Water, Water Everywhere: Swimming Dominates Olympics Coverage

By: Joe Strupp News coverage of the Summer Olympics in Beijing has been focused mostly on three sports and one athlete, swimmer Michael Phelps, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center?s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

"News about swimming and diving was easily the most popular Olympic subject, accounting for nearly 40% of all the coverage in the first week of the Games," the report said. "Gymnastics came next with 11%, while track and field constituted another 10%. No other competition came close to generating that much attention.

"Swimmer Michael Phelps, with his record-setting eight gold medal performance, was the focus of more than one-quarter of all the stories studied, generating seven times more media attention than the next most covered athlete," the survey added.

In addition, it revealed that "China and the Olympics combined were the No. 2 news story during the two weeks studied (behind presidential campaign news), due in part to the network that aired the games. NBC devoted almost half of its newshole to those stories in that period, roughly three times the amount of news coverage other outlets produced."

The report is based on an analysis of more than 390 news stories about China or the Olympic games from Aug. 3 to Aug. 17. The majority of the data is drawn from 48 different news outlets in five different media sectors.

The full report is at:
http://journalism.org/files/Olympics%20REPORT%20PDF.pdf

Among the report?s other major findings:

? "Next to Michael Phelps, the next most covered athlete at the Olympics was Russian-born American gymnast Nastia Lukin (4%). The No. 3 Olympic newsmaker is 58-years old and long retired. Mark Spitz, whose record of seven Gold Medals in the 1972 Olympics was topped by Phelps, accounted for 2% of the coverage in the first week of the Games."

? "Coverage of the Olympic Games and China accounted for 14% of the newshole in the period from Aug. 3-17. The No. 1 story?the presidential election?accounted for 23%. The conflict in Georgia was a close third behind the Games at 13%."

? "Just as NBC television news gave extensive coverage to the competition, MSNBC.com, NBC?s news Web site, devoted 29% of their lead news coverage to the Olympics and China between August 3-17."