Amid the usual criticisms of NBC’s coverage of the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics — the fact that the event was tape delayed served as a major irritation for viewers — at least one writer accuses the network of not devoting enough coverage to the social issues in host country China.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Barry Garron writes “money talks, but it can also buy quite a bit of silence … Having shelled out $894 million for the U.S. rights, [NBC] was not about to squawk about many of the controversies that surround these Games.” Garron noted that Tom Brokaw used somewhat sanitized language to describe how China views protesting, and that China’s human rights record recieved “almost no mention, and its disgraceful record in Darfur … didn’t come up until Sudanese athletes entered the National Stadium.” Additionally, neither “[Bob] Costas nor co-host Matt Lauer had much to say about Beijing’s air, though there was time enough for Lauer to tell viewers that Malawi was the country from which Madonna adopted a child.”
Steve Springer of the L.A. Times had an opposing view, saying NBC “answered the challenge” of “balancing the face China was presenting to the world with the unrest and controversy that the country hopes to shove into the background.” Springer noted that Brokaw “chronicled the country’s sometimes tortured history” during the first half hour of the telecast, and praised Costas and Lauer for “[detailing] the upheaval affecting several countries” including Russia and Pakistan.
The Opening Ceremony began at 8 AM ET, and was tape delayed by twelve hours on NBC. On The Today Show, broadcasting from Beijing, “the co-hosts barely acknowledged that the nearby stadium was abuzz with activity. That may be because, according to TVNewser, Friday?s Beijing segments on ?Today? were pre-taped.” While viewers in other countries, including Canada, were able to watch the ceremony live, viewers in the U.S. “woke up, turned on NBC, America’s Olympic Network ? and saw Meredith Vieira doing a cooking segment.”
Some found a way around NBC’s blackout, using online outlets to watch the Opening Ceremony as it happened. The Washington Post‘s John Pomfret “caught some of the Olympics opening ceremony on a Ukranian website … I would have liked to have watched the whole thing live and not felt like a hacker while I was doing it.” With several online outlets providing feeds of the event, The New York Times‘ Brian Stelter reports “NBC sent frantic requests to Web sites, asking them to take down the illicit clips and restrict authorized video to host countries. … Network executives tried to regulate leaks on the Web and shut down unauthorized video, while viewers deftly traded new links on blogs and on the Twitter site, redirecting one another to coverage from, say, Germany, or a site with a grainy Spanish-language video stream.”
The tape delayed broadcast likely helped NBC in the ratings, says The Hollywood Reporter‘s James Hibberd. “With gushing critic reviews and lavish images saturating the media Friday, many viewers likely tuned in to see if the ceremony could possibly live up to the hype.” For example, after a post by Tripp Mickle on the Sports Business Daily Olympics page detailed the Opening Ceremony, one commenter wrote “Tripp, the way you describe the opening ceremonies, sounds sooo exciting & spectacular. It is 4:00 PM in Georgia (US) and can’t wait to watch it at 8 PM tonite.” That being said, the L.A. Times‘ Springer says tape delaying the broadcast caused NBC to “[lose] the anticipation of the moment and the drama of the lighting of the torch, as word [leaked] out. … The network’s own website had a photo of [Li Ning] in midflight a full three hours before he soared on the West Coast telecast.”
On NBC itself, The Seattle Times‘ Ron Judd says the network’s coverage was “effective. Not in the constant blather and faux emotion of Costas and Lauer, but in its production values and in the interpretation of the historical and cultural elements of the show by NBC China analyst Josh Cooper Ramo.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch describes Costas and Lauer as “sometimes [seeming] stunned into silence by the epic opening ceremonies in Beijing.” USA Today‘s Robert Bianco says NBC deserves credit for “allowing [Zhang] Yimou’s show to play out with a minimum of superfluous fuss from hosts Bob Costas and Matt Lauer and their newly hired expert Joshua Ramo.” The Washington Post Tom Shales says that Costas “was less inclined to quip the night away than he was back at the 2004 Games in Greece, and he held off on superfluous chatter until … the colorful but a tad monotonous Parade of Nations had begun.”
