Between June 14 and July 15 in 2018, the FIFA World Cup firstly went to Russia. No matter how disappointing China Men’s National Football Team failed in the qualification, the second largest economy still orchestrated the most onsite journalists among non-participant counterparts. By means of “domestication”, different national media made news and created festive air around the mega sporting event to local audiences in an acceptable, appealing and resonant manner.
In view of that no previous researches have connected journalistic “domestication” with FIFA World Cup, this article addresses two propositions. Firstly, the author works to analyze the strategies used by China Central Television 5 (CCTV5), largest state-run sports channel of TV station in China, to localize the world-known sporting event. More importantly, the writer purports to find out the key factors accounting for the active engagement of CCTV5 in the coverage of a non-participant game of national teams. Hence, we can identify how media production of socialist China is powered by globalized market economy.
The research presented here employs framing analysis based on televised images and discourses. The flagship program “Sports News”, aired once per day, is used as the case from June 1 to June 30, 2018, that is, 13 days before the opening ceremony, 14 June, until the end of the group matches, given the fair media exposure premises and observation of the content changes.
The study argues that Chinese fans watch FIFA World Cup mainly because of their fandom identification. Therefore, the author records the time length of all the videotapes within sampling period, calculates the length percentage of each national team mentioned, counts the word frequencies of individual football players, and documents the distributions of news themes to teams, competitive performers and other actors. As such, we can identify these elements and strategies combined by the medium to make the event domestically recognizable.
The writer supposes that the strongest driver for CCTV5 to report this sporting event owes to the economic factor, which explains why it showed such great enthusiasm for reporting a faraway event that the national team didn’t even play. State-owned CCTV5 has an enormous viewership foundation, based on which the channel produced its programs closer to the audiences according to the attention economy characterized by socialist market economy. This article offers a new perspective to see global sports information flow at state-run media economy lenses. Implications and suggestions will be discussed in the full paper.