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February 23, 2006
Olympic coverage not that jingoistic: The Olympics The Nation missed.
Maybe The Nation is becoming a better magazine, because I finally read something in it I vehemently disagreed with: Dave Zirin's "The Olympics We Missed." (Well, aside from Hitchens a lot and Cockburn occasionally.)
I've been blogging on the Games and the coverage on my personal blog almost every night. (I'm a Winter Olympics freak and watch everything I can.) I agree with some of his points, about stupid, made-up events that practically only Americans excel in and the advertising build-up of mediocre American stars, for example. (He could be better informed about his sport history, though: slalom skiing is not a made-up American event; it premiered in Switzerland in 1922.)
The predictable charge of hyper-nationalism and arrogance is rather off the mark, at least this year. For one thing, NBC has shown practically no medal ceremonies, one common source of jingoistic skew. Secondly, they make almost no mention of the "medals race," the stupid, country-by-country tally that I ignore in the paper ever morning. They do always mention the Americans athletes in any event no matter how far down in the pack, but they have given expansive coverage, both in the events themselves and the schmaltzy back stories, to foreign athletes. (And since so many promising Americans are tanking, they don't have much choice, I suppose.) They even covered events in which Americans rarely figure, cross country skiing, for example. The human interest coverage seems to focus on underdogs, and not too many of these are American! I know that many countries, Canada, for instance, have much more extensive coverage, but I really didn't think NBC was so bad this year.
As for his other main complaint, the tape delay, what the hell? I couldn't take off work to watch in the morning and midday, and a lot of other folks couldn't either. I just tune out results news during the day and enjoy the suspense and drama of the carefully non-spoiling evening coverage. Ok, so Koreans are getting up at 3 a.m. or whatever to watch their athletes live. Only super-rabid nationalism could make people do that.
Posted by johnn at February 23, 2006 08:26 PM
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