Media Exposure for Olympic Host Cities

A main reason often given to host a mega-event, such as the Olympics, is the generated media exposure for the host city. However, the sentiment of content might influence destination perceptions people have. Therefore, the goal of this research is to investigate if organising the Games leads to more positive than negative exposure for the host. This is done by performing a manual media content analysis for Sochi and Rio with newspapers articles extracted from the LexisNexis© Academic database. A time period division is made in order to analyse different effects for the periods before, during and after the Games take place. The results indicate that the media coverage is mainly negative for both events. Only a small exception is existent for the insignificant positive coverage during the Rio Olympics. Organising the Olympics for these cities thus implicated mainly negative coverage, but bad publicity is also publicity.