Berliini ja Pekingi olümpiamängude kajastamine (Eesti) Päevalehes ja Postimehes

Date

2009

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Tartu Ülikool
ajakirjandus
spordiajakirjandus
olümpiamängud

Abstract

Description

The Reflection of the Berlin and the Beijing Olympic Games in the Newspapers (Eesti) Päevaleht and Postimees The main purpose of this bachelor`s thesis was to examine how two Estonian daily newspapers reflected the Beijing and the Berlin Summer Olympic games. In both years the period which was investigated was the time between the beginning of March until the first day after the end of the Olympics in August. In the year 1936 the period was from the 7th of March until the 17th of August and in the year 2008 it was the time between 10th of March to 25th of August. These beginning dates were selected because of the fact that the 7th of March of the year 1936 marks the date when German army entered the Rhine demilitarized zone and last year it was the 10th of March when the demonstrations in Tibet began. The method what was used in this study was quantitative data analysis because this is the only method that affords to examine a big amount of articles. For this study 1637 articles were encoded, 873 from the year 1936 and 764 from last year. These numbers reflect the total amount of the Beijing and the Berlin Olympic games articles which appeared in the selected newspapers during these periods. The articles were divided into three categories. The first one consisted of the articles which told about the apolitical side of the Olympics and the second part was formed by those, which reflected the political side of the Olympics. Third category was also formed and it consisted of the articles that informed about the international crisis. But only the first two were investigated in this part of the study which dealt the genres because the main purpose was to examine the reflection of the Olympics and not the crisis of Tibet and Germany. Also eight hypothesis were put up for this study. One of them indicated to be true, four were partially true and three of them were wrong. It was correct that most of the articles which told about the two Olympic games were apolitical not political. The numbers were 683 and 81 in the year 2008 and 854 apolitical and 19 political articles were published in the year where the Berlin Olympic games took place. The hypothesis which stated that the amount of apolitical articles will enlarge when the Olympics are approaching was partially true because there was a small decline after April in the year 1936. It was expected that the most popular genre is the news but it was not so in the context of the Berlin Olympics. Partially true was also the hypothesis which stated that the articles which informed about the situation in Tibet and in Germany will gradually decrease after March. Unquestionably most of the articles in this category were printed in March but last year there was a small increase in August and in the year 1936 the same happened after May. Partially correct was also the presumption that the biggest amount of political olympic articles were printed in March and in August and the lowest in May and in June. Last year the peak was actually in April and in the year 1936 in May there were more articles than in June, in April and in July. The hypothesis which stated that there are no big differences in numbers between the same year newspapers in the reflection of the the Beijing and the Berlin Olympic games appeared to be wrong. Also appeared that most of the olympic articles came from the year 1936 not from the year 2008 as it was assumed and thirdly there was a significant difference in the proportion of the three analysed categories between the two analaysed years. This study gives a very good statistics to compare it with similar materials from some other Olympics. One possibility would be the year 1980 Summer Olympic games in Moscow but here in Estonia it is not possible to conduct that kind of study because our journalism was then strictly censored. But in the future I assume it would be the year 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi that could own such a political dimension.

Keywords

H Social Sciences (General), bakalaureusetööd

Citation