Dr Ji-Hyun Ahn
Associate Professor of Global Media Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at University of Washington Tacoma. Her research interests include racial politics and nationalism in East Asian popular culture, primarily in the context of South Korea. She is the author of Mixed-Race Politics and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in South Korean Media.
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
- 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
- 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
Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), one of South Korea’s national terrestrial broadcasting networks, was heavily criticized for its inappropriate choices of images when reporting the Parade of Nations during the opening ceremony for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The Parade of Nations is intended to promote a spirit of unity and peace through its presentation of the participating countries to the world at large. However, in covering the event, MBC used the image of a salmon to represent Norway, Dracula to represent Romania, a Bitcoin symbol to represent El Salvador, and so on. Even worse was its use of national tragedies to represent some nations, including images of Chernobyl for Ukraine and, for Haiti, of an angry mob with a caption describing the nation’s “unstable political situation on account of the assassination of its president.” When the Indonesian team entered the parade area, MBC showed a caption describing Indonesia as “the country with a low GDP and a low COVID-19 vaccination rate.” These inappropriate and even offensive ways of referring to the countries reinforced national and racial prejudices and stereotypes.
This so-called “MBC incident” immediately went viral on social media, both domestically and internationally, with foreign newspapers and news channels such as BBC, CNN, and The New York Times reporting on the case in detail. Here, I discuss this incident as an example of the paradox of representing nations at the Olympics. First and foremost, this case indicates that the internal editorial decision-making process at MBC is not working properly, for no one within the organization flagged the images and captions as inappropriate before they aired. Especially given that MBC was severely punished by the Korea Communications Commission for using inappropriate captions to introduce some countries when it broadcast the opening ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it seems obvious that MBC, as a media institution, has a serious oversight problem regarding content. In other words, the MBC incident represents, not a simple mistake, but rather a matter of institutional practice.
Looking beyond MBC’s poor editorial decisions, I draw attention to the manner in which a national television broadcaster represents foreign countries. MBC explained in its apology statement following the incident that “The images and captions are intended to make it easier for the viewers to recognize the entering countries quickly during the opening ceremony.” Ideally, then, the Parade of Nations during the opening of the Olympics provides a unique opportunity for television broadcasters to promote global unity and public diplomacy while also educating and entertaining audiences with eye-catching visuals that well represent each nation. Television broadcasters have commonly used images of national flags, traditional food and clothing, and iconic figures for this purpose. Michael Billig’s well-known concept of banal nationalism describes precisely such mundane, daily consumption of these national symbols and practices. As a global sporting mega-event, the Olympics, and especially the Parade of Nations during the opening ceremony, is among the most prominent events at which banal inter-nationalism – as a container model of the nation – takes place, in the sense that it represents the world in the form of more than 200 national teams as they enter the stadium together, each marching under its flag.
As the premier representation of banal inter-nationalism, then, the Olympics is the place where the tension between the global and the national is particularly intense. Despite the fact that the Olympics is a global sports event for participating athletes as well as audiences worldwide, the event inevitably fuels nationalistic sentiment for the simple reason that the nation-state serves as the fundamental designation of the participating team, though there are, to be sure, exceptions, such as Palestine, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Furthermore, the games are competitions among participating national teams, and the national broadcasters prioritize the airing of games in which their national teams or athletes perform. From all of these perspectives, the Olympics are, by nature, simultaneously global and national.
The MBC incident shows the limits of one media outlet’s imagination regarding the nations that participate in the Olympics. To some degree, the incident also, I suggest, represents a Korean way of understanding the world. That is, the use of a simplified image of each nation for quick and easy presentation—an economical way of presenting the nations—and of captions referring to nations’ GDPs or political problems captures Korea’s economically-focused and developmentalist understanding of the world. In this respect, the MBC incident represents not simply one broadcaster’s mistake but rather an opportunity to think deeply about the politics of the representation of nations at mega-events such as the Olympics.
