Young Viewers Are Coming Out on the Short End

Most U.S. eyes are on Old Glory in Atlanta. But big stuff is also happening in Washington, where some hardbodies of television visited Mr. Clinton’s Neighborhood on Monday in conjunction with a deal forcing stations to air at least three hours of kids’ “educational” programming per week.

Ironic, isn’t it, that this dialogue about enlightening youth through TV should occur in the middle of the Olympics that NBC is hemorrhaging all over in red, white and blue?

Expected to be ratified by the FCC, the kids plan was accepted by the industry only after intense, godfatherly prodding by the president who, assisted by Vice President Al Gore, First Lady Hillary Clinton and Gore’s wife, Tipper, chaired this merging of network executives, producers, advertisers, academics and kids’ TV advocates in the East Room of the White House.

Televised live by C-SPAN, its diversity somehow reminded you of the eclectic Parade of Nations that opened the 1996 Summer Olympics, the mucky mucks here ranging from a Pizza Hut executive to sneakerless kids’ show icon Fred Rogers. You felt the same giddiness of the moment, the same artificial, hermetically sealed dreaminess, something reflected in Bill Cosby (who holds a PhD in education and was seated beside Clinton) being addressed by the First Lady and others only as “Dr. Cosby.” No wonder it’s said that reruns of Dr. Cosby’s former sitcom, “The Cosby Show,” may qualify as “educational” under the plan.

If so, NBC’s Olympic telecast must be graduate school.

After all, this mingling of 197 nations offers a unique opportunity to make us smarter. And when it comes to children, TV is the amphitheater of classrooms. Kids in front of a set are sponges, Dr. Robert Phillips, deputy medical director of the American Psychiatric Assn., told the White House group Monday. They’re transfixed, he said, “absorbing everything,” then “wringing it out behaviorally.”

So you wonder what America’s wee sponges are absorbing from the Olympics. How do the Games of 1996, as presented by NBC, rate as an educational experience?

First, the positive values. One conveyed by NBC repeatedly is that achievement is possible through hard work and tenacity, triumph over adversity being the theme connecting most of the network’s sugary profiles on athletes. Another message is that the individual can make a difference, despite the advantages of teamwork. Moreover, the bulk of skilled women on the screen during the Olympics affirms athletics being as much the domain of females as males.

The big picture is uglier, though, as a recent caller noted.

“NBC,” she charged, “is depriving kids of the spirit of the worldwide community by depriving us of the spectacle and the pageantry of the award-winning ceremonies of all the nations, their costumes, their smiles, their tears.”

She may be wrong about the tears. Able to detect even a sniffle at 500 meters, NBC’s cameras run down just about all weepers, it seems, regardless of national origin. Otherwise, though, the caller has it right about NBC narrowing the Olympic experience.

Neither NBC, nor Channel 4, its station here beaming back Olympic newscasts from Atlanta, is doing much to educate young viewers, to say nothing of older ones.

As in 1992, their flag-waving coverage of the Summer Olympics feeds a national narcissism, further nourishing a sweeping ignorance in the U.S. about the world beyond these borders. It’s one thing to encourage national pride, another to promote “Americans-only” as a family value.

That’s not to say that NBC omits foreign athletes. It’s hard to show gymnastics, for example, while showing only Americans, although you have the impression that NBC would love to do just that. And early Tuesday evening, NBC profiled Canadian and Russian athletes, respectively, in advance of synchronized swimming and weightlifting.

Yet talk about ethnic cleansing.

By only rarely showing sports on which other nations have medal locks, NBC squeezes these nations from the coverage. And what it also does is aim its most deafening toots at Americans, giving foreigners short shrift.

Seldom does it cover medal rites and anthems for non-American winners. Just as rarely does it interview non-American jocks (surely NBC can scrape together some money to hire some interpreters for athletes not fluent in English). Instead of using this occasion to enlighten viewers about the histories and richness of other cultures, it too often dotes on the U.S. that we already know about.

Here, on Monday, meanwhile, was NBC’s John Tesh advertising what was coming later: “One star-spangled banner to play tonight, two Americans on the medal stand.” What would little sponges absorb from that except that only the U.S. had medalists?

Here was a KNBC headline from Atlanta that night: “Shannon Miller stunning the world with a gold medal performance on the balance beam.” What was the message here other than the world cares only about U.S. gold medalists?

Later, Tesh announced that Miller was now “the story of the Games,” presumably supplanting last week’s “story of the Games,” U.S. gymnast Kerri Strug, the message being that only U.S. athletes merit headlines?

Monday night, NBC bowed out of its prime coverage with a U.S.-cheering slow-motion collage that included American Jair Lynch, who won a silver medal in individual gymnastics, but not the Ukrainian who won the gold medal ahead of Lynch. It featured U.S. gymnast Dominique Dawes, who won a bronze in the individual floor exercise, but not the Ukrainian and Romanian who finished ahead of her. It showed diver Mark Lenzi, the bronze medalist in men’s springboard, but not the two Chinese who topped him.

You expect some of this, U.S. athletes being the home team, so to speak. But what an opportunity NBC is squandering by waving just one flag.