The analysis of the media coverage of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games that was carried out at CEU-UCH is the only research at a Spanish university into these two events that has so far been sponsored by the International Paralympic Committee
The world’s most prominent researchers in the field of media coverage on the Paralympic Games and adaptive sports are meeting today and tomorrow at CEU Cardenal Herrera University (CEU-UCH) in Valencia. These experts, invited by the CEU-UCH Research Group for Disability and Communication (GIDYC), are from universities in cities like Kent (United Kingdom), Paris (France), Lausanne (Switzerland), Alabama (United States), Toronto (Canada) and Auckland (New Zealand). The researchers will attend a conference at CEU-UCH titled ‘Challenges of research on disability, communication and sport’, where they will be debating the research challenges in their field.
The goal of this international meeting of experts is to discuss at length the research lines and methodologies that are being developed, as well as others that will be necessary, to analyze communication on sport and disability. The goal is also to facilitate exchanges between conference attendants so as to encourage research cooperation. The conference is financed by the government of the Valencian Community and by CEU-UCH’s Vice-Rectorate of Investigation and International Relations.
The following professors today and tomorrow will present the progress they have been making in their investigation on communication, sport and disability: Sakis Pappous (University of Kent), Eric de Léséleuc (INS HEA, Paris), Anne Marcellini (Faculté des Sciences Sociales et Politiques de la Université de Lausanne), Margaret Stran (University of Alabama), Jill Le Clair (Humber Institute on Technology & Advanced Learning, Toronto), Toni Bruce (University of Auckland) and organizer of the conference Josep Solves, professor in Jorunalism (CEU-UCH).
London 2012 versus Beijing 2008
The analysis of the media coverage on the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games that was carried out at CEU-UCH is the only research at a Spanish university into this subject matter that was sponsored by the International Paralympic Committee. As the committee usually sponsors research from the field of physical education connected to sporting performance, it has worldwide accepted only two investigations that address paralympic games from the perspective of the Social Sciences.
Josep Solves, professor in Journalism at CEU-UCH and chief investigator in the GIDYC research group, at the Disability Sport Conference 2014, which was organized in Coventry (United Kingdom) in September, presented part of the results the group obtained from their research into the media coverage on the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The analysis of the corpus revealed that 447 of the news items, all taken from Spanish media, discussed the Paralympic Games, while 6,398 discussed the Olympic Games. That number equals 6.9% of the total, or a daily average of only 2.2 news items on the Paralympic Games in the Spanish press, compared to 33.6 items on the Olympic Games.
The amount of news items on the Paralympic games has, in total, increased between 2008 and 2012; however, this increase can only be attributed to sports daily Marca. The media coverage on the Paralympic games has, in fact, decreased in each medium separately, newspapers and radio as well as TV. The research by the GIDYC group on the 2008 Paralympic Games in Beijing was published jointly by the Spanish Committee of Representatives of Persons with Disabilities (CERMI), the Spanish Paralympic Committee and Ediciones Cinca.
