Looking Closely or Looking the Other Way? How German Television Viewers Respond to the Precarious Issues of the Rio Olympics

• In Event: The 2016 Rio Olympics: Content, Uses, and Effects

Abstract

The 2016 Rio Olympics were overshadowed by negative developments in the global sports world and general difficulties of such mega events. Our study argues that these circumstances burden the untroubled enjoyment for the television viewers. The study aims to find out which strategies of coping with this burden are applied by the audience in regard to their reception behavior and which audience characteristics explain the choice for different response patterns. We conducted a conjoint analysis among 300 German television viewers. Measuring viewers’ preferences for varying portions of reporting on positive and negative facets of Rio 2016 and the sports world we identified three response patterns: ignoring the negative issues, escaping into the beautiful façade of Rio 2016, or favoring to get confronted with the problems of the event. Thereby, the viewers’ sports involvement, but not their political sophistication affects the response towards the (sport-) political aspects of sport mega events.

Authors

• Felix Flemming, U of Muenster

• Pero Dosenovic, U of Muenster

• Frank Marcinkowski, U Duesseldorf - D

• Marco Luenich

• Christopher Starke, U of Muenster