NBC's Olympics coverage wasn't just bad -- it was a disgrace to America
Photograph by Curtis Compton/AJC
Czechs, Nigerians, Ukrainians, Mexicans, Japanese: We're sorry. We're not really like this. You caught us on a bad two weeks. We're not really a bunch of provincial yahoos howling for Our Side, weeping on corporate cue and trademarking the sunset.
Well, OK, maybe we are a bunch of provincial yahoos. But NBC could have spared us the indignity of demonstrating that fact to the whole world.
NBC's coverage of the 1996 Olympics succeeded in winning a rare double: it not only represented the definitive low point in the Marianas Trench-like history of television, it brought shame to the United States. Watching it was like staring at a slo-mo closeup, projected on a screen the size of the Gobi Desert, of someone picking his nose -- and then discovering that the nose-picker is you. Creepier than Nixon's election, dumber than Iran-Contra, more humiliating than the AMC Pacer, Atlanta's Jingo Jamboree, as nauseatingly shrink-wrapped by NBC (Nothing But Cretins) revealed to the entire world an unpleasant, yet all-American truth: We have no class.
Call me naive, but the Olympics are about more than cheap patriotism, fake emotions and the astronomical ratings those lovely qualities seem to inspire. They're about globalism, and sportsmanship, and the dignity that still adheres, after thousands of years, to those most primordial of human strivings: running fast, jumping high and throwing far. They're about Michael Johnson coming off the corner in the 200, so straight up he almost seemed to be leaning backwards, his legs pumping like fate and his face locked in that immense, heartwrenching concentration that makes you realize what human beings can achieve when they direct all their will toward one thing: running faster than anyone has ever run. They're about all the athletes, the victors and the vanquished, for whom participation in this ancient ritual means, or should mean, more than the pursuit of fame and wealth. They're about national pride, yes -- but pride that reaches beyond mere selfishness to honor the opponent, to honor the idea of the opponent.
In short, the Olympics are about an ideal. The ideal is never attained, of course -- that's why it's an ideal. But without it, they are nothing. Less than nothing, in fact, because a debased ideal is worse than a mere entertainment. I love NFL football, but I don't expect it to be anything more than what it is. By turning the Olympics into an NFL-style corporate American sporting event, and adding soap-opera bathos to the mix to pull in women, NBC (with a lot of help from tawdry sponsors and vulgarian fans) pissed all over one of the West's greatest legacies.
Olympic coverage has never been perfect. I've been watching the Olympics since long before Chris Schenkel started flogging "The Good Taste of Beer" (yes, that was an actual product name). ABC, which held the franchise for years, could be awfully mealy-mouthed -- some of those old "Up Close and Personal" color segments had all the punch of wet toilet paper. But somehow gentle, querulous old Jim McKay and company conveyed more of the spirit of the event than supersmooth Bob Costas and his team did. It wasn't Costas' fault, actually: he's a first-rate pro. The fault lay in the Big Concept -- NBC's decision to turn the whole thing into fiction, by controlling what we saw, concealing inconvenient facts like whether or not events were live, using reality-blurring "docudrama" techniques and creating fake, overwrought emotional backgrounds at every opportunity.
Their pervasive sense of unreality was the creepiest thing about these Games. I have no idea whether what I saw had anything to do with what really happened, because NBC, like the '50s-fascist "control voice" in the old "Outer Limits," was controlling transmission. Even those sublime, weepy moments that we all love to feel at the Olympics were compromised, because we were never sure if we had been manipulated into them. It was a case of the boy who cried "heartbreaking": when everything is stirring, uplifting, sublime and magnificent, you start wondering if anything is.
NBC's debacle demonstrates the way that modern media culture is inevitably drawn to sentimentality. Sentimentality is emotion that isn't paid for. It's the payoff without the work, the high without the low, the dramatic climax without the plot. Cloying, sickly-sweet and addictive, it's the crack cocaine of pop culture. It cheapens everything it touches: prolonged exposure to it makes it impossible to feel any authentic emotions at all. Combine it with America's ubiquitous emotional partner, mean-spirited flag-waving, and you get something in between the Republican National Convention, a professional wrestling match and "As the World Turns" -- all sponsored by AT&T. It's a combination that raises the specter of terminal cultural decline a la Gibbon, a smiley-face Gotterdamerung in which every ideal, every noble concept is turned into a game-show jingle.
Scary. But even scarier is how predictable, in retrospect, this media nightmare was. NBC played the game strictly by the superslick, ratings-driven, demographically-dominated rules that now govern all aspects of American reality, from statistically-analyzed corporate moral posturing to the Clinton reelection team's Bill Walsh-like quick-response tactics. If that meant that "dramatic recreations" have to replace reality and the cheapest sort of patriotism has to replace internationalism, well, the last resort of scoundrels got the highest ratings ever. And in the new bottom-line vulgarity that has replaced shame among the American elites, this ends the discussion. We can confidently expect NBC execs to say to their critics what that media moralist Maynard Parker said to those whiners who dared to question him about Lying Joe Klein: "Get a life."
No, guys, we have a life. But if you keep on painting over the Grecian urn with your manipulative tricks, your irresponsible journalism and soft-core emotional porn, we won't have one much longer. Then watch the ratings soar! Robots make the best consumers.