NBC’s Olympics Balancing Act Is Getting Even More Complicated

Originally, NBC Sports had planned to send three announcing teams to Beijing to cover the Winter Olympic Games there in February. But that all changed on Wednesday, when the network announced it’s opting to keep its commentators stateside. NBC made the decision in response to the fast-spreading omicron variant of the coronavirus, which has led to record caseloads in many regions of the world. “The announce teams for these Olympics…will be calling events from our Stamford (Conn.) facility due to COVID concerns,” said NBC Sports senior V.P. of communications Greg Hughes in a Wednesday statement. Hughes added that the network will “still have a large presence” in Beijing, with approximately 1,000 NBC employees on the ground.

Even a single complicating factor—like, say, an ongoing global pandemic—would have made Olympics coverage a minefield for NBC. But the network will also be required to carry out a careful balancing act in the way it approaches the Games’ host country. Beijing has been under fire for months over its alleged treatment of the Uyghurs, a Chinese Muslim minority group; in December of last year, a public tribunal established by a prominent British human-rights lawyer reportedly found that China had engaged in “crimes against humanity” in its treatment of the Uyghurs, including “rape, enforced sterilization, torture, imprisonment, persecution, deportation, and enforced disappearance,” and as recently as Thursday, France’s parliament passed a motion labeling the events a “genocide.” (The Chinese government has denied all wrongdoing.) As Bloomberg noted Wednesday, NBC is under pressure to acknowledge China’s alleged human-rights violations—which prompted the U.S. to announce a diplomatic boycott of the Games—in its coverage, but could risk angering China in doing so. “It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” Andrew Billings, coauthor of Olympic Television: Broadcasting the Biggest Show on Earth, told the outlet.

In a media event on Wednesday, Molly Solomon, executive producer and president of NBC Olympics Production, said the network would address the situation in part by “focusing on telling the stories of Team USA.“ She added, “We understand that there’s some difficult issues regarding the host nation. Our coverage will provide perspective on China’s place in the world, and the geopolitical context in which these Games are being held. But the athletes do remain the centerpiece of our coverage.” According to TheWrap, NBC is bringing in two China experts to contribute to Olympics coverage: Andy Brown, formerly the China editor for The Wall Street Journal, and Jing Tsu, a professor of China studies at Yale.

The logistics side of the equation seems slightly easier to balance for NBC, which has covered Olympics remotely before. During the 2008 Summer Games, which were also held in Beijing, the network relied on New York–based play-by-play teams to remotely call a number of events. Last year, when the belated 2020 Summer Games were held in Tokyo, a majority of NBC personnel covered the event remotely. NBC had planned for 400 more employees to travel to Tokyo but later pulled them.

Still, the network will have to contend with many of the same factors that earned it a barrage of criticism for its coverage of the 2020 Games: reliance on proprietary streaming services and a massive time difference, among others. Viewership of the Tokyo Games dropped 42% from Rio in 2016—as writer Josef Adalian put it, “The technical term for this kind of Nielsen performance is ‘yikes.’”

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