OPINION | Pongprapunt Rattanaporn: Reporting the Olympics with sporting spirit

Today, the world is looking forward to the grand conclusion of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. During the past few weeks, people have detected some biased news reports and comments on the 2022 Winter Olympics and the host of the Games. Can these journalists, most from the West, claim political impartiality? Well, such a claim would be difficult to prove; however, they must have foreseen the responses from their readers. These western media have politicized their Olympic reportings and are not contributing to the world peace as a whole.

For quite some time before and during the 2022 Winter Olympics, there have been political, economic and technologial conflicts between China and the U.S., along with their allied nations. The U.S. has tied all these conflicts to human rights, democracy and environmental concerns etc. It is not unusual that these conflicting frames are so naturally embedded into the Olympics reports of western media which claim to professional, impartial and objective. 

However, as an outsider, I should say that it is irresponsible journalistic practice to have placed the Winter Olympic Games into the above political frames either in the form of news reports or comments as it pollutes and undermines the attitudes of global sport fans and athletes and reinforces a hatred towards China and Chinese people.

I can easily cite an example of a British newspaper that has approached the 2022 Winter Olympics from a politicized perspective, even though they commented on a regular news fact like a Uyghur athete lighting the torch with a Han athlete at the opening ceremony.  “Then an Uyghur athlete lit the torch together with a Han athlete in a display of enforced unity which was, I guess, supposed to prove that there’s no-genocide-honest-guv, but instead gave the world another excuse to talk about the heinous treatment of Uyghurs,” commented the Telegraph on 15 February 2022. 

Another example is in the rhetorical use of a news headline by Reuters on 3 February 2022: “India won't send diplomats after Games 'politicized' by China,”  which implies as if it is a hard fact that China has politicized the 2022 Winter Games.

Sadly, this is not the first time the Olympics hosted by China was politicized in Western media. Back in 2008, there was a similar journalistic movement undermining the image of China as the host of the Summer Olympics that year. Such actions are against the ultimate goal of theOlympic spirit and the world peace as a whole, which I think deserve condemnation.   

“Sports have nothing to do with politics” and “the Winter Olympic Games is not a stage for political posturing,” as Wang Wenbin, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson pointed out. Global media, including western media, should not have been tools for international politics, so as to avoid  harming world peace and human dignity, which the Olympic Games represents.

The 2022 Winter Olympics, the second Olympics Games held in the Covid-19 pandemic era, has come to its completion today. The closing ceremony is expected to include a cultural presentation, closing remarks, and the formal handover to Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, the host cities of the 2026 Winter Olympics, with the motto is “Dream Together.”  Until then, let us dream it and do it together for the global sport, world peace via our global mass media!

The author, Pongprapunt Rattanaporn (蔡鹏宇), is a lecturer at the School of Asian and African Studies and Ph.D. candidate at the School of Journalism and Communicartion, Shanghai International Studies University (SISU).