Sport or Politics? A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis of Chinese and American Media Coverage of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games

Abstract

As two leading sporting nations who tied for gold medals in the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, how their media outlets depict such a mega sports event is worth exploring. This study aimed to investigate what and how the Chinese and American media outlets (China Daily and CNN) reported the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. In particular, the question of whether they regarded this quadrennial event as an opportunity to deliver politics-related topics to serve their own interests in every aspect also needed to be addressed. Corpus-based critical discourse analysis, a mixed methodological framework, was applied to conduct this study. Techniques from Antconc, including keywords, colloca-tion, frequency, and lexical distribution, were employed on the two study cor-pora, which were compiled from the 2024 Paris Olympic Games news reports from China Daily and CNN. Based on the empirical evidence, the author con-cluded that the political topics in these two media outlets were mainly dis-cussed, and the author demonstrated how they used specific language patterns to depict them. The author hopes to provide an efficient, operative, and com-prehensive framework and methodological pattern for analyzing texts in social and political contexts by demonstrating the potential of combining corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis.