By Maira Magro
World Cup coverage has been marked by discussions about more than just soccer games. In the United States, the extreme right declared war against the tournament, seeing it as a foreign ideology, alien to U.S. culture. In Brazil, the fights between the coach Dunga and journalists from Globo television have generated a wave of Internet campaigns against the station.
Strong support during the World Cup has never been a big tradition in the land of basketball, football and baseball. But with U.S. fans showing signs of adopting the sport and celebrating the heroic efforts of their team with shouts of "Yes, we can!", conservatives are making ugly faces and arguing that soccer is something from the left, and for Latinos, according to O Estado de S. Paulo and Uol.
“It doesn’t matter how you sell it to us. It doesn’t matter how many celebrities you get. It doesn’t matter how many bars open early. It doesn’t matter how many beer commercials they run. We don’t want the World Cup. We don’t like the World Cup. We don’t like soccer...The rest of the world likes Barack Obama’s policies. We do not, and I’m cool with that. If you want Barack Obama’s policies or the World Cup in your country have at it,” said Glenn Beck, conservative Fox News commentator, comparing soccer to Obama's policies (watch the video).
Dan Gainor, of the Media Research Center, said that “soccer is designed as a poor man or poor woman's sport,” and that the "the left is pushing it in schools across the country."
Gary Schmitt, in a blog from the American Enterprise Institute, said that perhaps soccer is not as popular in the United States as in Latin America or Europe because Americans, at least when it comes to sports, stop rooting for the underdog and believe "excellence should prevail."
In Brazil, the World Cup has turned into grounds for a campaign against TV Globo: many Internet users have adopted the attitude of the coach Dunga of cutting off privileges that the station is accustomed to, like exclusive interviews with the players and accompanying the team, according to columnist Mauricio Stycer of Uol.
On Twitter, users called for a boycott of the station on Friday, during a game between Brazil and Portugal. The campaign “A Day without Globo” came about after two other Twitter cases critical of employees of the station: the case of “Shut up, Galvão” and “Shut up, Tadeu Schmidt”.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
