Sport diplomacy and the Anglophone mediation of Korean Peninsula politics

Attempts to capture the ‘Western media’s’ treatment of North and South Korean relations at the Olympics and Paralympics (for brevity these events will be mostly treated as one here) should be treated with caution. This discussion is not designed to measure, via the empirical precision of quantitative content analysis, how certain media outlets engage with sport-related politics and diplomacy on the Korean peninsula. Instead, it selects relevant texts from Anglophone news ‘quality’ and tabloid news outlets in analysing some significant but inexhaustive ways in which Korea comes into the frame via sport mega events held on the peninsula as well as in other parts of the world. The paper addresses the relationship between sport diplomacy and the media coverage of the Olympics and Korean peninsula politics in Anglophone contexts. It concerns not just mediation – the reproduction of sport in the media with all its attendant meanings and uses – but mediatisation, a stronger process of changing the world that is mediated as a consequence of that mediation. It argues that, regarding the Korean peninsula, the Anglophone (and, no doubt, other world) media are drawn by sport mega event and attracted by sport diplomacy dedicated to peace and reconciliation, but prone to expect the easily digested results generated by sport encounters and conditioned to witness clear wins and losses within timeframes analogous to those of the sports tournament.