Professor, Dr.Sc.Phil. A.N. Teplyashina
PhD N.A. Pavlushkina
Professor, Dr.Sc.Phil. B.Y. Misonzhnikov
Saint Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg

Keywords: sport, promotion, popular scientific publications, doping.

Introduction. Attention of mass media has been recently focused on the phenomenon of mass doping in sport, which has negative social, political, psychological and other consequences for individual athletes as well as for the country as a whole. Events associated with doping are predetermined by a set of factors, a threat to physical health of athletes, morals allowing tolerance to illicit drugs, the lack of acquired practice of reading the government press being among the notable ones. “Rossiyskaya Gazeta”, founded by the Government of Russia, publishes presidential decrees, orders of the Ministry for Sport, Tourism and Youth Policy, and others. Over 20 such publications were made in the period from 2005 to 2016. In this regard, it is necessary to clarify and explain provisions and the role of these official documents to the readers. These issues are solved by popular scientific publications of RG that present to the readers all the nuances of relationships between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and athletes in a popular and clear form, explaining what doping is, assessing the facts of doping usage by athletes or dwelling on the issue of doping in general.  

Methods and structure of the study. The authors conducted in-depth interviews with 300 student-athletes, the result of which characterizes potential impact of the publications in “Rossiyskaya
Gazeta” on the subject of doping on the young people studying in eight departments of Lesgaft National State University of Physical Education, Sport and Health, Saint Petersburg.  

The content-associated analytical study was carried out in two stages. Zero results were obtained at the first stage: students-athletes do not read “Rossiyskaya Gazeta”. Volunteers (students of the Department of Journalism of the School of Journalism and Mass Communications of Saint Petersburg State University) asked the athletes to read informational and analytical articles on the website of “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” and answer the following questions: 1. Are you going to be a regular reader of “Rossiyskaya Gazeta”? 2. Would you like the newspaper to publish more popular scientific articles on the effects doping substances have on health? 3. Is the coverage of the doping issue in “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” intelligible for the reader? 4. Is “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” objective in its coverage of the topic of doping? 5. Is the tendency of journalists to report about athletes suspected of doping before the final test results are obtained justified? 6. Is “doping scandal” real? 7. How would you rate the efforts of “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” in promoting physical culture and “fair play”? (on a five-point scale). Answers to the question about the efforts of “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” in promoting physical culture and “fair play” were as follows: 5 points – 59 respondents, 4 points – 100, 3 points – 100, 2 points – 41 respondents. The range of responses to the questions 1-6 is shown in Table 1.            

Table 1

Results and discussion. Content analysis of the publications in “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” covering the subject of doping showed a steady dynamics of it becoming more relevant (see Table 2). The government recognizes the important role of “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” with regards to potential impact on the target audience.

Table 2

Results of the study suggest that the importance of “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” in spreading fair play ideas and principles as well as drawing the attention of the target readership to issues of scientific and moral and ethical nature is quite substantial. However, the propaganda will be more successful if as a mechanism of its realization a systematic approach is developed to targeted, informative and substantial in terms of content, control and regulatory components of media education of sports university students; selection priorities for news items inclusion into the modern system of teaching aids for promoting sport without doping are defined; expedient combination and ratio of traditional tools and new generation information sources are achieved; specifics of media usage is defined and organizational forms, methods and teaching technologies are suggested along with the rational information environment and technical means necessary and sufficient for entrenchment of media literacy.     

To identify the characteristics of the coverage the topic of doping gets in “Rossiyskaya Gazeta”, 749 publications within the last decade (2006-2016) in its hardcopy version were selected. The selection was based on the linguistic unit “doping” and was carried out using the analytical system Public.ru, an online database with a broad functionality and the archives of 15,000 periodicals from all regions of Russia, the CIS and foreign countries dating back to 1990. Next, news items of informational nature only stating the facts relating to doping and covering doping scandals without providing a lot of details were excluded from the base of these publications. Thus, 137 publications became the subject of our analysis. The dynamics of popular scientific publications about doping published in the newspaper is presented in Figure 1:

Figure 1. Dynamics of doping-related popular scientific publications in “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” in the period from 2006 till 2016.

The chart shows that attention to the problem of doping in sport was at its peak in 2009, 2014 and at the beginning of 2016. In 2009 the publications dealt with clarifying the case of six Russian track and field female athletes accused of doping tests substitutions, positive doping tests of the leading biathletes of the Russian team before the start of the Biathlon World Cup in PyeongChang (South Korea), the situation with the CSKA football players who failed in the doping test before the match of the Champions League either, forecasts of the Olympic Games in Vancouver in terms of doping and possible mistakes of WADA, and initiative of the Commission for physical culture, sport and the Olympic movement development within the framework of the national anti-doping policy. In 2014 – doping scandals during the Olympic Games in Sochi. In 2016 – the topic related to the updated list of substances prohibited in sport and detection of meldonium in tests of many athletes.    

The articles of educational nature targeting general audience mention 235 persons, the five most mentioned include V. Mutko (17 times), V. Putin (10), D. Medvedev (8), A. Zhukov (5), J. Rogge (5). Genres of the publications include news items (66 publications), interviews (40), spot coverage (13), comments (8), reports (5), reviews (3), round-up (1), and criticism (1). Information about doping sourced from competent individuals is trusted by youth.

To attract the attention of the audience the authors of the publications often use journalistic aphorisms built around puns as headlines (“There’s nothing left for testing”, “Gene on the podium”, “It’s not beer that kills athletes”, “Dracula – 2007”, “WADA all around us”, “Devildom”), headlines in the form of questions (“Who is responsible for meldonium?”, “What is the WADA Prohibited List?”) and the word “scandal” (“Feeling sad – a scandal”, “Blood race – a scandal”, “It’s a hard day for Mariа – scandal”).

At the same time to enhance the readers’ perception of the publications the authors often simplify the terminology using a variety of artistic and visual techniques. Here are some randomly selected examples: a) “Alexander Vinokurov is accused of “blood doping”. Analysis of sample “A”… revealed the presence of different types of blood cells – erythrocytes. Doping tests indicate that Vinokurov had blood transfusion; the blood was of the same type as his, but of another person…. Blood transfusion provides a huge advantage – right away. The body becomes as good as new! That is why vampires lived so long” [2]; b) “Recall at least how 15 years ago erythropoietin, a famous doping, dealt with Western European cyclists like the Grim Reaper” [1]; c) “Indeed, they took poison – meldonium, the very same that is a lifesaving medication for heart disease patients” [3]; d) “The drug is called clenbuterol. It burns fat, helps build muscle and gives energy”  [4], etc.

Conclusions. Examination of the popular scientific publications shows that authors and protagonists of these publications in general disapprove of doping, explaining with the help of examples the harm they do to the body and the sports industry as a whole. However, at the same time Russian athletes are often somewhat made allowances for, since according to journalists and experts the anti-doping agency accused them of having positive tests results “by mistake”. Among the reasons provided by the publications’ authors incorrect operations of doping control officers and WADA as a whole and inadequate compilation of the list of prohibited drugs that includes quite harmless substances are mentioned. They also see these charges as politically motivated. It is the government mass media that shapes and promotes information policy in terms of coverage of the activities and position of the President and the Government towards the actual problem that can overcome the situation. It is particularly important to provide the necessary information to young athletes.   

References

1. Geguchadze A. Olimpiada v Pekine budet posledney… (Olympics in Beijing will be the last ... ) / A. Geguchadze // Rossiyskaya gazeta. – 2007. – January 25. – P. 11.
2. Kozina A. Gonka na krovi – skandal (Race to the blood - the scandal) / A. Kozina // Rossiyskaya gazeta. – 2007. – July 26. – P. 11.
3. Trudny den' dlya Marii – skandal (Difficult day for Mary - the scandal) // Rossiyskaya gazeta.   – 2016. – March 9. – P. 16.
4. Kharlamov M. Kontadora prosyat pritormozit' (Contador is asked to slow down) / A. Kharlamov // Rossiyskaya gazeta. – 2010. – October 1. – P. 19.

Corresponding author: fizkult@teoriya.ru

Abstract

The article explores the issues of doping-related problems coverage by the national mass media organizations. Subject to the study were, on the one hand, 137 popular doping-related scientific publications in the state-owned “Russian Newspaper” (RN) designed to promote fair play ideas and concepts and familiarize the target audience with the relevant research and ethical issues. On the other hand, the study included a questioning survey of 300 university athletes to explore the effects of the above RN publications on the young people and their awareness of the doping-related issues. The study gave the grounds to rate the contribution of the “Russian Newspaper” publications to the public awareness of the sporting ethics as high enough, albeit the young athletes were found to seldom rely on this edition as the sole source of information. In this context, the study offers a set of key elements of the fair play promotion media policy, as follows: ensure a systemic approach to the media education for the sport university students being designed on a targeted, informative, substantial and control-and-regulatory-system-aware basis, with due priority being given to selection of due media content for the modern doping-free sport promotion system; apply the relevant specific media coverage instruments and develop new institutional forms of education and educational methods and technologies supported by a facilitating information environment and technical tools required and sufficient for media literacy of the students.