U.S. Flag Is Up on NBC Olympics

At a time when television’s amazing technology is widening our view of the globe, NBC’s flag-wrapped, America-first-and-only Olympics coverage is narrowing it.

Thursday morning:

“Next up,” said Katie Couric, the “Today” co-host on sports duty in Barcelona, “more swimming--Nicole Haislett and Summer Sanders when we return.”

Were Americans Haislett and Sanders swimming alone? You’d have thought so from the buildup, which was typical of the way NBC has often promoted U.S. athletes while either de-emphasizing or outright ignoring their competition:

“Will Anita Nall come back?”

“The American quest continues when we come back.”

Actually, Haislett and Sanders were in separate qualifying heats for Thursday evening’s 200-meter individual event.

As it turned out, Haislett won her heat, edging What’s-Her-Name from That Other Country, but failing to swim fast enough to qualify for the finals. And Sanders, who did qualify, beat a bunch of swimmers Nobody Cares About Because They’re Not American.

You can imagine what NBC is thinking: What a swell Olympics this would be Minus All Those Foreigners.

NBC’s “world view” was demonstrated during its telecast of Saturday’s opening ceremonies when acerbic host Bob Costas remarked that, following the 1988 Seoul Olympics, NBC needed to get out “the atlas to figure just where Barcelona was.”

The good news is that NBC has an atlas.

Yet there was Costas Wednesday night, responding to tennis commentator Bud Collins’ report about a player from Madagascar being concerned over an attempted coup in that African country, where rebels had temporarily seized the state-run radio facility. At least, Costas said later with a mocking smirk, “they were able to change the format of the station. . . .”

If only it were as easy to revise NBC’s jumbo jingoism. When a U.S. athlete mumbles anything even vaguely coherent, an NBC camera is there to record it. It has yet to interview a gold medalist who isn’t an American citizen, however. (Surely it has the budget for interpreters.) And although NBC has practically made the national anthem its Barcelona theme song, rarely does a medals ceremony that isn’t American get televised.

“The swimmers on the medal stand are getting to be a familiar sight,” Costas said. U.S. swimmers, that is.

It’s understandable that NBC would accentuate U.S. athletes and their accomplishments. After all, this is a U.S. network whose primary audience is American, making the U.S. team the home team. Plus, U.S. athletes are indeed piling up the medals.

Yet so overwhelmingly pro-American are most of NBC’s telecasts that the network is close to eclipsing even the super-patriotic frenzy of ABC’s coverage of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, where, according to legend, it was a bump on the head that caused boxing commentator Howard Cosell to begin speaking like Patrick Henry.

By packaging events to de-mphasize the time difference between the United States and Spain, NBC has rearranged reality to suit its own purposes, in some cases seeming to set up artificial rivalries for the sake of putting on a good show.

In Monday night’s compulsories gymnastic competition for men, for example, NBC showed only the U.S. and Unified (formerly the Soviet Union) teams, creating an impression that this was a dual competition echoing the Cold War. Wrong. In addition to the first-place Unified team from the former Soviet Union, three other nations finished ahead of the United States in the standings. But they weren’t shown or, until the end of the segment, even mentioned.

NBC hit a low in revisionist coverage Wednesday when it devoted the first 20 minutes of its three-hour morning Olympics block to the comeback of U.S. gymnast Kim Zmeskal en route to the Americans getting a bronze medal in the women’s team competition. Zmeskal did rebound stirringly after falling on the balance beam.

However, viewers might have concluded that phantoms finished ahead of the U.S. women, for nowhere in the three-hour telecast did NBC mention that the gold and silver medals were won by the Unified and Romanian teams, respectively. It was the equivalent of withholding the name of the winning team from a story reporting a Dodgers loss.

“NBC Nightly News” caught the ethnocentric bug itself Wednesday when, after a lengthy story celebrating Zmeskal and her teammates, it added only as a footnote that the Americans “won the bronze medal against the former Soviets and the Romanians.” That sounded like the Unified and Romanian teams had lost.

NBC has allowed some exceptions to its red-white-and-blue coverage, notably the occasional inclusion of foreign Olympians in its sugary, melodramatic, tumultuously scored profiles of athletes. And it was uncharacteristically evenhanded and liberal in its praise of non-Americans Wednesday night in coverage dominated by swimming and diving events that included Mark Lenzi’s gold-medal performance in the men’s springboard competition.

Yet American Crissy Ahmann-Leighton earlier let NBC down by not justifying the network’s gold-medal buildup of her for the women’s 100-meter butterfly event. Although lightly advertised by NBC, Chinese swimmer Qian Hong won the gold, Ahmann-Leighton the silver.

“Are you really disappointed losing out to the Chinese woman?” the American was asked. To her credit, Ahmann-Leighton said that she was thrilled simply to win a medal. Any medal.

Just how thrilled Hong was, U.S. viewers will never know.