Browsing by Author "Halajian, Matthew"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Local Media and the Olympic Bidding Process: A political economic analysis of Calgary’s 1988 and 2026 Olympic pursuits
    (2024-05-14) Halajian, Matthew; Taylor, Gregory; Hiller, Harry; Stowe, Lisa Roxanne
    This research project explores how changes to the political economy of the local media industry impact public opinion by analyzing two case studies: Calgary’s successful bid for the 1988 Olympic Winter Games and the city’s failed bid exploration for the 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. The Olympic Games embody a melange of social, cultural, political, and economic elements alongside distinct urban, sporting, and media dimensions. I focused on scholarly literature pertaining to 1) the sports-media complex and changes to specific media industries, 2) relevant aspects of the Olympic Games and the Olympic bidding process, and 3) Calgary’s Olympic bid pursuits and how they are situated in the contemporary bidding environment. In this, the sports-media complex encompasses the fundamentally inseparable relationship between the sports and media commercial capitalist industries and their prime commodity: the audience. This study employed qualitative methods, highlighted by the 14 semi- structured one-on-one interviews I conducted with individuals involved in, or experts on, one or both of these case studies; I then performed a thematic analysis and identified five themes. In this paper, I emphasize the second theme: the role of the changing local media industry. This analysis demonstrates that the political economy of the local media in Calgary, particularly the newspaper industry, has decayed dramatically since the late 1970s. With this knowledge, I argue that this decay presents tangible and worrying consequences for the contemporary information landscape and concretely harms the ability of citizens to be adequately informed on matters of public policy.