STATE POWER AND HEGEMONIC VALUES: MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE SUPER BOWL AND ARIRANG MASS GAMES

Andray Abrahamian

Introduction

In the swathe of spectacle that mediates and defines social life, one of the most important, emotive and mass-participatory events is the ‘big-time’ sporting fixture – the ‘sports spectacular’. Theodore Adorno wrote that ‘if one were to summarize the most important trends of present-day culture, one could hardly find a more pregnant category than sports’ (Adorno 1981: 56). Sport, for Adorno, is both an institution of social domination and a factor in cultural formation (Khabaz 2007: 30). Sporting events impart value to society in ways that are far more diverse than mere enjoyment of the prowess displayed by athletes in an arena. In the modern world, where broadcast technologies allow such wide levels of passive participation, the constitutive and reconstitutive power of such events looms especially large in any society. For participants – and this includes the audience – sport helps define and construct the very society in which they live. Civil society and cultural values are transmuted or affirmed and state power is exalted. The superi- ority of the system that produced the event is constantly referenced and held aloft for praise either directly or indirectly. In the United States of America, the National Football League (NFL)’s Super Bowl is the clearest example of such an event. The NFL is the most popular professional sports league in the country. Also, unlike other top professional American sports, a single contest acts as the climax to the entire season. In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, it is the Arirang Mass Games.1 The Arirang Mass Games are by no means the first mass gymnastics event in the DPRK, but they are the biggest in terms of participants, viewers and longevity as a multi-annual event. Despite the similar functions of these sporting spectacles, western media analyses of

1 The song ‘Arirang’, from which the Mass Games takes its name, is Korea’s most popular and culturally significant folk song. With obscure origins and orally transmitted, there are up to thirty versions in both North and South Korea. They all speak to loss or tragedy in some form.

124 andray abrahamian the events that take place in the ‘Oriental World’ are strikingly different to those of the ‘homegrown’ event. Similarities between the home and for- eign event are ignored, while the foreign spectacles are used rather as focus points on which to project criticism of the alien society at large. This paper analyses the discourse of western media outlets like NBC, CNN, CNBC and the UK Guardian and their response to these two ‘national’ sporting events.2 The two countries – the DPRK and the USA – are ideologically, militarily and politically opposed to each other. They were chosen to highlight not just differences but important cultural similarities that exist but that are frequently ignored by the media in North America in particular and the West in general.

The Events

The Super Bowl The Super Bowl is the National Football League’s championship game, played annually at a neutral ground, usually an indoor stadium or some- where with a relatively warm climate. American Football has its roots in the late nineteenth century, when American universities began altering the rules of rugby and association football. It is a team sport which is unique in several regards. It has the most complex strategic component of any version of football, extreme specialization in position play and very large rosters. This means that each NFL team has fifty-three players on the active roster, plus eight practice squad players. Unlike other iterations of football, players are usually given a single specialized position and task, such as kicking the football for conversions or defending the quarterback from tacklers. The championship game has become an overt media spec- tacle and an unofficial national holiday in the United States. Viewing numbers increase every year: in 2011 a new record was set with 111 million viewers, representing more than one third of the US population (Klayman 2011).

Arirang Mass Games The precursors to mass gymnastics in Asia were developed by nineteenth century nationalist movements in central Europe and expanded under

2 National Broadcasting Company, Cable News Network, Consumer News and Business Channel.