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Who Hates Whom:
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Of course, 20 year old snowboarders can't tinker with broadcasting laws

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Friday, 17 February 2006

Nice job, NBC.

20-year-old kid gets a little overexcited for maybe two seconds, is instantly punished by life itself, and you catch her in a small lie while she's trying to explain it to herself a few minutes later, then rake her over the coals for another half-hour.

And yet somehow, on your Sunday morning talk shows, you never seem to have the ability, ever, to confront anyone in the White House or the Congressional leadership on their stream of obvious, ongoing, shameful lies on about thirty different subjects.

Gosh. If only the media could have the same balls around the powerful as they do around a humiliated and disappointed 20-year-old girl.

Yeesh.

UPDATE: I wrote the above while exhausted at the end of a long day of snorkeling, and I believe my head may have been underwater a bit too long. This may be the most unclear thing I've ever posted, and my bad. It's in reference to an instant-classic Olympic flub that I assumed (wrongly) would be all over the news for its sheer embarrassing glory: American snowboard racer Lindsey Jacobellis was within seconds of winning a gold medal, with one of the biggest leads anyone will ever see in that sport: only one competitor was even still standing, and she wasn't even within sight. So young Lindsey began hotdogging a few seconds from the finish line, and immediately not only fell down, but threw herself from the course entirely. By the time she managed to climb back up and regain her direction, zzzzip! went her pursurer right by, and that was that.

It was an amazing example of hubris being instantly punished, and NBC seized on it by repeating the video over and over, interviewing her immediately afterwards, while she was still in shock and trying to rationalize her foolishness, then repeating the video again a few more times, and then interviewing her yet again. And when her rationalization was obvious crap, they said so, with a bluntness one never sees in the news division.

So that's the reference.

What I forgot, of course, is that unusually few Americans are even watching the Olympics this year, partly because NBC always manages to make the games almost completely unwatchable, interrupting a perfectly enjoyable three-hour block of Visa card commercials with short bursts of actual athletics. These are terribly distracting from the main subject of the Olympics, which is of course Bob Costas. I understand that for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, NBC is planning not to show any events at all, but merely let Bob Costas sit around a studio with friends, strumming a guitar, while Visa card ads play continuously on three cable networks. This will finally eliminate all those pesky images of world-class athletes which so vex the Olympic viewer.

Anyway, Lindsey Jacobellis flying too close to the sun is what the post up top was about. My bad.