When the most popular media phrases of 2006 were unveiled recently, some people might have been disappointed to see that Beijing's Olympic preparations had taken a back seat.
In the general and most indicative category, "harmonious society" , a political vision for China, popped up most frequently in leading Chinese newspapers, radio and television last year. It was followed by "new socialist countryside", "Qinghai-Tibet Railway", "innovation", "socialist sense of honor and disgrace", "Sino-African forum", "Long March spirit", "consumption tax", "intangible heritage" and "anti-Chen demonstration" in Taiwan.
In preparing the results of the annual analysis of media content in China's "mainstream" media, researchers from the National Language Resources Tracing and Research Center and two prestigious universities in Beijing said they had counted the frequency of usage in 15 newspapers, as well as scripts of 12 television stations and seven radio channels across the country.
Although most of these media organizations are based in the city, if you are looking for anything immediately related to the 2008 Olympic Games, you'll only find the Bird's Nest and Water Cube, nicknames for the centerpiece National Stadium and the National Aquatics Center, in the sports category.
And to add insult to injury, the two venues under construction had occupied the last two spots of the top 10 most popular sports phrases in the media, after a French footballer, a woman tennis star, a snooker prodigy and a controversial TV sports commentator.
Why would the news editors have favored other news events and personalities over Beijing's Olympic preparations that had aroused a growing public curiosity? Perhaps the city's organizers had been a little too modest to let the world, including the media, know all the great things they had done, as a top International Olympic Committee official bantered last week in Beijing, when urging the host to improve communication.
And why had the two barely-finished Olympic venues been on the lips of the media organizations more often than other aspects of the work in progress? That was probably because the Bird's Nest and Water Cube were easier and more vivid to report. But people might argue other Olympic developments should have received the same if not more media attention.
As such, it would be a little too hasty to equal what the media had reported with the readers' actual ranking of news topics. For example, a local newspaper story on the ranking exercise looked a little simplistic, as it had begun with asking, breathlessly: "In the past year, what topics have people talked about most?"
Editorial decisions shouldn't be taken lightly if we know the media, through their ways of presentation, can impact on the perceived importance of news events and bias the public agenda. In other words, media don't tell people what to think, but what to think about.
This has led to another interesting premise about media that in a modern society, the press, the government and the people should reciprocally influence one another for agenda building in public events. Some of the most popular media phrases of 2006 might serve as good proof of this perspective.
We might well expect the Olympics- related topics to rank higher among the most popular media phrases in 2007, with increasing involvement from the media, government and the general public.
The easing of media regulations and a more accommodating approach of "treating media nicely" by the Olympic organizers, will also help increase the volume as well as the position of the Olympic coverage in news media in China.
All these factors may also fuel competition among the media for Olympic news, which helps explain the motivation behind the simmering news rivalry in the capital city that we report in the cover story of this issue.
