The summer Olympics are regarded as the biggest sporting event in the world which gathers athletes and fans from all corners of the globe every four years. There have been many changes to the Olympics from ancient times up to now and in the meantime, they became, among other things, a handy tool for promoting nationalism. Never was this more obvious than in 1936, when Nazi Germany first hosted the winter games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which were followed by the much more notorious games in Berlin later that year. In my thesis I researched how different or similar the newspaper reports in The New York Times and The (Manchester) Guardian were in comparison with the year 2024, when both of these newspapers – in the meantime The Manchester Guardian became just The Guardian – were reporting about the Paris Olympics. From archive newspaper clippings I developed a critical discourse analysis and tried to answer my research questions. Nationalism today is reproducing differently but is still very much present in media. Racism, which incidentally left such a mark in Berlin 1936, has turned from underlining physical attributes to more political and philosophical differentiation, while athletes are still considered to be an extension of their respective nations, which experience successes and faliures through collective emotion.
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