Political Employment of Hate Speech in Sports Coverage: Case Study of Qatar 2022 World Cup

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Ahram Canadian University

Abstract

Sports have extraordinary abilities to transcend the cultures of societies, and sports are a global language that brings a stable and constant shared ground. Moreover, the feature of sports media coverage allows societies to acknowledge athletes' contributions, especially in the World cup, Olympic Games, and other international competitions, which reflects the different and diverse nations’ cultures.  
This study which applies the Critical Discourse analysis, investigates the construction of hate speech in the news discourse of different countries’ newspapers in its coverage of the Qatar 2022 World Cup. This study evaluates the content and nature of reporting in the British Guardian, American New York Times, Spanish Marca, French Le Monde, British Columbia, Canada Vancouver Sun, Argentinian Buenos Aires Times, Danish Copenhagen Post, Brazilian Rio Times, and Japanese Japan Times newspapers. In addition, this present study attempts to delineate how Qatar was perceived during the event, trying to shed light on the correlation between the construction of hate speech and political employment. These objectives are examined in the context of Speech act theory.  
The current study results reveal that hate speech was constructed and embedded in the news discourse of almost all newspapers studied. Consequently, the coverage was skewed because of the political employment that shed light on the coverage. The news coverage was tremendously negative before the World Cup even began. Various news articles on alleged migrant human rights, beer banning, and LGBTQ+ rights dominated the news coverage for weeks despite denials from the host nation Qatar. The hate speech was constructed because of the invisible rejection from the Western countries of Qatar’s winning the bid to host the World Cup. This consequently increased the cultural tension.

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References

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