Australian mainstream media coverage of Asian football

This papers uses coverage of Asian football in the Australian mainstream media as a case study to examine the extent to which agenda setting through interaction between media sports departments and sports journalists potentially impedes the understanding of the game in a broader social and political context. It does so by situating media sports departments and sports journalists in the broader sports field and examines the extent to which the field has adapted its coverage to the particularities of emerging Australian engagement with football in Asia . For the purposes of this article, the study employed a mixture of participant observation, literature review and informal workplace interviews with a variety of media practitioners. The two participant observation components were comprised of a ten-day working trip to the 2011 AFC Asian Cup in Qatar in January 2011 and a two-week internship at Fairfax Media publication Brisbane Times in March .