The Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games will be remembered not only for Canada’s record-breaking gold medal grab and the outpouring of patriotism throughout the country. Canadians will also remember the media’s extensive coverage of the Games.

Never in the country’s history have there been so many channels covering the Games. Canada’s Olympic Media Consortium, a media corporation formed to cover the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics and the 2012 London Summer Olympics, consisted of CTV, Canada’s largest private broadcaster, and Rogers Media, a unit of Rogers Communications Inc. The consortium paid US$90 million, thus outbidding CBC, which has a long tradition of covering the Olympic Games.

“Consortiums have begun to spring up over the last few Olympics. It is a way of sharing your labour power; it’s a way of sharing your technology,” said Margaret MacNeill, Associate Professor at U of T’s Faculty of Physical Education and Health. “And it also happens in the context in which you’ve seen with the global fall in the market the last two years, [when] advertising revenues dived.”

But MacNeill does not like this idea. “The fact that you have to pay for the right to be in an event, that’s a huge change in journalism. [Not only] the broadcasters, but the print media worry about that too. […] The Globe and Mail would have access to athletes before anybody else did.”

The Globe and Mail, owned by CTVglobemedia, became the official national newspaper of the Vancouver Games. Because of the Globe’s affiliation with CTV, almost every article in the Globe’s Olympics online section linked to the CTV Olympics website, annoying some people. But this is exactly what MacNeill called a media mogul.

CBC and the National Post formed a media partnership in providing coverage on the Games, given that the two corporations have started sharing sports and business news content since last October. CBC had broadcasted the previous five Olympics, but is no longer “Canada’s Olympic network.”

“CBC traditionally has been well-funded to do what they do because they get the public sector money from taxes, but they also get advertising revenue,” said MacNeill. “CBC has been covering [the Games] pretty well, but there are some things that aren’t that much different, because [CTV] stole Brian Williams, the face, the host.”

“When you get to the Olympic Games, there’s very few people that work full-time for those networks, so they are hiring the best people in the industry. So sometimes it’s the exact same people. […] You are not going to see an awful lot of difference.”

The consortium did invest a lot in all aspects of Olympics coverage. According to J-Source, a project of the Canadian Journalism Foundation in collaboration with journalism schools and organizations across the country, CTV and Rogers Media together sent approximately 1,400 staffers to the Olympics, which means that about one in eight media workers sent to Vancouver worldwide to cover the Games is from the broadcasting consortium.

This allowed the audience to watch pretty much any event on TV, gospel for people who do not have access to the Internet.

In addition, the broadcast consortium covered the Olympics in 22 languages to reflect Canada’s multiculturalism and diversity. The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, Asian Television Network, and OMNI Television were among the broadcasting networks that provided multilingual commentary and analysis.

The CTV-affiliated channels kept the ratings high: 13.3 million viewers tuned in to watch the Opening Ceremony. Ninety-nine per cent of the Canadian population experienced the Vancouver Olympics through the consortium’s platforms.

One could argue that ratings do not mean anything, as there was basically no other choice for the viewers, and that the Olympics were held on Canadian soil helped bolster the ratings. However, it is hard to deny that CTV has put in a lot of effort in covering the Games.

Nevertheless, the mainstream media came under fire for a lack of coverage on critical stories, in large part due to corporate sponsorship of the Games.

“Newspapers have what I called ‘barricaded access,’ which is sad. If you pay for the exclusive rights, you have the right to interview athletes first after the gold medal, before the print journalists,” said MacNeill. “There is this hierarchy of rights; you can’t be a full watchdog if there is [inequality]. This is not equal freedom of the press for the different media. If you are an athlete, you don’t have the right to really choose who you want to talk to. And that’s all come down because of the power of big corporations.”

The IOC and the VANOC have been under fire for imposing media censorship.

“The Olympic protests weren’t well covered. [They] were not front page news. If it was Beijing, you believe it would have been on the front page,” said MacNeill. “There is a lack of critical investigation. There is very little of what goes on at the biggest level of this incredibly big machine. It sells papers, too. When newspaper readership is going down, you want to have a story that gets people to buy something. The Olympic gold makes people feel good; doesn’t necessarily improve their lives, but it makes people feel good in this crappy economy. […] People like winners.”

The Vancouver Olympics also received sticks from British media. Notably, at the beginning of the Games, Lawrence Donegan, a journalist from the Guardian, called the Vancouver Olympics the worst Games ever, due to the large number of negative and tragic stories popping up in the early going.

“[England is] going to be the next Olympic organizers for the Summer Games, so their media is quite critical of our organization, because it’s the same thing that’s going on,” said MacNeill. “There were people questioning, ‘shall we be putting in this amount of money into security, into buildings when we are not building new parks and recreational facilities for the kids?’”

The Olympic torch relay, the longest in history to be contained within Canada, sparked controversy over the media’s approach to covering the event. Many journalists from the mainstream media participated in the torch relay.

In a critique on j-source.ca, Stephan J. A. Ward, Professor of Journalism Ethics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, refused to call the torch relay “Canadian journalism’s shining moment,” and claimed that reporters running in the relay compromised journalism ethics, as the action violates the general principle of independence. David Eby, executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, echoed Ward’s opinions, and argued that journalists have sacrificed independence in journalism, and served up for the IOC as “mascots for the Olympics.”

The debate was brought on CBC Radio’s The Current. A panel featuring Gary Mason (The Globe and Mail), Tom Harrington (CBC), and Frances Bula (freelance journalist) responded to Eby’s comments. While Mason called Eby’s concerns “ridiculous,” Harrington denied that CBC has relieved its responsibilities for journalism when covering the Games.

Frances Bula claimed that journalists live with conflict of interest all the time, and that the Olympics are no different from the other occasions. She also responded to Ward’s article, “It really surprises me that, for example, a respected journalism professors like Stephen Ward will say that journalists have been compromised, but there is not a shred of evidence to say they [held] back on this story.”

But MacNeill said she also had problems with journalists participating in the torch relay. “If you are covering the news, you are making your own news, and then covering it. Now that’s the real mediascape at this point; the political economy is the one that has shifted. So the role of the media as watchdog has come into question.”

Perhaps this may be the perfect time for other media sources to fill the gap. Indeed, social media did just that, and flourished in the world’s biggest sporting occasion. The citizen bloggers reported on Olympic protests and social issues surrounding the Games, among many other issues.

This was the first time social media was widely deployed in an Olympics hosted by a democratic country. People are free to criticize the IOC, VANOC, the Games itself, the mainstream media, etc. on their own platforms. “Communication has never been solely one way, but [now] it’s much more interactive, much more engaged,” said MacNeill, explaining that the use of social media has broadened the audiences and that the public now has “multiple ways of engaging in the media.” In 2012, London will probably set the stage for an even bigger boom in social media, given the scope of the Summer Olympics.

The Games organizers also turned to social media to disseminate public information. Facebook and Twitter.com/2010Tweets attracted 1.1 million fans and 14,000 followers respectively.

In addition, athletes shared their feelings and emotions on the computer through these networking tools. “What a fabulous way. In the past, athletes only got represented through their official press kit and now you can follow your favourite athlete online,” said MacNeill.

But MacNeill criticized the Olympic organizers for controlling what the athletes say online. “They’ve tried to clamp down on athletes blogging, unless they are officially representing something. I think that athletes’ rights to expression have been dampened quite a bit by them putting strict rules around their use of social media.”

“We need to question why they get that voice. Do they represent the nation, or aspects of sports, or aspects of the media, or aspects of the sponsors that are aligned with the values of those bigger powerbrokers? I find it a very serious issue when the freedom of expression of athletes gets signed away in their contracts. They should be able to criticize when the facilities are dangerous. Those are serious issues of stifling, not just freedom of speech, but then freedom to intervene in ways that make changes that make sport healthier, that make sport more democratic, and certainly in a bigger picture, to make it more accessible.”

Despite the golden ratings, CTV repeatedly came under fire, mainly for instilling too many elements of entertainment into the Games coverage. But this might prove that there is now more of an intersection between entertainment, sports, and news. When you see entertainment reporters going to the Olympics, you know that the audience now has different demands.

Having said that, perhaps the 2012 London Summer Olympics would be the right time to assess the media consortium’s coverage of the Games, as the consortium should have gained a lot of experience from covering the Vancouver Olympics.