Why should we not be critical? Soft power, sportswashing, and the foreclosure of critical sports journalism in Taiwan’s 2024 premier 12 coverage

Baseball is Taiwan’s national pastime, carrying the weight of contested sovereignty and identity. This research investigates why critical sports journalism was foreclosed during Taiwan’s first adult world championship at the 2024 WBSC Premier 12. Across the sixteen-day tournament, 97.6% of coverage was celebratory and no sports journalist filed a critical report. Integrating Bourdieu’s field theory with Sen’s capability approach, the analysis selectively close-reads 756 articles from eleven outlets alongside four journalist accounts. The findings indicate that soft power, instrumentalized by the state through sport, is reproduced as a discursive rule in the field: nomos rewards celebratory coverage, doxa makes critique contextually unthinkable, and habitus settles the disposition reproducing both. Meanwhile, sports journalists redirect capabilities from critique toward source trustworthiness, career, and passion. This research proposes structural foreclosure, in which sportswashing is reconceptualized as a distributed ideological operation and soft power as what the field rewards itself for sustaining.