A Message from NBC About Its Olympics Coverage

Still laughing. I've been thinking all week about how much
I miss the old ABC coverage, you know, the thrill of victory
and the agony of defeat. Oh well. Times have changed
with Comcast in charge of the media. It so sucks.

Monday night Brian Williams gave away all the results during Nightly News. Why would NBC want to do that?

ABC, bar none, was the best at coverage like this. You saw as many athletes as possible and the commentary for the most part was even-handed. Now it's just USA highlight reels with the occasional foreign athlete thrown in when it can't be avoided. The finals of the women's team gymnastics was complete and utter bullshit, coverage wise.

Jim McKay at the center of it, old pros like Chris Schenkel at the individual events. Top-notch analysts. Short, interesting and unhyped athlete bios when appropriate and a focus on the competition itself. Those were the days.

I also really enjoyed their series of two- or three-minute spots called Olympic Moments, I believe -- some really great stories, well presented.

This has been the least enjoyable Olympics for me because NBC coverage has absolutely sucked on every level.

Before that phrase became cliche.

His coverage of the 1972 hostage crisis, as a sportscaster, puts today's newspeople to shame.

It's a shame that big bucks dictates everything we see and hear anymore -- from politics to sports coverage.

As I said in the Lounge, NBC is rapidly killing my interest in these games.

They have absolutely butchered coverage. Let's recap

1) blowing Franklin's race just before she swam
2) men's gymnastics...where to begin? Were any other countries even competing? Do the athletes receive scores?
3) women's beach volleyball - skipping the 2nd set where Mays/Trainer roared back to life
4) no medal ceremonies
5) non-functional, advertisement riddled, spoiler filled live streams
6) Ryan Seacrest - enough said
7) that idiot chick interviewing all of the swimmers
8) 5 minutes of coverage, followed by 10 minutes of commercials
9) a total blackout of events where the US isn't competing

And that's just off the top of my head...

That "idiot chick" is Andrea Kremer, and she does a very respectable job on one of the best sports shows in TV in my opinion -- "Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel" on HBO. I don't think on-spot reporting like that is her forte.

I'm hoping that NBC takes a good, hard, and long look at its coverage after this. There has been so much outrage over how they're doing this that they really can't be deaf, dumb, and blind to the criticism. Even NPR had a story about it the other day.

I absolutely went ballistic Monday night when Brian Williams gave away the results of both the men's swimming relay and women's gymnastics team finals. I was looking forward to both, especially the swimming. Then last night the smirky SOB had the gall to say that if we didn't want to see a medal count (which is meaningless to most of us) we should look away.

Their attitude of "we've got the Olympics and we'll cover it however we want" is just bullshit.

just isn't used to airing shows people actually want to watch.

I think they're on to something...

hammered in the blogosphere and on Twitter for their horseshit coverage, but they don't seem to give even half of a hoot.

They bought it, they broke it.

I'll really be interested to see the ratings for this once it's all over. As people get their fill and find alternative coverage, I think numbers will drop.

Arrogance and blatant disregard for one's audience tends to have a nasty way of coming back and biting one in the ass.

Unless we can get that contract out of their greedy grasp, tear it in a million pieces, and set the pile on fire!

On which I've been watching BBC 1 LIVE coverage of the Olympics:

http://tvpc.com/Channel.php?ChannelID=3

Of course, it's on GMT, so the athletes are all asleep now.