How to Report on the Olympics: From Paris 2024 to LA 2028

What you need to know to report on the Olympics responsibly

The Olympics catalyze and intensify a myriad of issues: gentrification and displacement, police militarization, the surveillance state apparatus, environmental destruction, corruption, hijacked public agendas, nationalistic and imperialist fervor, and undemocratic transfers of wealth from public to private hands. How, then, are they still allowed to steamroll across city after city?

This question can be answered partly by examining the role of the media in sanctioning the Olympics. While there are exceptions, a significant number of journalists reporting on the Olympics have an unfortunate track record of abandoning their watchdog responsibilities. Instead, they uncritically reproduce the IOC’s narratives — that the Olympics is simply a sporting event, a celebration of international camaraderie, politically neutral, and even a ‘movement’ for peace.

Let’s be clear: the Olympics are first and foremost a multi-billion-dollar industry. And despite constant attempts to frame it as apolitical, in reality it wields a nearly-unparalleled amount of soft geopolitical power that is ripe for exploitation; ambitious nationalistic leaders from Hitler to Putin and pre-Brexit Boris Johnson have recognized this all too well.

Reporting on the Olympics should be done with the utmost scrutiny. Instead, we have the Los Angeles Times and Reuters publishing headlines that amplify Mayor Garcetti’s unfounded claim that the LA 2028 Olympics will generate a $1 billion profit. Instead of investigation, we have a veteran journalist penning a New York Times column claiming the Rio 2016 Olympics “are good for Brazil and good for humanity, a needed tonic,” counselling us to hit pause on our concerns about inequalities and human rights violations. And instead of critical analysis, we see countless media reports quoting politicians, business executives, and police representatives, while ignoring voices from communities at risk of eviction or increased harassment from police. These failings only continued during the COVID-19 pandemic; instead of interrogating why any city should host an extravagant party for the global elite when its residents are struggling to survive and pay for rent and food, ahead of the postponed Tokyo 2020 Olympics we saw various news outlets peddling the IOC’s pet “Recovery Games” narrative.

The media’s pro-Olympics bias is not surprising. The narrative of a once-in-a-lifetime chance at athletic glory generates mass audiences, clicks, and advertising dollars. (In particular, NBC’s investment in the Olympics is so substantial that it has the power to dictate the Games’ schedule, even if it endangers’ athletes lives.) As a result, publications have an incentive to join the boosters in promoting the Olympics and its official narratives so that they too can keep profiting from future Games. In this context, to maintain any semblance of journalistic integrity, journalists need to work extra hard to turn a critical eye to the Olympics — not just during the three-week event, but from the minute the first whispers of a city’s bid arise through all the years of preparation and resistance in the lead-up.

The media must do better when it comes to covering the Olympic machine. We’ve compiled tips and resources to help guide journalists to do just that.

DOs

Talk to those most materially affected by the Olympics. 

Center them in your reporting. With every Olympics, a similar set of groups is harmed by preparations for the sports event, and their stories hold the evidence to counter the false claims of the powerful.

Let the Olympics’ track record guide your reporting.

Look at the issues that have accompanied Olympics after Olympics and explore the ways in which your city’s rendition of the Games is perpetuating them. Put the onus on boosters to explain why the public should trust that this Olympics will somehow be different from the others. Cover the Olympics’ relationship to:

  • Displacement, homelessness, and gentrification
  • Policing and surveillance
  • The privatization of public space and resources
  • Environmental destruction
  • Corruption
  • Nationalism and fascism
  • A lack of democracy

Challenge unsubstantiated narratives. Interrogate who and what are valued (and excluded)

Unsubstantiated claims and overblown rhetoric surround the Olympics. Call out the bullshit when you see it. When boosters declare the impacts of the Games will be positive, ask them how they know, and question ‘positive for whom?’ Ask how a benefit like building a few extra swimming pools and tennis courts stands up to the displacement of families from their gentrifying neighborhoods. How will ‘feelings of national/city pride’ help the families displaced from nuclear disaster zones in Fukushima?

Frame the Olympics as political

The Olympics, like sports writ large, are political. Even the LA Times Editorial Board knows this. Billions of dollars, global geopolitical images, a host city’s planning agenda, and those pesky things called human rights are at stake. If you quote a supporter of the Olympics, be sure to also quote at least one critical voice.

Cover resistance

This is a big story. Resistance has always accompanied the Olympics. As of 2019, a new transnational anti-Olympics movement is working to build community power against the aristocrats in the International Olympic Committee and their allied global elites. Athletes increasingly use their platform to highlight the systemic inequalities and abuses they experience or see around them. These are the seeds of future change, and you should report on them now.

Put numbers into context

Most people can recognize that the 2028 budget of $6.9B is a huge figure, but might not know off the top of their heads that it’s more than three times the funding provided by Proposition HHH ($2.1B) for 7,000 units of supportive housing over 10 years. Or that’s it’s three times the amount of funds LAUSD had in reserves when UTLA went on strike in 2019.

Follow the money and connect the dots 

Why are real estate developers and construction magnates so often involved in Olympics organizing committees? With all the money involved in hosting an Olympics, journalists need to scrutinize where it goes and what kind of incentives it creates. Why did Casey Wasserman’s family donate to Councilmember David Ryu right before the 2017 LA 2028 City Council vote?

Provide context for key players — and when relevant, challenge their credibility

By design, most people don’t know who the people driving an Olympic bid are, let alone how they came into power and money, or any of their notable scandals and misdeeds. If you choose to quote an IOC member on how hosting the Olympics poses zero risk to a city, check how many times that person has been charged with either bribery, fraud, or corruption. These facts aren’t just relevant in order to gauge overall credibility, but are necessary for the reader to understand whether or not they can trust particular claims.

For example, any time that LA 2028 Chair Casey Wasserman makes a claim about gender equity in sports or how the Olympics benefit children, a relevant fact that readers need to know isn’t who his famous grandfather is (a Mafia-affiliated agent who pushed Reagan into politics, for one), but that he was on notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s plane with Kevin Spacey. Another relevant fact is that Wasserman’s companies have received over $2 million in business from LA28!

Likewise, when reporting on how the Olympic plans are shaping up, don’t just frame an IOC visit around whether an IOC member is “pleased”; they are someone with a direct stake in claiming that things are going well. This is Journalism 101.

Be upfront about your own conflicts of interests

Media companies have a stake in the Olympics, too, either directly or by virtue of the Games generally attracting audiences. The public needs to know when your platform has direct interests tied to the Olympics industry. Unfortunately, publications are often not transparent. In Los Angeles, for example:

  • LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong has business relationships with the IOC (via the 2019 Urban Games, among other partnerships), the Lakers, and many other sports interests that also happen to intersect with LA 2028 interests.
  • The LA Times is media partners with the LA84 Foundation. A report by the Times of this year’s summit didn’t disclose until we pointed out the error. 
  • LA 2028 CEO Casey Wasserman is on the board of Vox, which owns Curbed LA. In late 2017, we pointed out that they should be acknowledging this conflict of interest, which they have been doing in every new piece on the Olympics.
  • Fernando Guerra was on the board of KPCC in 2016-2017 when he ran LMU’s 2024/2028 Olympic polling, but much of their reporting did not disclose this interest. More info on this conflict here.

Examples of good Olympics reporting: 

DØN’Ts

Don’t fall for the IOC’s semantic gymnastics

The IOC has crafted a whole vocabulary to obscure the fact that the Olympics are an industry, and that the IOC itself is a massive, extranational corporation that pays essentially no taxes. Don’t buy into this sleight of hand by using its favored terms like the “Olympic movement” or the “Olympic family.”

Don’t reproduce common myths about the Olympics

Journalists should bust myths, not perpetuate them. Here are a few narratives we see crop up often in Olympics reporting, and why they’re misleading:

  • “The Olympics are popular.” — Nø. In the five cities that have held referenda since 2013, four of them voted against hosting; in Oslo, residents voted marginally in favor of hosting, but the city later abandoned the bid anyway when public support visibly dropped. In the same time period, another five cities abandoned their bid due to a lack of public support (Stockholm 2022, Rome 2024, Budapest 2024, Boston 2024, Graz 2026). None of the recent or upcoming host cities, from Tokyo to Rio to LA to Paris to Beijing, allowed their residents a say in hosting the Olympics. Residents of Denver, which in 1976 became the only city (so far!) to reject hosting after being selected by the IOC, recently voted to prevent the use of tax dollars in future Olympic bids.
  • “88% of Angelenos support hosting the Olympics.” — Unlikely. The Study LA/LMU survey that produced this result did not offer respondents a ‘neutral’ option, skewing the results on a topic many Angelenos know little about. NOlympics LA’s survey, in contrast, provided information about past Olympics trends and found 47% of respondents opposed the Olympics coming to LA (versus 26% in support). Additionally, our own investigation into Study LA — and Fernando Guerra in particular — has shown this poll to be illegitimate on multiple fronts, including the fact that Guerra was a registered lobbyist for LA 2028 partners. Full report here.
  • “LA84 made money for the city of Los Angeles.” — Nø. The City of Los Angeles did not get a cent from LA84’s surplus. That money was funneled into the LA84 Foundation, whose investments include notorious real estate speculators Blackstone.
  • “The Olympics create jobs.” — Not really. Research suggests the Olympics rarely create long-term jobs. Potential boosts to certain areas like the construction or hospitality industries tend to be short-term, and vary in terms of compensation and job quality.
  • “The Olympics boost tourism.” — Actually, not necessarily. Research suggests the Olympics rarely have long-term effects on tourism. Even for the Games themselves, the influx of participants and tourists does not increase the number of people in the host city as much as many expect: a different segment of potential tourists who might normally be expected to visit a city actually choose not to visit during the chaos of the Olympics. Meanwhile, some locals leave in order to rent out their homes or escape bad traffic.
  • “The Olympics are sustainable.” — Nøpe! Each Olympics edition tries to introduce some new green technology and then claim itself the ‘greenest’ Games to date, but the innovations rarely counteract the toll of thousands of athletes, journalists, and fans flying from around the world for the Games. Environmental promises are often abandoned, as in Rio. Meanwhile construction for some Olympics have actively destroyed environmentally vulnerable or protected areas, from Pyeongchang’s Mount Gariwang to the golf course built on a nature reserve in Rio de Janeiro.

Don’t rewrite press releases

The LA Times has gotten in trouble for all sorts of journalistic impropriety recently, including admitting it was letting journalists literally rewrite press releases. Arasha Markazi, sports writer and booster who covered events like the Olympics, was getting gifts from hotels and sports interests. In 2020, the LA Times admitted gross journalistic malpractice (including copy-pasting press releases) happening across verticals in its paper, proving the outlet has essentially no journalistic integrity. We still regularly see casual pieces where the writer repeats Olympic press releases beat-by-beat, like this piece on LA84 Foundation’s Renata Simril delivering toys to kids under COVID (which is identical to the press release). 

Don’t fall for the ‘Recovery Games’ narrative/myth

We saw this narrative being pushed for Munich 1972, as Germany sought to distance itself from its previous rendition of the Games, the Berlin 1936 “Nazi Games”. We saw it with Salt Lake City 2002, which was the first Olympics after 9/11. And we’re seeing it again, not only with the lead-up to Tokyo 2020 (postponed), which has become a disaster (Coronavirus) on top of a disaster (the Olympics themselves) on top of another disaster (Fukushima ‘11), but also in talks about Vancouver 2030 — disaster capitalism meets celebration capitalism at an unprecedented clip.

The “Recovery Games” narrative must be critically interrogated — recovery for whom?

Don’t let Henry Kissinger, or any other war criminal, write op-eds dripping with purple prose

This one should be self-explanatory. And yet, here’s an example of the LA Times making this mistake.

Don’t blow column space on the athlete condom narrative

Every two years, we see hundreds of stories about how many condoms are needed for the athletes’ village. This journalistic cliche is fundamentally not newsworthy and a cheap non-story in the midst of much more interesting, much more urgent narratives.

Examples of poor Olympics reporting and opinion

RESOURCES FOR U.S. JOURNALISTS REPORTING ON PARIS 2024

Recommended contacts in Paris:

Both Paris 2024 and LA 2028 have been framed by the IOC and other Olympics boosters as events that will rescue the struggling Olympic industry — events that will allegedly rely primarily on existing infrastructure and offer financially and socially responsible models for future Olympics. But the Paris 2024 Olympics show us that a) this is not true, and b) even if it were true, a multitude of other problems still exist.

Paris 2024 is costing the public a LOT of money.

  • Organizers like to claim 96% of the budget is privately funded, but they’re only talking about the organizing committee’s budget of around 4.4 billion euros. Another 4.5 billion euros have been spent on construction projects like the athletes village and a new aquatics center. (As of July 2024, this near 9-billion-euro budget was equivalent to about $10 billion.)

Paris is building a lot for these Olympics, fueling displacement and gentrification.

  • The athletes village, the media village, the aquatics center, a gymnastics and badminton arena. These are all new constructions for Paris. 
  • The athletes village directly displaced a workers’ hostel, home to mostly immigrant laborers, as well as “three schools, two apartment blocks, a hotel and 19 businesses employing some 1,000 people.” As the village will be converted into housing after the Olympics (with only a small portion allocated for ‘affordable’ housing), it threatens to increase displacement and gentrification pressures in its surrounding neighborhoods, which are home to many low-income, immigrant residents. 
  • An Olympic-standard practice pool was built adjacent to the Aubervilliers workers’ gardens, justifying the destruction and displacement of several workers’ vegetable and flower plots. 
  • The media village was constructed in the l’Aire des Vents park, steamrolling over various European environmental protections. 

Paris has ramped up its criminalization of poverty.

  • Like so many other Olympic host cities, Paris is banishing unhoused people from key tourist areas at higher rates than in recent years, as this in-depth report from Le Revers de la Medaille demonstrates. As the New York Times has reported, many people are being bused outside the city, to shelters or other regions of the country with limited opportunities and resources. Unhoused residents and advocates have denounced the process as social cleansing.
  • The city is also cracking down on and evicting housing squats, destabilizing residents’ lives, community networks, and access to resources and jobs. 

Paris 2024 has been used to justify the unprecedented use of AI surveillance technologies.

  • The French government approved an array of “AI-powered surveillance cameras” for use ahead of, during, and for a period after the Olympics. In a letter denouncing the plan, 40 European lawmakers argued it “would set a surveillance precedent of the kind never before seen in Europe, using the pretext of the [2024 Paris Summer] Olympic games.” And as Amnesty International wrote, “such draconian technologies of mass surveillance violate the rights to privacy and can lead to violations of the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.” Although the government has so far only approved this exceptional surveillance expansion for a temporary period, past Olympic host cities have a track record of introducing ‘temporary’ policing technologies that become permanent. 
  • Additionally, Paris is erecting unprecedented security barriers around a large chunk of the Seine River and its adjacent neighborhoods in order to ‘secure’ the Opening Ceremonies extravaganza. It will require residents and tourists alike to register in advance and show a QR code to enter certain areas, a massive expansion of state surveillance capacity that infringes on people’s right to access and move freely through the city.

The claims that Paris 2024 is the ‘most green Olympics ever’ are bogus.

  • “Just three of its sponsorship deals will produce more pollution than eight coal plants running for an entire year,” The Ecologist reports.
  • It is impossible for an event on the scale of the Olympics to be “green” or “sustainable” in a time of climate crisis.

RESOURCES FOR REPORTING ON LA 2028

Example questions the media should be asking about LA 2028 (but aren’t)

  • How do Angelenos really feel about the Olympics coming to Los Angeles? Can we trust polls produced by Olympics boosters?
  • How much do Angelenos actually know about the Olympics? Do they know that they’re happening or when they’re happening? Do they know about the taxpayer guarantee or the NSSE?
  • Have you, X politician or Y Olympics booster, read the host city contract?
  • Why did LA 2028 CEO Casey Wasserman’s mother donate to city councilor David Ryu right before City Council voted on the Olympics?
  • Does the $6.9 billion Olympics budget include security costs? What other line items are not included?
  • Who will pay when the Games go over budget, as they have at every Olympics since 1960?
  • How will electeds guarantee that the event’s NSSE status does not expand ICE’s authority in the city and access to the LAPD and LASD’s extensive data on vulnerable immigrant residents?
  • Will Olympics-related construction bypass environmental regulations due to the CEQA exemption?
  • How will the Olympics will improve transit when we are already seeing loss of ridership due to declining service arising from shifts of funding and operations from transit that people are using now towards increasingly expensive projects? 
  • How will we measure shifts in transit access? How do we define success? Do our metrics meet the needs of working-class Angelenos who rely the most on public transit?
  • What is the contingency plan if a major natural disaster or series of natural disasters (e.g., wildfires, earthquakes) prevents LA from “fulfilling its duties as host city” and the city/county is responsible for paying back the $180 million advance from the IOC?

Overview on LA 2028

We are happy to answer any questions that we can, and point you to those who can when we can’t, but please do your homework, which is more than just reading Wikipedia and reading the first page of Google results.

Here is a quick run down of the key issues and problems we believe the media could do a more consistent and thorough job of exploring relating to LA 2028:

Displacement & Hotel Development

  • Residents are already being displaced for the explicit purpose of LA 2028. Here are 8 RSO buildings near USC being razed to make room for a mixed use development that will address LA’s “hotel crisis.” 
  • Angelenos are also being displaced via various tourist zones that are tied to the LA 2028 and World Cup hotel developments
  • Residents are being displaced for arena and luxury developments in Inglewood, driven by the SoFi and Clippers Stadiums (which will be a part of LA 2028). 
  • All of the increased displacement contributes to homelessness in a region with 60,000 unhoused residents and the largest incarcerated population in the country. 
  • Airbnb and the Olympics just announced a 10 year partnership, in advance of Airbnb’s impending IPO. Our analysis explains why it will drive more displacement.

Policing and Militarization

Diversion of Resources

  • Our mayor, city council, and their staffs have spent years of their time and countless resources working on an Olympic project there is no public mandate for. We saw this idea exposed and articulated in the mainstream during the 2019 UTLA strike.

Transit Catastrophe

  • The 2028 bid was sold as something that would bring much-needed transit expansion to the city. In reality, Measure M was approved before the 2028 bid and was happening regardless of the Olympics. Garcetti’s “28 x 28” plan with Metro has recently been called “doomed” and “depressing” and represents another colossal Olympic blunder.

RESOURCES FOR REPORTING ON THE TRANSNATIONAL ANTI-OLYMPICS MOVEMENT

In July 2019, anti-Olympics organizers from Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo, Pyeongchang, Rio de Janeiro, London, Nagano, and Jakarta gathered in Tokyo for the first-ever transnational anti-Olympics summit. The resulting coalition is determined to work together to end the Olympic Games and to build power so that communities can determine the futures of their own cities and regions, regardless of the whims of global elites.

Key readings

Who to follow and contact

RESOURCES FOR REPORTING ON AIRBNB AND THE OLYMPICS

In November 2019, Airbnb announced a 10 year partnership with the Olympics — a disturbingly fitting match considering both massively accelerate displacement, gentrification, and deliberate banishment in the cities they invade. Airbnb pushes deregulation around the globe, facilitating giant corporate machines gobbling up homes, evicting tenants, and turning them into informal hotels. Olympic cities like Paris, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and Japan have pushed back with some of the world’s strongest rules against the displacement machine that is Airbnb, but with the Olympics en route, those regulations are being deliberately undercut.

In Los Angeles, city council is already attempting to roll back regulations that bar short-term rentals that are not in a person’s primary residence. In December 2019, city council heard an attempt to allow Airbnbs in rent controlled buildings, which was only defeated by tenants and organizers responding with a resounding “NO.” On top of that, the current law is not enforced: 42% of active Airbnb listings as of June 2020 in LA were illegal. In the middle of the compounding crises of homelessness, housing, and COVID-19 in Los Angeles, Airbnbs sit empty while rents around them continue to climb. 

But we’re fighting back. In 2020, we squashed further attempts to open loopholes in the Airbnb rules already on the books. As part of our Homes Not Hotels campaign, we fought with tenants against the displacement caused by Olympic development and Airbnb gentrification in places like Inglewood and Hollywood. And we’ve launched a campaign called Locks On My Block to help organize tenants against Airbnbs in their buildings and communities and to tell stories of people affected by Airbnb. To make LA habitable, to make housing a human right in Los Angeles, we have to reject and expel both the Olympics and Airbnb.

Our Airbnb analysis:

 

 

For more resources on LA issues, the LA 2024/2028 bid’s effect on them, the whitewashed horrors of the LA84 Olympics and references to Olympic effects on other host cities, please visit our references page and let us know if you have any further questions.

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