Olympics: The backlash against NBC

“If NBC wanted people talking about London’s Summer Olympics,” said Robert Bianco in USA Today, “consider that goal achieved.” From the start of the Opening Ceremony, public grumbling over the network’s handling of the Games has grown into a roar. Though NBC’s lightweight hosts and melodramatic production have irked many viewers, the main focus of the anger is the network’s insistence on tape-delaying its coverage, so that events that occur earlier in the day in London can be shown at night during prime time. That delay has led to comical paradoxes, said Heidi Moore in Guardian.co.uk. By the time NBC showed American swimmer Missy Franklin winning the gold, for example, the results had been on the Internet for hours, and NBC had just aired a promo for the next morning’s Today show in which Franklin was asked what it was like “to win your first gold medal.” What NBC doesn’t understand “is that sports are news,” and that in today’s lightning-fast information culture, viewers “want the news as it happens.”

True, but NBC paid $1.18 billion for the right to televise the Games, said Megan Garber in TheAtlantic.com, and it won’t get its money’s worth without giving advertisers a massive, prime-time audience. For those who prefer to watch the Games in real time, the network is streaming every event live at NBCOlympics.com, and some events on sister networks like MSNBC and CNBC. In essence, “there are two Olympics”—a Games of pure competition shown live, and the “highly produced, heavily narrative, ad-filled, time-delayed” product on NBC at night. The level of vitriol being directed at NBC is just bizarre, said Scott Pierce in The Salt Lake Tribune. “There is no God-given right to see a sporting event on TV,” and NBC is making a perfectly sensible business decision in tape-delaying its broadcasts. Based on the viewing figures so far—up 17 percent from the Beijing Games four years ago—the network would seem to be doing something right.

I can forgive NBC’s tape delay, said Emma Keller in Guardian.co.uk, but not its provincial, pro-American chauvinism. The nightly telecast focuses almost entirely on American athletes, especially those with heartwarming personal stories that can be dragged out into gauzy mini-features. There are 10,500 athletes in London representing 204 countries, but if you watch NBC, you’d hardly know “there’s more than one team competing in the Olympic Games.”

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