By Deanna Fisher | Victory Girls
The Beijing Olympics have begun, and no one
but the media apparently cares about it.
NBC, which has exclusive rights to the Olympics, started their coverage off
with outright simpering and sucking up to the Chinese Communist Party. As Kim
noted here, an Uyghur athlete was chosen by China to light the
Olympic torch during the opening ceremonies. Savannah
Guthrie of NBC’s Today show called it an “in your face response” from
Xi Jinping to the West. Does she HEAR herself???
Today show coanchor Savannah Guthrie provided
credulous commentary on the (alleged) selection of a Uyghur athlete from Xinjiang
province to light the Olympic torch.”
“This moment is quite provocative. It’s a
statement from the Chinese president Xi Jinping,” said Guthrie. “It is an
in-your-face response to those Western nations, including the U.S., who have
called this Chinese treatment of [Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang] genocide and
diplomatically boycotted these games.”
The video of Guthrie saying this was yanked off Twitter
due to NBC claiming copyright issues, but can be seen and heard embedded in
this video.
It’s truly gross to hear an American media figure talk of
Xi Jinping as pulling off some kind of power flex by choosing a Uyghur athlete
to light the torch. Here’s a question for Savannah Guthrie – did this athlete
have ANY CHOICE in the matter? This is the same country, after all, that
“disappeared” tennis player Peng Shuai until she was put out to do her propaganda videos. Why would any responsible
media simply take China’s actions at face value?
Oh, that’s right. Money and access. My bad, I forgot. And
moral equivalency is the name of the game at Disney-owned ESPN. After all, the United States has
problems – why should we be throwing stones at China for genocide
and ethnic cleansing?
During Friday’s “Around the Horn,” host Tony
Reali kicked off the conversation highlighting the opening ceremony of the
Winter Olympics in Beijing as the CCP commits genocide of the Uyghur Muslims,
asking J.A. Adande, the director of sports journalism at Northwestern
University’s Medill School of Journalism, “As a fan and as a reporter, how do
you reconcile enjoying this competition” while such abuses by China are taking
place.”
“I think it’s standard in sports right now-
you have to have a cognitive dissonance. You need to compartmentalize,” Adande
responded. “We’ve never had a more enjoyable NFL Playoffs in this country and
we’ve never had more people watching the playoffs, and yet it goes on amid the
ongoing allegations against Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington Football Team,
and, you know, the continuous concussion concerns, and now the concerns about
diversity in the allegations and questions about competitive integrity even,
all of that, and yet we’re still enjoying the games.”
“And who are we to criticize China’s human
rights records when we have ongoing attacks by the agents of the state against
unarmed citizens and we’ve got assaults on the voting rights of our people of
color in various states in this country. So sports – I think it is possible and
it’s necessary more than ever to just shut everything out if you are to enjoy
the actual games themselves,” Adande told Reali.”
I don’t think Xi Jinping could have said it better than
Adande did. Will ESPN or Disney decline to put Adande back on the air as a
guest because of his sucking up to Communist Chinese policy? Of course not!
Disney is desperate to keep the Chinese market open to them and selling
movies and product there (aside from Xi’s personal nemesis Winnie the Pooh, anyway). Xi should just hire Adande to
represent China on these sports shows and just make it official.
The only good news here is that the American people are
largely tuning out the Beijing Olympics – which is not good news for NBC.
Now, there are multiple causes for the drop in
viewership. NBC is probably loath to admit it, but people are ditching
traditional cable for streaming services in order to cut costs and get what they want.
While NBC will show the highlights of the Olympic Games in
primetime, the live showing of the events on their Peacock streaming service is
limited to their “premium” tier. As in, only those paying subscribers will be
able to see it live. In this era, the fact that we have the ability to watch
the Olympics live, no matter the time zone, should be a draw for viewers. But
by locking down the stream to only premium subscribers, NBC is trying to create
exclusivity in a media world that will receive the Twitter update on who won
the event, and then if they care, will catch up on the highlights on YouTube
hours later. And the worst part is, NBC has the exclusive rights to the
Olympics for TEN MORE YEARS. They are desperate to draw eyes, but
how do they do that when China allows no live audience, and most of the American media
coverage, including most of the color commentators, are in Connecticut and not Beijing?
NBC has dug themselves quite a hole between their
restrictive coverage, their laser focus on the glossy shell of Chinese
authoritarianism covering actual human rights abuses, and the absolute lack of
Olympic buzz among the American public. I hope they enjoy the next two weeks of
trying to sell the public on these Winter Olympic games.
________________
RELATED
ARTICLES
AMERICANS TUNE OUT OLYMPIC CEREMONIES
BY PAUL MIRENGOFF | POWERLINE
Thus, Axios’ explanation for the mass tuning out of the
China ceremonies — that “broadcast and cable TV viewership has been declining
for many years as more people adopt streaming alternatives” — is wide of the
mark. So is its other explanation — that a lack of fans in attendance makes
watching the Olympics less exciting. There were no fans in Tokyo, either.
Disgust that the Olympics are being held in a
genocidal, totalitarian nation is the most plausible explanation for the
abysmal ratings, I think. Yet it goes unmentioned by Axios.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post is doing all it can to
generate interest in the China Olympics. Today’s sports page contains ten
articles about the Games. Six are by Post reporters covering the Olympics from
China. Four are from news services.
With so much of the sports page devoted to the Olympics,
I was able to get through it in about three minutes, instead of the usual five
to ten.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/02/americans-tune-out-olympic-ceremonies.php
_________________
Televised Coverage of Beijing Winter Olympics
is a Snow-filled Ratings Bust
By Leslie Eastman | Legal Insurrection
Despite the blizzard of Chinese PR, CCP officials cannot snow potential viewers and have them forget all the damage that nation has done in the past two years.
This past week has been filled with karmic news (CNN’s
Jeff Zucker resigning, Whoopi Goldberg’s suspension, Meta/Facebook shares plummeting).
It’s as if someone baked a schadenfreude cake and is now
dishing it out. And the frosting on that confection is this: The televised Winter Olympics games in Beijing,
China, are a ratings bust.
Thursday’s primetime coverage of the Beijing Winter
Olympics averaged 7.25 million viewers on NBC, marking the smallest
primetime Olympic audience ever on the network. The previous low was 8.5
million for the final night of competition at last year’s Tokyo Summer
Olympics.
Even including concurrent primetime coverage on USA
Network — 512,000 viewers — the average of 7.78 million would still mark an
all-time low. An across-all-platforms figure that includes NBC’s various
streaming platforms will be provided here when it is available.
…Viewership plunged 55% from NBC’s first night of
coverage at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics four years ago (16.00M) and 64%
from night one of the Sochi Games in 2014 (20.02M). Keep in mind this is only
the third time NBC has aired primetime coverage prior to the Opening Ceremony.
The “bonus” night of coverage is typically not factored into NBC’s averages.
There are so many reasons people are opting out of
watching, despite the grace of figure skating and the thrills associated with
ski competitions.
To begin with, people around the world are
still struggling to free themselves from pandemic restrictions caused by a
virus that appears to have originated in a Wuhan laboratory and was spread
worldwide as a result, at least in part, of the 2019 World Military Games in that city.
The 7th International Military Sports Council Military
World Games (MWGs) opened in Wuhan on October 18, 2019. The MWGs in Wuhan drew
9,308 athletes, representing 109 countries, to compete in 329 events across 27
sports. Many of the participating athletes fell ill with various flu-like
complaints. Here is a glimpse of the sick athletes and their location in the
hospitals…now seeing ill patients.
Evidence from Brazil, Italy, France, and Sweden indicate that
the virus circulated in those countries by November and December of 2019,
long before China officially admitted they had a significant public health
problem. This was likely the global “super-spreader event.” China tried to
blame Italy for the virus at one point.
To compound the insult to Americans, House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi wanted athletes to remain silent about conditions in China, as she
was fearful of their safety.
According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the motto of the
Beijing Winter Olympics should be “Faster, Higher, Stronger — and Silent.”
The California Democrat reiterated Friday that American
athletes should keep any unkind word about China’s repressive Communist
government to themselves, repeating an admonition from the previous day.
“As I wish the athletes well, I do not encourage them to
speak out against the Chinese government there because I fear for their safety
if they do,” Pelosi said Friday, hours after the opening ceremony. “[To] remove
all doubt about why I said they shouldn’t speak out, it’s because I fear for
their safety.”
The responses to this inanity have been
scathing.
Finally, corporate sponsors are afraid of being
connected to a regime that is accused of atrocities on its minority populations
and other human rights abuses.
The corporate sponsors that typically go big on the
Olympics have kept their distance in the run-up amid global condemnation for
the host country’s human-rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims
in far western Xinjiang – which the US state department has labelled a genocide
– in addition to the persecution of Tibetans and the repression of Hong Kong’s
freedoms. Those thorny geopolitical implications were only underscored when the
US, Australia, Britain and Canada announced a diplomatic boycott of the event last
month.
Only two of the 20 official Team USA sponsors
had aired spots pegged to the Olympics as of Wednesday, according
to Reuters, with both focusing on the athletes while downplaying the host
nation. That’s a far cry from the flood-the-zone deluge that’s critical to
breaking through and building anticipation for athletes and sports that are
largely in the public eye only once every four years. Bottom line: many casual
sports fans, perhaps thrown off by an Olympics taking place only seven months
after the last one due to the coronavirus postponement, are barely aware a
Winter Games is even happening.
Beijing laughably had Uyghur cross-country skier Dinigeer
Yilamujiang be the last athlete to carry the flame.
For a country that has been condemned for its treatment
of the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority in the western Chinese
region of Xinjiang, the symbolism was impossible to miss.
The lighting of the Olympic cauldron by the final
torchbearer has long been a centerpiece of Olympic opening ceremonies and marks
the beginning of the Games. It is considered a great honor to be the last
athlete to carry the flame.
Despite the blizzard of Chinese PR, CCP officals cannot
snow potential viewers and have them forget all the damage that nation has done
in the past two years.
I can only hope this is the last Olympic event hosted by
this country. I also pray all our athletes come home safely, and free of
lab-grown viruses.
