The discussion is divided into two sections. The first section discusses the findings of print newspaper coverage of all 17 countries or regions. The second section discusses the findings of coverage from Facebook postings of 14 countries or regions (excluding China, Iran and Saudi Arabia). Additionally, the second section also includes discussions of the Facebook coverage in comparison to the print newspaper coverage.
Print newspaper coverage
The purpose of this study was to investigate and compare print and social media coverage of the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games across 17 countries or regions.
Total number of articles and photographs
There was a huge disparity between the countries or regions in terms of the total number of articles throughout the two-week period of the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games. The top three countries with the highest number of articles and photographs were Japan, Malaysia and the United Kingdom, which is consistent with findings from Cheong et al. (2021). Newspapers in Japan contributed over 700 articles, and this amount was almost equivalent to the stories published by all the newspapers of the remaining 16 countries or regions. Similarly, for the total number of photographs, Japanese newspapers dominated with close to 500 photographs published throughout the Games. This dominance could be attributed to Japan being the host country, consistent with other studies. Pappous et al. (2011) note that countries that have hosted or are due to host Paralympic Games tend to publish more photographs in their newspapers. It should not be surprising, then, that all attention in Japanese newspapers was centred on the largest multi-sport and multi-disability event in the world. This may also explain why the United Kingdom featured so highly, as a former host country. The anomaly in the top three is Malaysia, which has published almost 200 articles and has not hosted the Games before. There are a couple of plausible reasons for this. First, there was extensive media interest in the Paralympic Games after Malaysia won their first gold medals at the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games (Cheong et al. 2021), which contributed to media attention at the following Games. Second, the Paralympic Games had become a priority for the Malaysian government, with then-Youth and Sports Minister Khairy Jamaluddin offering Malaysian gold medallists at the Rio Games equal prize money as their Olympic counterparts, while the National Sports Council in Malaysia offered in 2016, a pension scheme for all Paralympians medal winners similar to Olympians, putting the two events on par in terms of significance (Augustin, 2016).
In contrast, three countries (Portugal, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam) had the least number of articles and photographs. This is likely because some of these countries had sent few participants and/or did not achieve much success in the previous Paralympic Games. For example, both Saudi Arabia and Vietnam sent small contingents, with 29 and 44 athletes in total from all Paralympic Games combined, respectively. In addition, both countries had only won five medals since their first participation in the Paralympic Games (International Paralympic Committee n.d. IPC – Paralympic News. Sports and Results). The case is different for Portugal, which had a relatively large representation with more than 300 athletes and nearly 100 medals to date (Comité Paralímpico de Portugal, 2023). However, a previous study about the characteristics and trends of the media over the Paralympic movement had reported that there was a general dissatisfaction due to low media coverage and devaluation of Paralympic sports in comparison with Olympic sports (Marques et al. 2015). It appeared that while there was an increase in awareness about the Paralympic Games in Portugal, awareness about the importance of the Paralympic movement is still low in Portuguese society.
Subject of articles and photographs
Consistent with previous studies, athletes received the most attention in the newspaper coverage in all the countries or regions surveyed, as a testament to their dedication, sacrifice and challenge to compete at the highest level (Cheong et al. 2016). Other individuals who were also part of the Games, such as officials, coaches, and volunteers, received minimal coverage. Japan’s Yomiuri published the most articles on officials and volunteers, with many articles associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the challenges of infection control and running a tournament without spectators. Malaysia’s The Star highlighted coaches the most—many of those featured were coaches who had previous success at the top level (Paul, 2021). Hong Kong and Indonesia did not publish any articles about officials, coaches, and volunteers, perhaps due to the limited space in printed newspapers for sports coverage, with the available space taken up by highlighting the outstanding achievements of athletes. That China (and its regions) focus more on achievements in sports can be contextualised through studies that have shown the country uses medal success to signal international soft power (Liu, 2020).
Besides athletes, the category of Others had the most coverage, with Iran and Japan publishing the most stories in this category. Further investigation about the coverage under the subject of Others in Iran was stories related to the opening and closing ceremonies, sports contingents, and the history of participation in the Paralympic Games. These topics appeared common across coverage for the Others category across all countries or regions in the sample.
Nationality of subject
All except one newspaper had featured more local than foreign subjects. The heavy focus on local subjects is consistent with findings from previous literature studying the Olympic Games (Jakubowska, 2017) and Paralympic Games (Brooke, 2019). This finding, also discussed by Cheong et al. (2021) in their paper on media coverage of the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games, suggested that the spirit of nationalism is closely linked to Paralympic sport (and sports in general, see Seippel, 2017). Brooke (2019) suggested that this might be the case because of the framing of discourses of challenge and resilience. Only one newspaper, China’s Reference News, featured approximately eight times more foreigners than locals. This was likely due to it being a newspaper that mainly reports news from around the world outside mainland China (Chase, 2018), prioritising foreign content.
Australia’s Herald Sun and The Daily Telegraph published an equal number of local and foreign subjects. Considering the popularity of sports in Australia (Roychowdhury, 2024), the official partner (Channel 7) of Paralympics Australia wanted to provide comprehensive coverage of the Paralympic Games, which has gained considerable popularity in recent years (International Paralympic Committee, 2022). To achieve this, Channel 7 gathered an impressive number of former and current Paralympians, who brought unrivalled experience, knowledge, and understanding to Paralympic coverage (Bruno, 2021).
With a multicultural populace that takes a keen interest in sporting events and activities, the broadcasting team showcased the diversity and achievements of Paralympians from different countries or regions and cultures, as well as support for the Australian Paralympic Team. As a result, it is likely that the Australian media, both in print and online, wanted to disseminate news consistent with the coverage by Channel 7, which celebrates the achievements of Paralympians (both local and foreign), and reflects the values and interests of their (Australian) audience.
Gender of subject
Approximately two-thirds of the newspapers featured more males compared to females. This gender inequality is consistent with media studies that have been conducted on the Olympic Games (Cheong et al. 2024; Delorme & Testard, 2015, Packer et al. 2015), as well as previous Paralympic Games (Buysse & Borcherding, 2010; Cheong et al. 2016; Cheong et al. 2021; de Leseleuc et al. 2010; Packer et al. 2015), with the possible explanation for this inequality due to higher number of male representation (Cheong et al. 2016; Cheong et al. 2021) and that Para sports was historically male dominated (Rees et al. 2019).
Meanwhile, three countries (China, Ireland, and Singapore) had highlighted more females than males in their newspapers. China was represented by 132 female athletes and 119 male athletes in Tokyo 2020. The number of female athletes winning gold, silver, and bronze medals was greater than the number of male athletes. This could explain why females had received more exposure and media coverage than males in newspapers there. As for Singapore, it is likely that the Singaporean press tended to focus on females more than males because of the strengths of the women’s delegation. First, there were more women who represented the country in Tokyo 2020—six women to four men. Secondly, Singapore’s medal success was dominated by Singaporean women’s backstroke S2 specialist Yip Pin Xiu, who won two gold medals, leading to more media attention; none of the other Singapore competitors won a medal. This corroborates Singapore’s Lianhe Zaobao’s coverage of the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games (Cheong et al. 2021), which found that this newspaper covered women (75%) more than men. It was argued that this phenomenon occurred because the females were all the nation’s medallists (Cheong et al. 2021).
The cases above showed the complexity in trying to give definitive meaning to the data in this study, echoing the systematic review of elite athletes with disabilities which included 17 articles which suggested that it was “unclear whether or not gender discrimination actually exists in reporting of elite athletes with disability in the media.” (Rees et al. 2017, p 378). This is in part due to the historical factors mentioned above, as well as its finding that of seven studies reviewed, almost half found that the gender representation in the media was proportional to gender breakdowns in participation at the Games. While our study did not include such a level of analysis, the same reasoning could be applied with respect to the proportion of medal winners, in the case of Singapore, above. Nonetheless, there is also literature surrounding issues around diversity in sports journalism—one article found that visibility of female sports journalists was under 10% in several countries (Boczek et al. 2023), which could have factored into the above findings (see also Descamp et al. 2024).
Disability of the subject
Of all the different disabilities featured in the news coverage, wheelchair athletes received the most attention. This particular focus on wheelchair athletes could be explained through several reasons: first, wheelchair sports count for more than a third of all the Paralympic sports in contention; secondly, from a historical perspective, the precursor to the Paralympic Games was the 1948 International Wheelchair Games (DePauw, 2012), leading to wheelchair sports dominating in the early years of the Paralympic Games (Rees et al., 2017); and finally, through cultural significance: wheelchair impairments are visible (Martínez-Bello et al., 2023), and alongside fibre carbon blades runners use, the wheelchair “contribute to the media spectacle of enhanced disabled bodies” (Kolotouchkina et al., 2021, p 3). To this last point, scholars have noted that the wheelchair is “the most universal symbol of disability” (Silva & Howe, 2012, p 182); indeed, a person in a wheelchair is the International Symbol of AccessFootnote 2.
Our analysis showed that in a significant number of countries or regions, including Thailand, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, and Australia, wheelchair athletes featured the most in both newspapers. Other countries like Vietnam only featured wheelchair athletes (n = 10). However, this wasn’t the case with other countries—many of which featured other disabilities in higher proportion; Iran featured no wheelchair athletes at all. The most notable contributor to the representation of wheelchair athletes in our study is Japan, which had the highest number of articles and photos. Aside from the sheer volume of total articles and photos in the dataset, this finding is also consistent with other studies. One in particular analysed Japanese photographic coverage of the Paralympic Games, and noted that the percentage of wheelchair sports has always been the main feature in news coverage since the Atlanta 1996 Paralympic Games up to the Rio 2018 Paralympic Games (Yajima & Fujita, 2021). Where the 2020 Paralympic Games are concerned, one other possible reason for this trend is that there was a lot of media coverage of the wheelchair basketball team from Japan as a result of winning the silver medal.
This attention to athletes who have done well could also explain why Iran contributed the most coverage on cerebral palsy, while Malaysia contributed the most coverage on intellectual disability. In the case of Iran, athletes with cerebral palsy were able to reach the final stage of the competitions in which they had participated, leading to more media coverage. Similarly, for Malaysia, one of the three gold medals the country took home was won by Abdul Latif Romly, an athlete with intellectual disability. He dominated the headlines as he was the first Malaysian to defend a Paralympic title, having also won gold in the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games.
Coverage from Facebook postings in comparison to print coverageTotal number of posts and photographs in the Facebook coverage
In total, there were 1776 posts and photographs in the Facebook coverage compared to 3029 in print, approximately 40% less than the print media coverage. There was a reduction in coverage from at least one newspaper of all participating countries or regions, except for Hong Kong and Indonesia, where both newspapers had an increase in coverage. These findings suggest that in many countries or regions, print media is still relevant for disseminating sports news, even with the significant use of online media for news consumption globally. In addition, newspapers in some countries or regions may have had multiple Facebook pages, and as such, some of their coverage was spread out across different social media pages, and therefore, outside the scope of our sample collection. This was certainly the case for the United Kingdom, although in this particular instance, this would have been negligible due to the low number of social media posts about the Paralympic Games in general by news organisations in that country. Another possibility is that the temporal relationship of social media and news (Tenenboim-Weinblatt & Neiger, 2018), which can favour timeliness in news means that media organisations prioritise online posting of breaking news or spectacular breakthroughs, and as such, do not offer as comprehensive coverage of the sporting event as they do in print.
Three countries (China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia) had published articles in the print media but not on Facebook. The social media platform has been banned by the government in China and Iran, while in Saudi Arabia, online users prefer other social media platforms (e.g. X—formerly Twitter) to Facebook (Alotaibi & Alotiby, 2022); this is within our limitation as indicated in the Methods section. Therefore, it was expected that there would be no posts or photographs related to the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games on Facebook in these countries.
In terms of the total number of data points, once again, Japan’s Yomiuri published the most posts and photographs throughout the duration and per day. Meanwhile, Malaysia’s Sin Chew and Indonesia’s Kompas published the second and third highest total and average number of posts and photographs, respectively, with Kompas posting three times more on Facebook compared to its print coverage. While the examples of Japan and Malaysia seem understandable, considering both countries were among the top three when it came to print media articles and photographs, Indonesia’s anomaly could be due to sheer numbers. Indeed, internet users in Indonesia are among the highest in the world (Tarsidi et al. 2023), leading to news organisations relying heavily on social media for news in most cases (Firmansyah, 2022).
For the newspapers with the lowest number of posts, most were from countries or regions that had a small representation at the Paralympic Games with few medals won. This could have influenced public and media interest in the Paralympic Games broadly.
Subject of posts and photographs in Facebook coverage
As with the print newspapers, athletes were also the main subject of the posts and photographs in the Facebook coverage (n = 1040). Yomiuri (Japan), Sin Chew (Malaysia) and Thairath (Thailand) contributed to almost half of the posts/photographs about athletes (n = 436). The coverage was about the profile or background of athletes, pre-competition information about the athlete, as well as the achievements of athletes. There was much less coverage about the other individuals who were part of the Games, with officials (n = 47) receiving more coverage than coaches (n = 21) and volunteers (n = 5). The Malaysian newspapers contributed to approximately half of the news about officials and coaches (n = 28). For example, there were stories about officials in relation to the Chef de mission (“Chef de mission rubbishes claim Ziyad was 28 minutes late to waiting room”, 2021) and stories about the coach of an athlete who was disqualified (“Muhammad Ziyad’s coach: I am responsible for disqualification,” 2021). Meanwhile, one example of a story involving volunteers was about the role of volunteers in helping athletes who were injured (“Despite the need to spray painkillers to compete, Le Van Cong still won a silver medal at the Tokyo Paralympic Games,” 2021). These very low numbers for non-athletes are consistent with our argument earlier that only sensational and breaking news—in sports, athletes are usually the main personalities of interest—is prioritised for social media dissemination.
Besides individuals, the category of Sports and Others had received the second and third highest coverage, respectively. Examples of coverage about Sports were about the classifications of wheelchair racing events (Thairath Sport, 2021). As for examples of coverage about Others, the Facebook pages of the newspapers from Malaysia had highlighted family members (“Mum wills son to long jump gold with screams of ‘Fly Latif… fly Latif!’,” 2021), congratulatory messages (“King and Queen congratulate Bonnie for winning Paralympics gold,” 2021), and cash incentives for athletes (Kaur, 2021), among others.
Gender of the subject in Facebook coverage
Similar to print coverage, male subjects were featured more than female subjects in more than half of the Facebook coverage. One country, Vietnam, featured 100% male subjects in both their newspapers. The bias against females was also reported in a previous study involving Twitter (now X), another social media platform (Adá-Lameiras & Rodríguez-Castro, 2023). One possible reason for inequality could be due to the imbalance in participant numbers, similar to the proportion argument made earlier for a similar finding in the print news. For example, the Portuguese Paralympic delegation participating in the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games comprised 33 athletes of whom only 10 were female (Comité Paralímpico de Portugal, 2023).
The United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and Singapore were the only countries or regions where both newspapers highlighted more females than males. In the case of Singapore, it appeared that both print and Facebook coverage shared the same characteristics around gender coverage and were possibly related to medals won. The Singaporean medal success was dominated by female swimmer, Yip Pin Xiu, and none of the other competitors won a medal. For the United Kingdom, para-cyclist Sarah Storey dominated much of the media coverage as she won three gold medals in Tokyo, which made her the most successful British Paralympian in the country’s history. As suggested by Cheong et al. (2021), this could be a reason for the similarly low coverage in Singaporean male athletes at the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games and could also be a relevant explanation for the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. Additionally, another possible reason why countries or regions had more coverage of females could be the same explanation given by Litchfield and Kavanagh (2019), which offered that bias could be reduced and more equity could be shown when it came to news reporting on social media due to spatial parameters. This is consistent with earlier discussions around diversity in sports journalism. It would be interesting to see if this trend will include more and more countries or regions as research on the news coverage of Paralympic Games on social media increases.
Nationality of the subject in Facebook coverage
Print and online media coverage shared the same characteristics, nearly all the countries or regions featured more local than foreign athletes. As above in the print newspaper analyses of this study, and noted in other studies (Brooke, 2019; Cheong et al. 2021), it appeared that there was a trend that media coverage of the Paralympic Games was closely linked to patriotism. This might explain the lack of foreign subjects on Facebook—if social media is used for timely and breaking news, the most relevant to followers and readers would be victories of their own athletes. Conversely, the findings were different for Australia, Ireland, and Vietnam. Both Australian newspapers, Herald Sun and The Daily Telegraph, published equal numbers of local and foreign subjects, whereas Ireland and Vietnam published more articles about foreigners than locals. In a content analysis of new media news coverage from six countries, Eagleman et al. (2014) suggested that there was less nationalistic biasness online as the internet provided spaces and opportunities for equitable coverage. This could explain the case of Vietnam, where the reporters found it important to highlight the outstanding qualities of counterparts of the Vietnamese competitors, as well as other outstanding athletes from other countries (Khuê, 2021).
Disability of the subject in Facebook coverage
Disabilities were featured in the same pattern as the print media, whereby wheelchair athletes were featured the most, followed by mixed disability, les autres, amputee, visual impairment, intellectual disability, and cerebral palsy. While Japan still contributed the most wheelchair and visual impairment, Malaysia featured the most les autres, amputee and intellectual disability, perhaps due to the athletes with these disabilities contributing to the best performances, and as such, making the cut in terms of editorial choices of which news are significant enough to be shared online through social media dissemination.
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