(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
closer the distance between the news and the country relevant to it are geographically,
or the more recent the news is, the more coverage the international news will get
from the media.
Wu (2000) explained the distinction of two approaches—"real world" and "news
world." First, journalists decide the worthiness of an event to be told as news. Based
on the decision, it will be focused on various gatekeeping processes consisting of a
coverage, editing, and flow. Second, in a wider approach, it explained the relation
among variables with the premise that international news flow reflects political,
economic, social, and cultural global system.
With the analysis of 38 countries' international news, that study showed general
international determinants. First, they are geographical dimension, population, and
economic power per nation. Second, there are physical dimension and a quantity of
political, economic, and cultural exchange among the countries. Third, it is separated
by an international agency, and the press affected the writing and flow of news after
analyzing what factor is decisive. According to his study, the most important factor to
determine the quantity of international news coverage is the quantity of trade among
countries. In addition, he revealed that the ownership of the international agency and
the existence of the agency's branches or correspondents are important in the choice
of international news. Also, he proved partially the determination of factors such as
the dimension of territory and population and geographical proximity. In addition, he
proved that languages and cultural homogeneity and similarity are not determinants of
international news. It is difficult to generalize, but it is possible to explain that an
economic trade is affected by global communication and not ideological conflict (Park
& Lee, 2001).
Similarly, sports coverage is a kind of news, and news must be based on the truth.
Of course, it remains a problem which is true and which is not. But we should deal
with an event that really happened as much as possible. And it emphasized that we
should not be informed about wrong news for certain reasons and purposes (Lee,
1993). However, in the case of sports news, sport itself has a feature that prefers
sensibility over rationality. Fans accept easily this situation without reluctance. It
especially exists in an international event like the Olympics or the World Cup
because everyone wants his own national team to win (Kim, 2003).
Recently, studies about the importance of relation between a sport, a nation, and
national identity appeared (Cronin, 1999; Cronin & Mayall, 1998; Hargreaves, 2000;
Bairner, 2001; Porter & Smith, 2004; Silk, Andrews & Cole, 2005). Allison (2000)
insisted that a nation's dimension is important in sport (Bainer, 2009). Sport is a
culture and an ideology, and it plays a certain role in the power relation among
countries. In other words, sport itself has politics (Park, 2007).
The study dealt with the World Cup, one of the biggest sports events in the world.
The World Cup holds games for 16 days, which is longer than the Olympics. It is
held within a month. It's a festival of a global village. The World Cup has played a
role of being a bridge among nations in a situation of war or hostile relation. For
example, the United States started building a better relationship with Iran despite
severed economic relations.
Although the World Cup is a single event, 204 countries are involved in FIFA and
250,000,000 players participate in the games. It is more than the UN. This is
presumed given that the soccer clubs in the world are 600,000, and the number of
teams is 4,100,000 (Chung, 2008).
Since 1990, the FIFA has developed mega sports events through media around the
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