Loughborough University
Browse

Media framing of the International Paralympic Committee’s WeThe15 Disability Inclusion Campaign during Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022: A comparative analysis

Download (389.72 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2025-02-04, 15:48 authored by Andrea GeurinAndrea Geurin, Emily HaydayEmily Hayday, Siena Morgan

During the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games, the International Paralympic Committee launched a global campaign called WeThe15 to draw attention to the 15% of the global population with a disability with the hopes it would become the largest human rights movement in history. Utilizing framing theory, this study sought to understand how the mass media framed WeThe15 in its coverage during the Tokyo 2020 Games and the subsequent Paralympic Games, Beijing 2022, and to determine if any differences existed between the two Games. Using qualitative document analysis, we examined English-language articles about WeThe15 during both Games. There were stark differences in the amount of coverage, with our search uncovering 177 articles from 22 countries during Tokyo 2020, and only 10 articles from six countries during Beijing 2022. Three broad frames and four overarching themes were used to contextualize the WeThe15 campaign during the Tokyo Games: basic campaign information, partners leveraging the campaign, athlete narratives, and amplifying disability visibility. Basic campaign information was identified in coverage from the Beijing 2022 dataset. Our findings highlighted the need for sustained media coverage and engagement for growing social movements and offered both theoretical and practical implications of media framing of social movements related to sport.


History

School

  • Loughborough University, London

Published in

Communication and Sport

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

© The Author(s)

Publisher statement

Users who receive access to an article through a repository are reminded that the article is protected by copyright and reuse is restricted to non-commercial and no derivative uses. Users may also download and save a local copy of an article accessed in an institutional repository for the user's personal reference. For permission to reuse an article, please follow our Process for Requesting Permission: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/process-for-requesting-permission

Acceptance date

2024-12-20

Publication date

2025-01-31

Copyright date

2025

ISSN

2167-4795

eISSN

2167-4809

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Emily Hayday. Deposit date: 30 January 2025

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC