown1
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?
- ‘A Games like no other’: The demise of FTA live Olympic sport?
- 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
- 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
If anybody wants to see how media producers can shape meanings about ‘others’, with the potential for changing perceptions in their own societies, a useful place to look is at the Paralympic Games. Camera angles, tone of voice and commentary are just some of the ways that audiences digitally consume subliminal messaging. However, scheduled media saturation or deliberate onscreen invisibility also speak volumes and shape which meanings are made. Because deeply held prejudice has historically often shown disability in a negative light, the representation of Paralympic athletes across onscreen digital content is becoming a very important subject. The competitors’ qualifying physical impairments provide a tangible point of difference that potentially mark ‘them’ out from ‘us’, but as they are part of our national sports team we actually need to positively identify with them onscreen instead. Therefore, depicting individuals as ‘different’ without being ‘other’ is fundamental to successful Paralympic broadcasting, but isn’t it a skill that all other media producers should also acquire?
One of the opportunities afforded to each host nation for reframing how society responds to disability, is to capitalise on the compatible live viewing time zone, by saturating their country’s broadcasting schedules with unifying mainstream sport media coverage. They can prize the coverage out of the marginal late night and early morning diversity graveyard slots as well as providing access to digital content online. When the Games came to London in 2012, the UK media producers sculpted intended meanings about Paralympians morning, noon and night, with a Breakfast Show, the live sport all day, and a witty banter evening chat show to finish. This normalisation process propelled the competitors into the spotlight as elite athletes on a par with their Olympic counterparts, even making some of them household names. However the public service broadcaster had to borrow meanings associated with other brands to reassure the public and used the biggest marketing budget in its history to do that.
So what story did they market?
For London 2012, we were invited to Meet the Superhumans, a band of athletes you could not feel sorry for, after rather cheekily saying to the Olympians ‘thanks for the warm-up’ via a London city poster campaign. Then for Rio 2016 we were told other high-achievers; talented musicians, rock-climbers and artists were superhuman too. However, the Tokyo 2020 marketing trailer has a brick firmly through the glass of all that, literally shattering the concept of extraordinary to leave a resoundingly human message, with a salutary application for us all, if we had been watching.
Audience research has shown that the UK’s domestic media coverage of the 2012 Games, with its ground-breaking reframing and normalisation of para-athletes, affected not only the mainstream sports audience, but also changed attitudes towards disability for 1 in 3 of the population – roughly 20 million of the UK’s citizens. Globally, London 2012 was the first truly social and online Games, with 82.1 million views of the International Paralympic Committee’s Facebook pages and over 1.3 million tweets mentioning ‘Paralympic’ during the course of the Games.
Meanwhile sports personalities more generally have been using their social media feeds to find their own voice, representing themselves and in charge of their own narratives. On 26th August 2021, Channel 4 showed the USA swimmer Anastasia Pagonis’ TikTok video on broadcast TV, pronouncing that ‘’blind people aren’t hopeless idiots though – just a thought’’ followed by a studio discussion about lots of other misconceptions around that disability. It was perhaps rather unfortunate, during the opening ceremony, that a UK presenter mentioned ‘how good the musicians with impairments were’. The expectation that their difference was a disadvantage clearly remains embedded in those words, as much as they might for a ‘female’ president or a ‘gay’ marriage.
Clearly the success of hosting a sports mega event in any city, whether in the Global North or South, is symbiotically linked to the quality and quantity of the media coverage that goes with it. But does it really matter if we depict some people as ‘other’ and alienate them? At a time when women and music are being banned from a social presence in Afghanistan and black lives are still not mattering in some parts of the digital public sphere, then we really need to take care of our representations of difference when the rest of the world is watching. This is a role that will fall to the upcoming host nations of China, France and Italy shortly, landing crucially on the shoulders of the United States when they host the Olympics and the Paralympics, finally from the same city, in Los Angeles in 2028. Will both the events be covered with parity and, potentially without public service media on board, whose voices might be heard?
