Covering Protest at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics: A “Peace Journalism” Inspired Analysis

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Brian Wilson University of British Columbia

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Nicolien VanLuijk University of Ottawa

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DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.2017-0227
In Print:
Volume 36: Issue 1
Page Range:
32–47
Restricted access

This paper reports findings from a study of Canadian mainstream media coverage of anti-Olympic protests around the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. The study included an experiment with a hybrid analytic approach, as we drew together Galtung’s “peace journalism” (PJ) framework with a more critically and contextually-oriented strategy. We found that articles written about the anti-Olympic protests commonly fell into the ‘war/violence’ sub-categories proposed by Galtung, which are: propaganda oriented, elite oriented, and ‘us vs them’ oriented. We also identified segments of articles that were ‘peace-oriented’ in that they offered nuanced contextual information and included perspectives of traditionally marginalized groups. We conclude by comparing our findings with other work on coverage of sport-related protests and reflect on the value of a PJ approach for the study of conflict in sport media.

Wilson is with the School of Kinesiology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. VanLuijk is with the Department of Geography, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Address author correspondence to Brian Wilson at brian.wilson@ubc.ca.
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