Television, nation and the Olympic universe

There is a continuing tension in the modern Olympics between the universalist humanism inscribed within the Olympic Charter and the competitive nationalism that is foregrounded in its media coverage. Television, as the most important medium within the ‘media sports cultural complex’, is particularly dependent on generating and sustaining audiences through the active stimulation of nationalism which, not uncommonly, manifests as national chauvinism. The high cost of Olympic broadcast rights tends to encourage a pronounced focus on identification with nation in pursuit of audience maximization, with profound consequences for programming decisions concerning which Olympic sports are covered, when events are shown and how they are represented. The BBC’s coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games reveals that, even in the case of public service broadcasters who are not reliant on advertising income, the ‘national public’ mainly takes precedence over universalist Olympism. This article addresses the political economy of television in the Olympics in the context of public discussion about the coverage of London 2012 by the commercial Nine Network in Australia and the public BBC in the United Kingdom. It is accompanied by brief critical autoethnographic reflections of an Australia-based British expatriate watching the host broadcaster’s much-lauded ‘red button’ Olympics.