"Tokyo Olympics, awakening the best in us": analysis of Jornal Nacional coverage of the Olympic Games for Brazil

Abstract

The present study aimed to analyze television coverage of the Tokyo Olympic Games (2021) to investigate how symbolic contents were signified through the media discourse adopted during the mega-event. A qualitative-quantitative documentary analysis was carried out to analyze the content of the videos, naming the amount of sports content transmitted, the most prominent modalities in the event and media discourse analysis. The videos were selected through the television channel ‘Rede Globo’, using the ‘Jornal Nacional’, with a study section involving events from the Opening Ceremony to the Closing Ceremony. In total, 556.1 minutes of the 13 documents found were analyzed. This study showed that there is a considerable change in the editorial priority of television news, in which the Sports and Sports Debate category occupied around 52% of the total news content analyzed. It is also noticeable that, within the framework of modalities present in the Olympic Games, football stands out with the longest exposure time in broadcasts. Finally, based on discursive analysis, we delimited the coverage image categories that were most repeated in the media context of television news: (1) national heroism; (2) overcoming, (3) tradition and rivalry; (4) hero succession. Furthermore, through the interpretation of the symbolic content conveyed in the analyzed coverage, we observed that the categories delimited here as nuclei of images, are close to the stages of the nuclear unit of the hero myth (separation-initiation-return), reinforcing the association between the image of athletes and the mythical-anthropological matrix of the hero figure.