Anyone else hate the US olympic coverage?

On one hand, I fully agree that NBC’s Olympic coverage was pretty bad, as it usually is.

On the other hand, I saw some of the BBC’s coverage of the Olympics, and folks… if you thought AMERICAN broadcasters were ridiculously biased homers, you’d be stunned at the partisan cheerleading on the Beeb (which is normally held up as a model of objectivity).

One of the newish things about the Closing on BBC was - apart from being on all broadcast platforms live - was you also had the choice of HD/not, and also ‘stadium sound’ or ‘with commentary’, which I don’t recall being an option before.

Fwiw, not sure but I kind of sense the move away from prescribed viewing - at whatever time the network decides to broadcast a show - isn’t happening so much in the US.

Having a big screen/tv with a USB port is really pretty helpful now all networks have downloadable programming.

Yep, even the outward going DG wasn’t entirely happy about it.

The BBC worries me at times because there is a difficult line to draw between being a propagandist tool of the state (stiring or creating sentiment), and merely reflecting genuine public sentiment.

I saw a quote from the head of NBC Sports:

“They openly root for their athletes on the air,” he railed. “Nobody ever uses the word ‘we’ in our coverage, and if they did they wouldn’t last long.”

From a piece in the New Zealand Herald, which also found the BBC’s coverage to be partisan (David Leggat: Three cheers for a job well done - NZ Herald )

For all the constant streaming and multiple channels, I felt like less sports were shown. It was volleyball-intensive, pool-intensive, and lacked a lot of sports that I used to enjoy watching like weightlifting, wrestling, boxing, track/field, and the occasional “huh that’s a sport?”

I managed to see a little bit of almost everything; just missed rifle and pistol shooting, and sailing.

The NBC coverage certainly had flaws. I think they do so much research and up-close-and-personal profiles in advance that they come up with an expected narrative of what they think will happen, and then are a little too reluctant to abandon that when things go another way. And the actual sporting coverage seems to be slipping a little bit as the years go by. During (at least) one of the gymnastics finals, an American was leading with one athlete left to compete. Lots of tense close-ups of faces, but they never said what score the last person needed in order to win. And then they didn’t even show the score when it was posted, just “Douglas wins!” or whoever it was. Was it close? Who knows. Sports have numbers, and scores, and facts; some of us want to know what they are.

Saw something today that I can’t blame on NBC. I watched a recap of the men’s marathon and it didn’t end in the stadium. That’s the tradition; they finish with a lap of the stadium track at the same finish line as all the other events, before the closing ceremonies. The only reason I could see for not doing it is so they could tart up the stadium for the closing. It wasn’t worth it.

I certainly missed my CBC coverage this year. I forget the night, but track had started and many other sports had big events. How does NBC open its prime time? By blowing 20 minutes on the 1996 women’s gymnastic team! What the fuck?!?

Too much beach volleyball, particularly since the chilly London weather kept the best feature of the sport under wraps. Too many feature stories. Too much basketball, which we can watch way too much of already. Not enough rowing, kayaking, and not any sailing at all that I could see. All too often the attitude at NBC was : Can Americans win the gold? No? Fuck it.

Mary Carillo is pretty awesome covering the Olympics, actually. Her late night coverage the last several Olympiads was great – she was excited about every sport, witty, and even pointed out stuff about athletes from other countries. Wish I’d had time to catch more of her stuff this Olympics.

Her fluff piece interviews with Bela Karolyi are always a hoot, and the only exception to my irritation at NBC’s timewasting random interviews of non-Olympians.

There was a little bit of bad feeling about that. Originally the marathon was going to finish at the stadium as usual, but then they apparently decided that the last few miles from the landmarks of central London out to the East End location of the Olympic Park would not have been “television friendly” i.e. that part of town is not pretty enough. Locals took this as a snub.

Exactly when did volleyball become a hugely popular sport in the USA?!
Last time I even saw anyone play volleyball was when I was a freshman in high school and I was forced to play in gym class.

What’s next? Will we see dodge ball become a big deal at the next Olympics? Rope climbing? Tether ball?

Yes, I am aware they had coverage on other channels all day, every day - but, uh, I have to do something called “work” and don’t have time to see those. Pretty much forced to watch the prime time version.

NBC had more than ample time to edit and cut footage before prime time, cutting off to commercials and missing whole bunches of stuff made no sense whatsoever.

So, considering they have time to edit, and they have about 5 hours of prime time every single night, if they simply got rid of the bullshit fluff pieces, and sob story back stories, and endless hints of what is to come, they could probably cover a lot more and make many more people happy.

Hell, even showing the final top three performances of other (non-American dominated) sports would have been nice and taken what, 5-10 minutes of time and a quick shot of the happy medal winners from other countries? Better than watching some 15 minute puff piece on how [fill in the blank of American athlete] overcame the stigma of acne in high school and show family photos of them at Christmas in 1986…

What I’d like is a channel devoted to wrap-ups of each sport. You can schedule time to see the day’s results for Judo, or Rowing, or Archery, rather than surfing at random hoping to catch a glimpse. Even better, make it an On Demand program, you get forced to see an ad or two, and get the full results with highlights, whenever it’s convenient for you.

Wait a minute. Now, I’m certainly no giant fan of NBC’s coverage. But in those olden days of ABC it was just as biased if not more so. Do you remember their coverage of the 1984 Los Angeles games? Probably the most biased in history.

And actually, if you include the coverage on all the side channels – MSNBC, CNBC, etc. – they covered a lot of “obscure” sports. Far more than they ever showed before 2000, say.

Oh, yeah, I remember the '84 coverage – one of my teammates was an Olympian. But if it seemed like they only showed American golds for medal ceremonies… well, that’s just about how it was with the USSR boycott.

It was absurd, the number of American medals – McDonald’s lost their hat on that summer’s Olympic promotion!

But they did get a few non-American profiles and focuses in. NBC is just weird about covering non-Americans – Usain Bolt: on all the time. China in gymnastics & diving: blink and you’ll miss 'em.

I DVR’ed it all and watched what I wanted, when I wanted. Deleted the fluff/crap.

I’m making a bold and early prediction about the games in Rio. They will be a giant cluster-fuck! Of course, that won’t come across on TV here. But I bet there will be horror storys.

Right. I don’t have cable, and I work a day job, so I can only see what NBC shows me during primetime. I understand that it’s a recap, and I understand that it’s going to be more focused on American athletes, but why spend 30 minutes recapping the amazing gymnastics of the ATLANTA games for me when you could be showing me a vault or two by gymnasts from other countries at these Olympics??

Several times, when it was a tight competition between America and some other country for the gold medal, NBC would cut away for replay after replay of the big win (or, rarely, the crushing loss), and not bother to show who got a bronze medal! A few minutes later they’d throw up a graphic with the results and then move on. That really pissed me off.

But someone, somewhere, must enjoy the endless interviews and athlete bios, or why would NBC bother?

The one hour documentary about WWII on Saturday was a ridiculous waste of time. But not as ridiculous as every minute Ryan Seacrest took up talking about Facebook. Jeeze, what were they thinking?

NBC paid $4.5B for this Olympics and the next three. The have four hours of Prime Time a night to sell commercials for. Facebook has a billion active members, almost all in the wheelhouse 25-49 year old demographic. Ryan Seacrest is the host of Prime Time TV’s most popular show.

I’m sure you can connect the dots.

Actually, to me, I hate it and it kind of makes me sad. I think of what could be and how it’s not being met. Seriously, the fluff pieces on the Magnificent 7 just about pushed me over the edge: you have the time to show something new, something that happens only once every 4 years, and we’re shown features about something that happened 16 years ago. It’s a world-wide event and we are force-fed the same crap. I wish that one network did not have a monopoly on it. Let several networks show it and then let the viewers decide what they want to watch. Give me something new. Something different. Let me see the world-wide spectacle, not swimming, running, and volleyball.

A-fricking-men.

I’m ok with America-centric broadcasting. I’m reasonably jingoistic and will cheer more loudly for the American doing a sport that I know nothing about than the non-Americans. I’m ok with focusing more on sports that are camera friendly and even pushing back the reveals until the end of the programming night.

But wasting a half hour talking about wandering through the streets of London? I don’t need that. And if I cared about what was going on on twitter, I’d be watching my twitter feed. I also don’t want up-close and personal profiles. Color commentary is fine, but it should be done while they’re showing the sport, not in place of showing the sport. They had multiple hours of footage of people doing something athletic. Paste that together and put it on the screen.

Oh, and don’t forget the feature on that Olympic paragon, James Bond. WTF?? Oh, then after that feature there was a commercial for Skyfall put out by Universal. Coincidence?