Nowadays, the media plays a key part in representing nations in mega-sporting events. In this study, we aimed to examine how Western English-language news sources represented Iran, as an Eastern and Islamic country, in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. To accomplish this, data were collected using LexisNexis Academic, Google Search, and Google News tools. We utilised topic modelling, a text summarisation technique for data analysis. The analysis generated seven main topics: 'Kimia Alizadeh & Refugee Athlete'; 'Saeid Mollaei & Israel'; 'Iranian Athletes & Home-Abroad'; 'Javad Foroughi & Win, Nurse'; 'Navid Afkari & IOC'; 'Russia, China, Iran & Media Representation'; 'Iran, Men & Medal-Winning'. Our analysis indicated the occurrence of Othering around Iran in the narratives of Western (in particular American-based) news articles in the 2020 Olympics. This means that these articles predominantly focused on Iranian refugee athletes and often discussed Iran and Iranian athletes in the 2020 Olympics using political language and negative associations.
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Ziaee et al. (2024) studied this question.
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