| In recent years,in order to improve their own sports level,countries have begun to introduce foreign athletes to play for their own countries.Naturalized athletes have become a new kind of sports talent resources,which flows around the world.From Hua Tian,an equestrian athlete in 2008,to Gu Ailing at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics,naturalized athletes have gradually entered the public’s field of vision,and how to construct the media image of naturalized athletes has become an important proposition.In this paper,Gu Ailing,a popular naturalized athlete,is selected as a representative case to study the construction of media image,so as to provide reference for the later construction of media image of naturalized athletes.In the Internet era,the media has flourished with the continuous progress of technology,everyone has a microphone,and the individual’s right to speak has gradually improved.At present,the reports of mainstream media are also deeply influenced by individual expression.As a new generation of young athletes,Gu Ailing holds great initiative in the process of building the overall media image,and the traditional communication pattern dominated by the media in the past has been broken.Therefore,this study creatively cuts in from the perspectives of the construction of the other and the self-construction of the individual,and puts forward the following research questions:First,how do the media and the individual construct the media image of Gu Ailing respectively?Secondly,what kind of media image of naturalized athletes has the media constructed from the perspective of others,and what kind of media image has Gu Ailing constructed from the perspective of self-expression?Third,what is the relationship between the construction of the other in the media and Gu Ailing’s own self-construction?Fourthly,according to the research results,it provides reference for the media image construction of naturalized athletes in the future.In the specific research process,this paper selects the official authoritative media People’s Daily,the professional mainstream media titan sports and the new online media Tencent Sports as the research samples to analyze the other’s construction,and takes Gu Ailing’s Weibo personal account@Princess Frog Ailing as the research sample to analyze the self-construction.Using content analysis and case analysis,this paper analyzes the process of media image construction from three levels:high,medium and low,combining Van Dick’s discourse analysis theory and scholar Zang Guoren’s "three-level framework" theory.It is found that the image of the other in the media is relatively simple,including the image of high-level top athletes,the image of commercialized star athletes,the image of talented athletes who are not afraid of challenges and the image of influential opinion leaders.Self-constructed media images are diverse,including the individual image of self-prominence,the image of naturalized athletes who are proficient in Chinese,the image of Beijing girls who love food and the image of slash youth with multiple identities.It is found that in the process of constructing the media image of naturalized athlete Gu Ailing,the media has the advantages of strong professionalism and wide communication channels,and still occupies the main position in grasping the direction of public opinion.At the same time,with the continuous development of self-media,the status of self-construction in the construction of media image has been rising,and Gu Ailing’s media image has been constructed together with the media.The construction of others and self-construction are complementary,cooperative and dynamic,and their successful construction of Gu Ailing’s media image provides reference for the construction of naturalized athletes’ media image in the future. |
