Media effect on resident attitudes toward an Olympic bid

Tourism Management Perspectives 29 (2019) 66–75

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Tourism Management Perspectives journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tmp

Media effect on resident attitudes toward an Olympic bid a,⁎

b

c

b

Qiulin Lu , Brian J. Mihalik , Bob Heere , Fang Meng , Amanda Fairchild

T d

a

School of Humanities, Southeast University, Sipailou 2#, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province 210096, PR China School of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Management, 701 Assembly Street, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, United States Department of Management, University of North Texas, 1155 Union Circle #311160, Denton, TX 76203-5017, United States d Department of Psychology, 1512 Pendleton Street, Barnwell College, Suite #220, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, United States b c

A R T I C LE I N FO

A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Olympic games Resident attitudes Media effect Experimental design Agenda setting theory

News media helps individuals think about the impacts of hosting the Olympic Games, enabling them to clarify or construct their own opinions toward an Olympic bid. This study aims to unveil the rationale underlying such media influence with the help of agenda setting theory. An experimental study was conducted in both China with 505 respondents and the US with 449 respondents in which media content was manipulated and framed as either positive or negative. The result confirmed the causal relationship between media content and resident attitude change. Although the moderating role of nation on media effect was not supported, it was found that the more initial interest the individual had in the Olympic Games, the more evident the media effect was.

1. Introduction As the most high-profile mega sport event in the world, the Olympics are virtually unassailable as an event of continuous public attention and discussion because the Games are such an intriguing mixture of sport, politics, and commerce (Essex & Chalkley, 1998; Hiller & Wanner, 2011; Rose & Spiegel, 2011). The magnitude of the event, the political and economic importance attached to the event, the prominence of the Olympics in the media, the frequent controversy surrounding the city and country and the attractiveness of the events make the Games a very popular phenomenon (Getz, 2008). Despite the popularity of hosting the Olympic Games, however, there are gradually fewer and fewer cities putting forward a bid for the mega-event. This study was motivated by the withdrawal of Norway from bidding for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games leaving Beijing and Almaty in Kazakhstan as the only contenders. Due to the large number of reports criticizing the USD$51 billion cost of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, western governments and citizens have become wary of hosting the Games. Because of the Sochi price tag which was reported as the most expensive in Olympic history, it was one of the major reasons that led to the withdrawal of Norway's 2022 Olympic bid (Guardian, 2014). Public support is extremely important during the Olympic bid period and how the Olympic legacy is presented by the mass media is central to a successful bid (Sant & Mason, 2015). Specifically, the external information provided by the national media and government agencies

interact with the individual factors. These include residents' own knowledge, values, and past experiences with previous similar events, to shape the residents' initial perception of the Games prior to the event (Kim, Gursoy, & Lee, 2006). Therefore, it is imperative to investigate the resident attitudes before the bidding or, at least, at the early stage of the bidding process to avoid unnecessary waste of financial or human resources. A considerable number of studies have been conducted on resident attitudes toward hosting the Olympic Games since 1980s. Acknowledging the significance of the psychological support from the local community, numerous scholars are addressing a wide range of themes related to this topic, including the assessment and measurement of the overall attitudes in terms of perceived benefits and liabilities (Ritchie, 1988; Ritchie & Aitken, 1984, 1985; Ritchie & Lyons, 1987; Ritchie & Lyons, 1990), changes in the resident attitudes over time (Kim et al., 2006; Mihalik, 2000; Mihalik & Simonetta, 1998, 1999), the variation of the residents perceptions (Fredline & Faulkner, 2000, 2001a), and the factors influencing the resident attitudes toward hosting the Olympics-like mega-events (Fredline & Faulkner, 2001b; Gursoy & Kendall, 2006; Hiller & Wanner, 2011; Martin & Barth, 2013; Zhou & Ap, 2009). The formation of the resident attitudes toward the mega-event is a dynamic process. Various individual factors exert significant influence on the residents' impact perceptions and their overall attitudes toward the events, such as the residents' economic status, their ecocentric

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Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (Q. Lu), [email protected] (B.J. Mihalik), [email protected] (B. Heere), [email protected] (F. Meng), [email protected] (A. Fairchild). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tmp.2018.10.009 Received 12 July 2018; Received in revised form 13 October 2018; Accepted 31 October 2018 2211-9736/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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of the 1988 Winter Olympic Games, even after the event concluded. Yet, despite the strong positive attitudes, variation among residents still existed. On one hand, the residents' overall attitudes and impact perceptions changed over time, as noted by Mihalik and Simonetta (1999) in the case of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Game. On the other hand, the variation of the overall attitudes and impact perceptions existed within the local community. That is, the community was not homogenous and different subgroups held different attitudes toward hosting the megaevents (Cheng & Jarvis, 2010; Kim et al., 2006; Zhou & Ap, 2009). After recognizing the attitude variation among the local residents, more efforts were devoted into examining the underlying reasons for the purpose of explaining the different attitudes toward hosting the mega-events. Two foundational theories played an important part in explaining the attitude variation: social exchange theory and social representation theory. Based on the former, individuals were likely to participate in an exchange if they believed they were likely to gain benefits without incurring unacceptable costs (Homans, 1974). Numerous empirical studies found that the public support toward hosting the mega-events relied heavily on perceived benefits rather than costs (Deccio & Baloglu, 2002; Gursoy & Kendall, 2006; Lee & Krohn, 2013). The connection between attitudes and social representations has been put forward by many scholars (Billig, 1993; Moscovici, 1981; Pearce, Moscardo, & Ross, 1996) as attitudes were seen as the product of social value (Farr, 1987). Social representations were defined as the “concepts, statements and explanations originating in daily life in the course of inter-individual communications” (Moscovici, 1981, p. 181). Fredline and Faulkner's (2000) proposed that the social representations can be divided into three categories—direct experience, social interaction, and the media. These social representations can be clarified as the antecedents of residents' perceptions and attitudes. Previous empirical studies have mainly focused on antecedents related to individual's direct experience, such as the demographic characteristics (Cheng & Jarvis, 2010; Gibson et al., 2014; Martin & Barth, 2013; Mihalik & Madanoglu, 2007; Ritchie, Shipway, & Cleeve, 2009; Waitt, 2003), community attachment, ecocentric attitude (Deccio & Baloglu, 2002; Gursoy & Kendall, 2006), and involvement in tourism/event (Chien, Ritchie, Shipway, & Henderson, 2012; Hiller & Wanner, 2011; Twynam & Johnston, 2004; Yang, Zeng, & Gu, 2010; Zhou & Ap, 2009). Other studies also were conducted that addressed social justice (Waitt, 2003), perception of government performance (Ritchie et al., 2009; Zhou & Ap, 2009) and trust in government actors (Nunkoo & Ramkissoon, 2011, 2012), perceptions of media portray (Chien et al., 2012; Martin & Barth, 2013) and so forth. All these variables are categorized as intrinsic factors (Faulkner & Tideswell, 1997). In contrast, the media, an extrinsic factor, has rarely been discussed in the literature. The effect of media reports on residents' reaction was only discussed by Chien et al. (2012). Their field study assessed the impacts of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic sailing events on the local residents in United Kingdom, and their finding indicated the link between the event publicity and the residents' supporting behavior. However, the underlying mechanism of such links remains unknown. The association between the event publicity and the resident support for hosting the Olympic Games was rooted in the media effect on public opinions on social and public affairs. In reality, the Olympic legacy could be framed in the news media during the Olympic bid, in a way to deliberately lead the local politicians and residents to focus on the probid arguments about all those positive legacies (Sant & Mason, 2015). In this process, the public opinion toward the Olympic bidding was likewise influenced by what the news journalists report and how they edit the possible outcomes of hosting the Olympic Games. As the third type of social representations, the news media undoubtedly played an essential role in formulating the resident attitudes toward hosting the Olympic Games (Fredline & Faulkner, 2000). To further clarify how the resident attitudes toward an Olympic bid can be influenced by the news media, we borrowed the agenda setting theory from the field of mass communication and unveiled the dynamics underlying the media effect

attitude, and the attachment to community as well as the demographic characteristics (Deccio & Baloglu, 2002; Gursoy & Kendall, 2006; Jurowski, 1994). These can be considered as internal factors whereas this study focuses on an external factor—news media. Fredline and Faulkner (2000) suggest the influence of media on perception development and transmission among the local residents. The point of departure of this study was that it has been suggested local residents' attitudes toward the mega-events are inevitably influenced by news media. Although the relationship between news media and public opinion has been a research focus in the domain of mass communication and political science, the existing literature in the field of tourism management rarely examines the dynamics of media exposure on resident attitudes. Within the framework of agenda setting theory, this study aims to investigate whether the public support for an Olympic bid is affected by the news media through an experimental design with manipulation on the media content reporting the impacts of hosting the Olympic Games. Thus the major research question of this study was proposed: Does different information presented by news media about the impact of bidding for the Olympic Games lead to different attitudes among the local residents? Two active bidding countries were selected for testing the media effect on resident attitudes: China for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games and the US for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games. The selection of the two different nations allows for a secondary research question: Does the media effect on resident attitudes toward an Olympic bid differ between China and the USA? The cross-national study is conducted for two reasons. First, the visions and objectives associated with the bidding differ between developing countries and developed countries. For the more developed countries and cities experiencing a decline in tourist arrivals, like the US, mega-events are viewed as a way to rebrand the destination and regain the worldwide reputation (Keller, cited from Fayos-Solá, 1998; Hiller, 2000). While for developing countries, including China, hosting the mega-events acted as a stimulus for infrastructural and human development (Bhardwaj, cited from Fayos-Solá, 1998; Hiller, 1998). Second, the agenda setting power in explaining resident attitude change needs to be examined in different media systems. One important characteristic of the media system was the degree of political autonomy of the news media from government and political parties. China and the United States have different media systems: central and provincial party newspapers are the dominant newspaper type in China (Zhao, 2004), whereas the media system in the US is highly commercialized (Strömbäck & Dimitrova, 2006). In this case, it was argued that nation, representing a set of political and contextual factors, could differentiate the relationship between the media coverage and the local community's attitudes. The study aims to contribute to a theoretical enhancement of the current level of knowledge on media effects and resident attitudes in the field of mega-events. The study finds support for Fredline and Faulkner's (2000) theoretical perspective which suggests that media serves as a kind of social representation in explaining the attitude variation among a local community. By understanding the dynamics of media effect in the context of resident attitudes toward hosting megaevents, mega-event practitioners can predict residents' support and accordingly adjust promotional strategies among a local community. Additionally, the intercultural validity of the media effect toward the Olympic bid is evaluated through the cross-national comparison between the US and China. 2. Literature review 2.1. Resident attitudes toward hosting the mega-events The perspective of the local residents was examined for the first time in 1980s by Ritchie and his co-authors, which found that general positive attitudes were high among the respondents toward the hosting 67

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evaluates the issue (Kim, Han, Choi, & Kim, 2012; Popkin, 1991). Simply said, the media, based on agenda setting theory, tells the audiences “what to think about” and meanwhile, by emphasizing certain attributes of an issue, tells the audiences “how to think about” the issue (McCombs, 2004). By doing so, the news media plays a significant role in shaping public opinion toward a variety of issues. It also significantly affects the public decision making and consensus building in local communities (Kim, Scheufele, & Shanahan, 2002). The reason why we focus on the media effect on the public opinion about an Olympic bid is that the Olympic Games are not just about sport, but rather a controversial, political, and public issue. The political element is very much a part of the ancient Olympics, and the modern Olympic Games have been seen as a political tool controlled by the social elites (Espy, 1979; Kanin, 1981). In a top-down political economy approach, the local media serves as consciousness-raising vehicles by keeping the residents informed and fostering the consensus (Hiller, 1990). Social consensus is created through the power of mass communication (Debord, 1995; Reis & Sperandei, 2014). Drawing on the social exchange theory, most of the “pro” and “anti” public opinions were based on the major attributes of the issue that might happen as consequences. In the issue of an Olympic bid, the various benefits and liabilities involved can be counted as the major attributes of the issue. The media content about these benefits and liabilities could direct the resident attitudes in different ways. Taken together, the Olympic bid actually represents a form of public agenda (Hiller & Wanner, 2011). It reflects the dominant ideology of the social elites and meanwhile, with the assistance of the mass media, arouses the debate among the local residents. In this study, the bidding for the Olympic Games is defined as the agenda (or issue) of interest, and the benefits and liabilities of hosting the Olympic Games are then regarded as the attributes of the issue. Within the framework of agenda setting theory, we propose a causal relationship between the attribute agenda in the media and the resident attitudes toward the Olympic bid, which is tested through an experiment with the manipulation on the agenda attribute in the media, i.e., the media content about the benefits and liabilities associated with an Olympic bid, and then examining the differences in the resident attitudes as an outcome of the experiment.

concerning an Olympic bid.

2.2. Media effect and agenda setting theory A rich body of knowledge in mass communication has established that the news media plays an important role in defining a social issue and affecting the audiences' evaluation toward this issue. Generally, the media frames an issue in a certain way, telling the audience about what is important and how to think about it (Gitlin, 1980). To understand the relationship between the news media and the public opinion, two basic theories were involved: the agenda setting theory and, as an extension, the second level agenda setting theory. The central role of the press in the formation of public opinion was first emphasized by Walter Lippmann in 1922 (cited from McCombs, 2004), and then McCombs and Shaw (1972) conceptualized the idea and put forward the agenda setting theory. There are two core assumptions underlying this theory. First, the press and the media do not always reflect reality; they filter and shape it. Second, the concentration of the media on a few issues and subjects leads the public to perceive those issues as more important than other issues. Generally, it is the news media, which serves as the window to the world beyond direct experience, that determines our cognitive image of the world. Public opinion “responds not to the environment, but to the pseudo-environment constructed by the news media” (McCombs, 2004, p. 3). According to McCombs and Shaw (1972), the agenda setting theory is a statement about a strong causal effect of mass communication on the public, and it deals with the transmission of issue salience from the media to the public. In other words, by emphasizing or frequently mentioning particular issues, the media increases the salience of the issues among the public. The agenda setting model has guided inquiry in public opinion and mass communication about social and political issues in different contexts. For instance, Willnat and Zhu (1996) examined the strong correlation between news content and public opinion about Governor Patten's democratization plan for Hong Kong. Kiousis (2004) analyzed the New York Times coverage during the 2000 US presidential election. In the field of tourism research, however, the agenda setting power has rarely been examined with one exception that Schweinsberg, Darcy, and Cheng (2017) identified the role of the media as facilitators of consensus building in protected areas regarding tourism planning and management issues. The second level agenda setting theory, also known as attribute agenda setting theory, extends the understanding of how the news media shaped public opinion on the issues of the day (See Fig. 1). As the public agenda consists of a set of public issues, an issue consists of a set of attributes, like the properties, characteristics, or aspects of an object, which could be employed to evaluate or think about the same object (McCombs & Evatt, 1995). The second level agenda setting theory refers to the significant correspondence between prominent issue attributes in the media and the agenda of attributes among audiences (McCombs, 2004). That is, the theory hypothesizes that certain issue attributes emphasized in the media become salient in the public mind (McCombs, 2004; McCombs & Shaw, 1972). Issue attributes emphasized in the media are functioning as important standards by which the audience Media Agenda

3. Methodology 3.1. Study context The study selected two active Olympic bids in China and the United States respectively to examine the media effect on resident attitudes. In 2013, Beijing and Zhangjiakou in China officially announced the joint bidding for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. The United States Olympic Committee in January 2015 chose Boston to bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics, but Boston announced its withdraw of their Olympic bid on July 27th, 2015. The study was conducted from May 2015 to June 2015, prior to Boston's withdrawal, when both Beijing and Boston were the candidate cities for the Olympic Games waiting for further selection process by the International Olympic Committee. 3.2. Experimental design

Public Agenda

A pretest-posttest experiment was employed in this study. After randomly assigning the Chinese participants and American participants into treatment groups, the outcome variable – overall attitudes toward the Olympic bid – was measured twice, before and after reading the manipulated news scenario about the impacts of hosting the Olympic Games. Such repeated-measures designs are generally favored because they are often more efficient and more powerful than randomizedgroups designs (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007a). The greatest benefits of experiments reside in the fact that they are artificial (Webster & Sell, 2007). One critical feature of this experimental design is the creation of realistic news articles, which involves

Transfer of salience Objects

Salience of objects First-level effects

Attributes

Salience of attributes Second-level effects Fig. 1. Agenda setting theory. 68

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Prayag, Hosany, Nunkoo, & Alders, 2013; Ritchie & Lyons, 1990). All items were measured on a 5-point Likert scale, from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. The list of scale items and the descriptive results for each is available in the Appendix. In the second section, the participants were asked to read a news scenario about the impacts of hosting the Olympic Games. This process served as the treatment in the experimental study. The two news scenarios were created as two separate blocks in the online survey. The surveys with different blocks were delivered alternately, through which the participants were randomly assigned to the two experimental groups. The third section contained questions regarding to the demographic backgrounds of the participants. In pretest-posttest experiments, testing effects are the potential issue that most likely affects the internal validity because the effect of testing may increase awareness of socially appropriate answers, increase attention to experimental conditions, or make the subject more conscious than usual of the dimensions of a problem (Zikmund et al., 2009). Thus, to minimize the testing effect, demographic information was collected from the participants following the news scenario. At the end of the survey, the participants were asked to indicate their attitudes toward the Olympic Games again. The same scale was used, but the order of items was changed for the purpose of avoiding the testing effect. The survey was first developed in English, and then translated into Mandarin. To increase the validity of the translation, two bilingual Ph.D. students in the field of tourism and hospitality management who used English and Mandarin with equal fluency were hired for back translation.

manipulating the media content by creating news scenarios that focus on different attributes of the Olympic bid: benefits or liabilities. In other words, media content was manipulated in terms of the degree of reporting the benefits and liabilities – high and low. In a 2 × 2 experiment, four news scenarios were identified as “high benefits & high liabilities” “high benefits & low liabilities” “low benefits & high liabilities” and “low benefits & low liabilities”. However, considering the size and long-term impacts of the Olympic Games, the news scenarios of “high benefits & high liabilities” and “low benefits & low liabilities” were neither realistic nor meaningful for the experimental operation. Therefore, they were excluded from the experiment, and only two kinds of news scenarios were created for further analysis: “High Benefits & Low Liabilities” and “Low Benefits & High Liabilities”. By doing so, it would improve the validity of manipulation. On one hand, two opposite experimental conditions provide more power to observe any possible differences in the dependent variable (Zikmund, Babin, Carr, & Griffin, 2009). On the other hand, as an exploratory study about the media effect on resident attitudes toward an Olympic bid, this study made no attempt to be exhaustive or even representative. Using the experimental levels with bigger variance was most likely to produce different effects on the dependent variable. Both of the two news scenarios were created for Boston's bid for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games and Beijing's bid for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, respectively. We first built a pool of relevant news articles and then edited the news content. The major media sources included the Boston Globe, USA TODAY, The Washington Post, and The New York Times and so forth. The focused attributes were then inserted (impact analysis, i.e., benefits and/or liabilities) into the news articles, meanwhile deleting innocuous material of roughly equivalent length. In addition, the specific figures used in the scenarios were based on the reliable information sources as well as with direct or indirect quotations from prestigious academic institutions. The news edition strictly followed the basic principles and skills of mass media writing. The identical structure and similar length can help to eliminate the framing effect, which might interfere with the testing of agenda setting theory. When creating the two news scenarios about the Beijing's bid, the same structure and mass media writing principles were followed, except that the contents were replaced with the facts associated with the 2022 Winter Games, the host areas of Beijing and Hebei, China, and the text was in Mandarin. To control the extraneous variables, random assignment of the participants to two experimental groups was used. It assumes that all characteristics of the participants have been likewise randomized (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007a; Webster & Sell, 2007). However, sometimes it is impossible to allocate participants into conditions randomly. The alternative option is to hold the extraneous variable constant or include it as a covariate variable. Previous empirical studies have identified the significant effect of interest in the Olympic Games, the community attachment, and demographic characteristics on resident attitudes toward the Olympic Games. Therefore, these potential extraneous variables were controlled as covariates in the statistical model.

3.4. Pilot study A pilot study was conducted for the purpose of checking the validity of manipulation. First of all, two professors in mass communication were consulted about the quality of the news scenarios. Both of them have decades of professional experience in broadcast and newspaper as news editor and they provided insightful comments and revision to make the created news scenarios look like real news articles from a leading newspaper. In the case of Beijing's news scenarios, they were checked and slightly modified by two current news editors for the purpose of making sure that they follow the format and routine of mass media writing in the Chinese style. Second, two questions were added at the end of the survey: (1) “Which of the following best describes the impacts analyzed in the article you just read”; (2) “To what degree do you think the news article is a fair portrayal about the Olympic Games.” A valid manipulation would produce substantially different average responses across two treatment groups. A snowball sampling method (N = 87) was used to distribute the survey among college students studying in Beijing, China and Boston, USA. There were 66% of the Chinese participants and 78% of the American participants who accurately interpreted the major attribute embedded in the news scenario assigned, which indicated an effective manipulation of the media content about the impacts of hosting the Olympic Games. In addition, the odds of failing to identify the attribute of the news scenarios was much higher among the participants spending less than two minutes on the survey than for the whole sample. Thus, a minimum time usage of two minutes was controlled when monitoring the online survey participants.

3.3. Survey design An online survey was developed to measure the attitude changes caused by the manipulated news scenarios. It consisted of four sections. The first section was the measurement of the covariate variables and the pretest attitudes toward the Olympic bid. The measurement items for the interest in the Olympic Games were adapted from the Sport Interest Inventory developed and tested by Funk, Mahony, and Ridinger (2002). The community attachment to the host area was measured by three affective items developed by Goudy (1982) and used in McCool and Martin's (1994) study as well as Deccio and Baloglu's (2002) study. Then, the participants were asked to rate three overall attitude questions toward the active Olympic bid. The questions were adapted from previous research (Kaplanidou et al., 2013; Mihalik & Simonetta, 1999;

3.5. Sampling The population of the study were the people who are 18 years old or above, and currently live in the city of Beijing and the Province of Hebei, China, where the co-host city – Zhangjiakou – is located, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where the city of Boston is located. Based on the power analysis through GPower (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007), the estimation of the sample size was 1095 in total. The data collection was processed from May 27 to June 14, 2015. A 69

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convenient sample was recruited through online marketing companies in China and the US. By using the large research panels of Sojump in China and Amazon Mechanical Turk and Toluna in the US, a total of 1353 qualified panelists who met the residency requirements, actively chose to complete the online surveys. In an attempt to guarantee the quality of the data, several qualification criteria were created. First, valid surveys accurately recognized the major attribute of the news scenario provided. Second, all surveys completed in less than two minutes were considered invalid. Third, both the IP address and zip code were used as the indicators of the participants' residency location. After filtering, 391 surveys were identified as unusable “completes”, and thus 962 “completes” were coded and used for preliminary data analysis.

Table 1 Demographic characteristics of the participants. Variables

Gender Male Female Age 18–24 25–34 35–44 45–54 55–64 65 or older Marital status Single Married Widowed/divorced/separated Education High school or lower College degree Bachelor's degree Master/doctorate degree Occupation Employed full-time Housewife/Homemaker Temporarily unemployed/Looking for work Retired Student Others

3.6. Data analysis Prior to data analysis, data screening was conducted, mainly checking for outliers and normality. The z score distribution was used to assess the distance of raw scores from the mean of the sample and eight cases were identified as univariate outliers with a z score of −4.50 (raw score is 1) on the item of “I am concerned about what goes on in Massachusetts/Beijing & Hebei”. The multivariate outliers were detected by calculating the Mahalanobis distance. The result did not indicate any existence of multivariate outliers for all constructs with Mahalanobis distance at p < .001 (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007b). After deleting the outliers, the sample size was reduced to 954. Before comparing the group means across nations, the measurement invariance was tested to check whether the participants of different cultures ascribed the same meanings to survey items (Cheung & Rensvold, 2000; Dimanche, 2011; Hui & Taiandis, 1985; Sin, Cheung, & Lee, 1999). The multi-group confirmative factor analyses for three constructs were performed using Mplus 7.0 (Muthén & Muthén, 2012) with maximum likelihood estimation. Composite factor scores were then computed by averaging items' scores on each latent variable. This simple procedure is adequate especially when the items have roughly equal standard deviations (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007b). To investigate the change of overall attitudes that occurred after reading the news scenario, the difference score model was used for inferential analysis, which refers to using the difference score (i.e., posttest attitude minus pretest attitude) as the dependent variable, i.e., the attitude change as the outcome of the experiment. Media content and nation both serve as the independent variables, with two levels respectively. A preliminary analysis of the covariates identified that most of the variables were not significantly correlated with attitude change at the 0.05 level, except the interest in the Olympics (r = 0.091). In addition, the assumption of homogeneity of regression was violated where the interest in the Olympic Games significantly interacted with media content (F(1,929) = 15.963, p = .000). To avoid misspecification of the model, a three-way between-subjects ANCOVA with interaction terms was performed on attitude change toward the Olympic bid.

China (N = 505)

U.S.A. (N = 449)

n

%

n

%

225 279

44.8 55.2

184 265

41.0 59.0

123 233 109 29 7 4

24.4 46.1 21.6 5.7 1.4 0.8

64 150 88 53 49 45

14.3 33.4 19.6 11.8 10.9 10.0

201 303 1

39.8 60.0 0.2

214 182 53

47.7 40.5 11.8

36 128 277 64

7.1 25.3 54.9 12.7

51 150 160 88

11.4 33.4 35.6 19.6

368 7 8

72.9 1.4 1.6

228 21 37

50.8 4.7 8.2

7 101 14

1.4 20.0 2.8

45 55 64

10.0 12.2 14.0

4.2. Measurement equivalence The results of measurement equivalence tests showed that the full scalar invariance model for resident attitudes toward hosting the Olympic Games was supported. This, in turn, provided the sufficient condition for meaningful comparisons of means on resident attitudes between China and the US for further analysis. In addition, the partial metric invariance model for interest in the Olympic Games and community attachment were supported, respectively (Table 2). 4.3. Descriptive analysis Table 3 summarized the descriptive statistics of the participants by nation. Prior to the experiments, Chinese residents had strong positive attitudes toward hosting the 2022 Winter Olympic Games (Mean = 4.11, SD = 0.76), whereas the American residents had more complex, less positive feelings about Boston's bid for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games (Mean = 2.95, SD = 1.33). In terms of the posttest attitude, Chinese participants still showed general support for the bid (Mean = 3.94, SD = 0.88). In contrast, the public opinion among Massachusetts' residents about Boston's bid (Mean = 2.91, SD = 1.31) was not decisively for or against. Further t-tests showed that the differences between two countries were all statistically significant. It was found from Table 4 that the pretest attitude toward hosting the Olympic Games was almost identical between two experimental groups (for the “High Benefits & Low Liabilities” group, Mean = 3.63, SD = 1.21; for the “Low Benefits & High Liabilities” group, Mean = 3.49, SD = 1.22). That is, statistical differences did not exit prior to the experiment, which was an ideal result of randomization. Notably, the difference did occur on the posttest attitude. Furthermore, dependent sample t-tests indicated that in each experimental group, there was significant difference between pretest attitude and posttest attitude. These significant differences gave indication for further analysis on the attitude change that took place in this experiment. Thus, the value of the attitude change was computed by subtracting the pretest attitude from the posttest attitude.

4. Results 4.1. Profile of participants The demographic characteristics provided a descriptive profile of the participants (See Table 1). Further tests showed that there were significant differences on the demographic characteristics between the Chinese sample and the American sample, except for gender. The American sample had a larger proportion of elderly, retired people and residents with graduate studies, but a smaller group of students in terms of occupation, whereas the Chinese sample had a relatively larger group of married people and those with a Bachelor's degree. 70

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Table 2 Fit statistics of measurement invariance across China and the US. χ2

Model

a

Partial metric invariance for IOG (item3 free) Partial metric invariance for COA (item1 free) Scalar invariance for PRA

1.841 0.042b 9.066c

df

Δχ2

Δdf

RMSEA

CFI

TLI

SRMR

1 1 4

1.841 0.042b 5.277d

1 1 2

0.042 0.000 0.052

1.00 1.000 0.999

0.977 1.007 0.997

0.016 0.002 0.019

Note. IOG = interest in the Olympics; COA = community attachment; PRA = pretest attitude toward hosting the Olympic Games. a p = 0.1748. b p = 0.8381. c p = 0.0595. d p = 0.0715. Table 3 Descriptive statistics by nation. China

IOG COA PRA POA

Attitude Change U.S.A.

0.300 0.150 0.000 -0.150 -0.300 -0.450 -0.600

t-tests

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

4.02 3.99 4.11 3.94

0.74 0.74 0.76 0.88

3.73 3.87 2.95 2.91

1.01 0.77 1.33 1.31

t = 5.000, p = .000 t = 2.287, p = .022 t = 16.164, p = .000 t = 14.063, p = .000

HBLL

Note. IOG = Interest in the Olympic Games; COA = community attachment; PRA = pretest attitude toward the Olympic bid; POA = posttest attitude toward the Olympic bid.

LBHL

close, was not significant, F(1, 931) = 3.426, p = .065, partial η2 = 0.004. It meant that there was no statistically significant difference of the media effect between the U.S. and China at the 0.05 level. Additionally, the trivial effect size suggested that the interaction between media content and nation was of no practical significance for further analysis. See in Fig. 2, the slopes of media content on attitude change were roughly parallel between two countries. However, there was statistically significant interaction effect between the media content and the interest in the Olympic Games, F(1,931) = 16.119, p = .000, partial η2 = 0.017. It means that the effects of media content on attitude change significantly changed along with the level of personal interest in the Olympic Games.

t-Tests

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

PRA

3.63

1.21

3.49

1.22

POA

3.76

1.19

3.15

1.17

T-tests on PRA-POA

t = 6.413, p = .000

t = 1.827, p = .068 t = 8.042, p = .000

t = 11.075, p = .000

Note. PRA = pretest attitude toward the Olympic bid; POA = posttest attitude toward the Olympic bid; HBLL = High Benefits & Low Liabilities; LBHL = Low Benefits & High Liabilities.

4.4.1. Main effect of media content The main effect of media content on resident attitude change toward the Olympic bid was statistically significant, F(1, 931) = 39.043, p = .000, partial η2 = 0.165, after controlling for the effects of nation, the interest in the Olympic Games, and the interaction effects. In the “High Benefits & Low Liabilities” experimental group, resident overall support increased by 0.107 on average, while in the “Low Benefits & High Liabilities” experimental group, the overall attitudes became more negative by 0.304. In terms of the direction of the media effect, the “High Benefits & Low Liabilities” new scenario affects the resident attitudes toward the Olympic bid positively, whereas the “Low Benefits & High Liabilities” news scenario changes the overall attitudes in a negative way. With regard to the extent of the media effect, the participants' reaction to the positive news scenario was minor, but the negative news scenario is apparently more influential in both two countries.

4.4. Outcome of the experiment Univariate outliers were identified separately on the dependent variable and the covariate within each cell. The decision was made to remove these 17 cases from the data set, leaving 498 cases in Chinese sample and 439 in American sample, respectively. Presented in Table 5 are the major statistics for the three-way between-subjects ANCOVA with interaction terms on attitude change toward hosting the Olympic Games. The interaction effect between media content and nation while Table 5 Analysis of covariance for attitude change by media and nation. Source

SSIII

df

MS

F

P

Partial η2

IOG Nation Media Nation×Media Media×IOG Error Total Corrected Total

3.641 2.434 39.043 0.726 3.414 197.205 256.556 247.847

1 1 1 1 1 931 937 936

3.641 2.434 39.043 0.726 3.414 0.212

17.189 11.491 184.322 3.426 16.119

0.000 0.001 0.000 0.065 0.000

0.018 0.012 0.165 0.004 0.017

China

Fig. 2. Mean attitude change (and 95% confidence intervals around means) as a function of media and nation at centered IOG = 0.

Table 4 Descriptive statistics by experiment condition. HBLL

LBHL

US

4.4.2. Main effect of nation The main effect of nation on attitude change toward hosting the Olympic Games was statistically significant at the 0.05 level, F(1, 931) = 11.491, p = .000, partial η2 = 0.012, after controlling for the effects of media, interest in the Olympic Games, and their interaction. It means that the difference between China and the US in attitude change, as an outcome of the experiment, was greater than we would expect by chance. Specifically, the resident support for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games decreased by 0.151 out of 5 among the whole Chinese sample, whereas American participants' attitudes toward the 2024 Summer

Note. IOG = Interest in the Olympic Games. To avoid the multicollinearity potentially caused by the interaction term, the IOG was centered, i.e., mean was subtracted from the raw score. 71

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Table 6 Estimated marginal means on attitude change.

Attitude Change

0.156

Nation

HBLL

LBHL

Mean

U.S.A. China Mean

0.130 0.083 0.107

−0.224 −0.385 −0.304

−0.047 −0.151

0.000 -0.156 -0.313

Note. Covariate appearing in the model is evaluated at the following value: centered IOG = 0. HBLL = High Benefits & Low Liabilities; LBHL = Low Benefits & High Liabilities.

-0.469 HBLL IOG=mean-std

among the local community. The significant main effect of media content validates the arguments proposed in previous studies about media effect on resident attitudes toward mega-events. For instance, Mihalik and Simonetta (1999) argued that the “varying press coverage over time” could be one of the several possible reasons for the attitude changes over time and the attitude difference among local residents toward the Atlanta 1996 Olympic Games. Furthermore, Fredline and Faulkner (2000) classified media as an important mechanism that people used to understand the positive and negative aspects of the event. The significant contribution of media content in affecting resident attitudes found in this study further confirmed Sant and Mason's (2015) statement that the framing of a legacy in the newspaper had significant implications for the way in which residents evaluate an Olympic bid and then formulate their supportive or opposition attitude. Just like other political issues, the news media functioned as a conduit for the information of bidding and hosting the Olympic Games, through which the citizens obtained the relevant information (Mastin, 2000). Specifically, by their selection of what was worth reading, hearing and seeing, owners, editors and journalists involved in the media perform a gate-keeping function (Toohey & Veal, 2007). As Shaw (2008) argued about the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, had Vancouverbased journalists done a solid exposé of the Salt Lake Winter Olympics and provided this information during their pre-plebiscite period, Vancouverites could have made a far more informed choice. The Vancouver case indicated that to some extent the media helped individuals think about and understand the Olympic bid, enabling them to clarify or construct their own opinions (Stamm, Emig, & Hesse, 1997) as a consequence. Additionally, the findings showed that the significant media effect on resident attitudes toward the Olympic bid existed both in China and the US. This was consistent with McCombs' (2004, p. 36) statement: “agenda-setting is a robust and widespread effect of mass communication”. Such wide-ranging effect has “the tremendous variability of the geographical and cultural settings in which agenda-setting by the media occurs” (McCombs, 2004, p. 36). That is, even with such a cultural and political contrast as between the US and China, agenda setting effects have been observed, in the case of bidding for the Olympic Games. With the media effect on the resident attitudes toward the Olympic bid empirically supported in both China and the US, we can reflectively postulate the reasons for the significant difference of the overall attitudes toward the Olympic bid between Chinese participants and American participants. No matter before or after the exposure to the news scenarios in the experiment, Chinese participants showed a higher level of support for the Olympic bid than American participants. On one hand, comparing with the United States, emerging powers such as China, Brazil, India, and South Africa are more enthusiastic about biding for mega-events due to the complex geopolitical purposes (Caffrey, 2008; Cornelissen, 2010). As Yang et al. (2010, p.172) suggest, “the local residents in a developing country were more [in favor of] mega-events”.

4.4.3. Interaction effect between media content and interest in the Olympics To further investigate the change of the media effects along with the interest in the Olympic Games, the study tested for significant difference between the experimental groups at specific points of the interest in the Olympic Games (Table 7). Fig. 3 shows that the slopes between media content and attitude change were different when the interest in the Olympic Games equals to a mean-1 standard deviation, the mean, and a mean + 1 standard deviation. Specifically, when the level of the interest in the Olympic Games was low, the “High Benefits & Low Liabilities” news scenario led to an increase in the support for the Olympic bid by 0.109 among the participants, whereas the “Low Benefits & High Liabilities” news scenario led to a decrease in the resident support by 0.179. When the level of the interest in the Olympic Games was in the middle, i.e., after reading the “High Benefits & Low Liabilities” news scenario, the increases in the resident support were 0.107. After reading the “Low Benefits & High Liabilities” news scenario, the decreases in the resident support were 0.304, bigger than 0.179 on the low level. When the level of the interest in the Olympic Games was high, the effects of both news scenarios became more evident across two countries. The “High Benefits & Low Liabilities” news scenario increased the resident support by 0.105 on average, and the “Low Benefits & High Liabilities” news scenario decreased the resident support by 0.429. Notably, there was no big difference on attitude change in the positive experimental group across the three levels of interest in the Olympic Games. However, the attitude change in the negative experimental became larger as the level of interest in the Olympic Games increased. 5. Discussion The experimental design empirically supports the media effect in this way: a positive news scenario about the impacts of the Olympic bid would increase the overall support among the local community, whereas a negative news scenario could decrease the overall support Table 7 Comparison of the marginal means of media content at three points of IOG.

IOG = mean-std IOG = mean IOG = mean + std

HBLL LBHL HBLL LBHL HBLL LBHL

Mean difference

Sum of squares

df

F

Sig.

0.109 −0.179 0.107 −0.304 0.105 −0.429

0.288

9.585

1

45.253

0.000

0.411

39.043

1

184.322

0.000

0.534

32.258

1

152.291

0.000

IOG=mean+std

Fig. 3. Estimated marginal means of media content at three points of centered IOG.

Games just changed by 0.047 out of 5 in a negative way across two experimental groups (Table 6). Apparently, after being exposed to the hypothetical news scenarios, the public support for hosting the Olympic Games among Chinese participants decreased more dramatically than that seen among American participants.

Mean

LBHL IOG=mean

Note. HBLL means “High Benefits & Low Liabilities” newspaper article; LBHL means “Low Benefits & High Liabilities” newspaper article. 72

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The major practical implication is to the Olympic Games Organizing Committees in the host city, especially in Western countries with a free press. Through unveiling the rationale underlying the media effect on resident attitudes toward an Olympic bid, this study shed lights on the need to develop a local media strategy to shape the agenda presented by the news media, particularly during the bid process. This strategy must influence the public media to produce more beneficial reports on the potential positive legacies of a future Olympic Games while minimizing potential negative issues. Specifically, the organizing committee could be more active in providing positive information to news media since it is common that public information officers and other public relations practitioners represent important news sources (McCombs, 2004). Empirical evidence can be found from Sigal (1973) and Lewis, Williams, and Franklin (2008). These studies showed that actually a large proportion of the news stories appearing in newspapers and broadcasts were based on press releases, press conferences and background briefings in the US and Britain. Therefore, the city officials and the bid management team should exert major effort through public relations to influence the news media to report the event in a way that was consistent with their own framework (Gorp, 2007). This public relation strategy also applies when considering the social problems in terms of tourism development. As Schweinsberg et al. (2017) discussed, the scope of agenda setting scholarship has expanded to explain socially constructed problems that cannot be definitively described nor widely agreed. Tourism is not immune to these kinds of problems, for instance, sustainability, climate change, social impacts, and so forth. This study has demonstrated the important role that news media can play in directing public debate and building public consensus. The experimental study is usually subject to the threat to both internal validity and external validity (Zikmund et al., 2009). In this study, the internal validity was possibly jeopardized by extraneous variables. For instance, Beijing's bid for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games and Boston's bid for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games were at different stages when the experimental study was conducted, which could threaten the comparability of resident attitudes between two countries. Another limitation relates to the large sample size which could lead to significant result in a cause-effect testing study. An attentional issue could also influence the negative attitude change for the negative news scenario as it contrasted with the participant's general knowledge about the mega-events. The potential threat to external validity is the representativeness of the participants. Although random assignment was employed, the experiment was conducted through online self-administered surveys with a convenience sample affiliated to the database of the research companies. It was difficult to control the selection effect caused by self interest, timing limitations, socio-demographic status, and so forth. Although the threat to external validity exists, it does not jeopardize the implications of the findings from this experimental study. Generalization of the experiment results could be better realized in future studies. Replication and expansion of the current study will strengthen the claims of the causal relationship between media content and public opinion about hosting mega-events. As a follow-up study, it becomes more meaningful and necessary to conduct content analysis of news media on the outcome of hosting the Olympic Games and then empirically examine the media effect in mega-event candidate cities. Opportunities also exist to broaden the research focus on other tourism related topics, in particular regarding tourism planning and policy. As the news media is one of the information sources in formulating the image of destinations, the various factors shaping the media agenda could be explored for destination marketing under the framework of the agenda setting theory. Moreover, future research should not only pay attention to traditional newspaper outlets but also study the agenda setting power of social media in the context of tourism management.

On the other hand, the different overall attitudes toward the Olympic bid, in particular the pretest attitude, might be attributed to the different media coverage about the Olympic bid existing in the real world between two countries. As Semetko and Mandelli (1997) suggested, the macro-level characteristics of media systems should be taken into account when considering cross-national visibility of public affairs in the news media and its potential influence on public opinion. In China, the news medias were mainly used to set the agenda for political discourse, propagate official policies, monitor public opinion, and rally regime support (Hague & Harrop, 2013; Tang & Iyengar, 2011). In the process of searching publicized newspaper articles, we barely found any critics on the 2022 Winter Olympic bid in Mandarin. Governmental reports were saturated with very positive narratives about hosting the Olympics for a second time in Beijing. This provides the particular context for understanding the overwhelming support for the Olympic bid among the Chinese participants and the unbalanced pre-knowledge about the impact of hosting the Games. In contrast, within the market-driven U.S. media system (McManus, 1994), diversity in viewpoints is more realistic within each individual news medium (Hallin & Mancini, 2004). Most American news media were not as friendly as the Chinese media toward the Olympic Games, and they provided more mixed analyses when discussing both the benefits and liabilities associated with the 2024 Summer Olympic bid in Boston. When the audiences gained more control over what news sources they used, the audiences were likely to seek sources that supported their opinions, obliterating the sense of a public consensus (Johnson, 2014). This could serve as the reasonable explanation for the indecisive attitude held by the American sample toward bidding for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games, observed through the pretest score, as well as the city's final withdrawal from the bidding process. Although the moderating role of nation on media effect was not supported in this study, it was found that interest in the Olympic Games served as a moderator for the causal relationship between media content and the resident attitudes toward the Olympic bid. The more interest in the Olympic Games, the more decrease in resident support for the Olympic bid was observed in the negative experimental group. The survey data showed that overall Chinese participants had significant larger interest in the Olympic Games than American participants. It became understandable that the effect of the “Low Benefits & High Liabilities” news scenario was more evident among Chinese residents than American residents. The inclusion of the interaction between media content and the interest in the Olympic Games in the statistical model could be the reason for the non-significant interaction between media content and nation. In other words, it is likely that, in the difference score model, interest in the Olympic Games acted as the suppressor variable of nation in moderating the media effect. Additionally, although randomization was employed in each country, the heterogeneous demographic characteristics within each sample were out of control, which could be the “noise” for cross-national comparison. 6. Conclusion This study addresses the link between the media content and resident attitudes toward hosting the Olympic Games. The major implications of this study are both theoretical and practical. With the help of the agenda setting theory, the experiments tested the significant causal relationship between media content and resident attitude, and then acknowledged the importance of news media as the antecedent of public support for hosting the Olympic Games. In doing so, this research expands the theoretical framework on a macro level for studying resident attitudes about the mega-events to incorporate not only internal factors, but also external factors such as news media. The understanding of how the news media can be utilized for the purpose of predicting public support for hosting mega-events as well as interpreting the attitude variations within local communities becomes exceedingly important. 73

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Qiulin Lu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities at the Southeast University in China. Her research focus on the interdisciplinary study of social problems associated with tourism and mega-event management. Special research interest currently goes to the impact study of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games.

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Brian Mihalik is a Professor in the School of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Management and in the Department of Sport and Entertainment Management and former Dean of the College of Hospitality, Retail and Sport Management at the University of South Carolina. His academic interest includes the investigation of global and mega-events, i.e., the Olympic Games, and the internationalization of education.

Bob Heere is a Professor in the Department of Management and the Director of Sports Management in the University of North Texas. He focuses on the social impact of sport on society, with a particular focus on social identity theory and community development. To that end, he has conducted research on five different continents, cooperating with researchers from all over the world. His research has been published in leading sport management journals such as Journal of Sport Management, Sport Management Review, European Sport Management Quarterly and Sport Marketing Quarterly and several of his articles are among the most cited in the field over the last decade.

Fang Meng is an Associate Professor in the School of Hotel, Restaurant & Tourism Management, and a Research Associate in the SmartState Center of Economic Excellence in Tourism and Economic Development at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Meng's research mainly focuses on tourism destination marketing and management, tourist behavior/experience, and international tourism.

Amanda Fairchild is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of South Carolina. She is a quantitative psychologist whose research centers on optimizing statistical methods for use in substantive research. She is currently collaborating with colleagues in the neuroscience domain, as well as in juvenile justice and child welfare.

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