Propaganda and Censorship for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games: The Internal Politics of Ceausescu |
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| Authors: | Simona Petracovschi |
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| Institution: | Faculty of Physical Education and Sport, West University of Timisoara, Timisoara, Romania |
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| Abstract: | The aim of this paper is to present an overview of the USSR boycott of the 1984 Olympic Games and Nicolae Ceausescu’s decision to send the Romanian Olympic team to Los Angeles, from an internal politics perspective. All the existing analyses study the situation from the perspective of international relations but the aim of this paper is to analyze the ways that Ceausescu incorporates this decision into his own ideology and how the Romanian people were informed. The sports news was published in the newspaper Sportul and some in Scanteia (‘The Official Newspaper of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Parti’). We will analyze all the relevant material from January until the end of August 1984 and will focus on the characteristics of propaganda and censorship used to convince the population about Ceausescu’s reasons to participate at the Olympic Games despite the situation. Dominated by the idea of a ‘multilateral developed society’, Ceausescu incorporated sport as part of this ideology and in the case of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, he manipulated the population through the media in a particular manner, centred on his ‘cult of personality’. |
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| Keywords: | Romania boycott ideology press nationalism |
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