"Back the Bid": the London Olympic Bid Committee and the Sun newspaper

This article explores how the London Olympic Bid Committee (LOBC) sought to gain the popular support required for London’s bid for the 2012 Olympic Games by attempting to influence the journalists of the U.K. newspaper with the greatest readership to communicate their discourse to the host urban population. The research draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse to investigate whether and, more importantly, how the journalists of the Sun articulated the key statements that the LOBC sought to convey to the U.K. public in their coverage of London’s bid for the 2012 Games in order to discover how collusion and tension between the discourses and practices of bid committees and those of journalists affect the statements articulated to the reader.