But, you know, it’s gonna be alright.
If you’re NBC.
The National Broadcasting Company is a subsidiary of General Electric. And GE has a goal of doubling revenue from sales to China to $10 billion by 2010.
So NBC’s Olympic coverage had lots of on air shots of beautiful vistas, clean streets, and a picture of Chairman Mao looking over the shoulder of Bob Costas.
Dissidents rounded up before the games? NBC didn’t notice. Reporters detained, web sites blocked, women in their seventies sent to reeducation labor camps for applying for a permit to protest? Yeah, but how about clean streets? Look at the Bird Cage, isn’t that something?
Imagine you’re Keith Olberman.
At one point in your career you proclaimed yourself the next Howard Cosell. You were the conscience of America, defender of the Constitution, lecturer of the evil Bush, master of sports and politics.
One day life tosses a great big change up right into your wheel house. A totalitarian state hosting the Olympics? Your fellow reporters are intimidated and censored? A major US contractor is in bed with a repressive government that confines its own countrymen without trial?
The Olympics, staged in a country where "Don’t even think about it." has the force of law?
Talk about ducks on the pond. And it’s on your own network.
How to play it.
You could do the whole Ed Murrow bit. You could even continue playing the Larry Rhodes character from "A Face In The Crowd". Who knows, you might even take a principled stand on the air that makes you a legend. Even if it got you fired.
Or…you could make a few snide remarks about President Bush attending the games, and otherwise ignore the greatest show since Leni Riefenstahl and Goebbels rolled film at Nuremberg.
I was only following orders!
A plausible excuse. Besides, Olbermann wasn’t even part of NBC’s official Olympic coverage. And it isn’t like he was alone.
Costas swallowed the Kool Aid. Jim Lampley displayed depth to his coverage which could have been splashed dry with a tossed coin. Melissa Stark? Not the worrying kind.
So, a bunch of people we don’t know got rounded up and disappeared. Some reporters got pushed around and a few websites were blocked. The police who stopped Chinese citizens from encouraging their own baseball team because their cheers were not approved in advance? Well, you must have order or you have chaos. Right?
Anyway, so what? A good time was had by all.
In 1936 a 243 foot tower rose from the midpoint of another Olympic venue. On it was the inscription "I summon the youth of the world." It overlooked the Reichssportsfield, the 16,000 seat venue which was the focal point of the games. There were children, and songs, and everything at the opening ceremony was wonderfully organized.
The historian Richard Mandell called those ceremonies, "an obscuring layer of shimmering froth on a noxious wave of destiny."
Too bad NBC wasn’t there to cover the games, or GE to sell generators to the Germans. But if Keith Olbermann had been there, or Bob Costas, I’m sure they would have spoken up.
Then again, maybe not.
