NBC ruins Winter Olympics

The last time I actually enjoyed watching an Olympic game was in 2000 when I visited Tammam in Montreal. The Canadian broadcast was relatively simple. No overly sappy Canadian athlete profiles and no talking heads who distracted from the actual Olympic events. The Canadian network (I don't remember what network it was) simply broadcasted the actual Olympic events -- even events in which no Canadian athletes were featured. Unfortunately, NBC execs think the Olympics is too boring for 'merican viewers, so they launch yammering Bob Costas, made-for-TV dramatic athlete profiles, and edit the competitions as if they were reality TV show highlights. I know I'm not alone in my criticism. Afterall, NBC's ratings are so poor that some network executives should lose their jobs. The Nation's website posted an article, The Olympics We Missed, by Dave Zirin which covered most of NBC's offenses which included jingoism, tape delay, idiotic sport choices, and the elevation of undeserving 'merican athletes like Bode Miller.

..Moldy Nationalism: It's amazing. America has never been a more dynamic, multicultural society and the world has never been more of a global village, but NBC still treats the games as if it were 1980 and the United States were taking on the Eastern Bloc. As Florida writer Pierre Tristam wrote in his blog, "NBC covers the Olympics the way American neocons do foreign policy: The world is 95 percent America, 3 percent water, and 2 percent everything else. America's projection onto the world is mostly as an emblem of force, preferably unrivaled....

If the Olympics had not sold itself to NBC, it would have been nice for viewers to have been able to select their own coverage of the Olympics.