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Did NBC Alter the Olympics' Opening Ceremony?
techmuse writes "Viewing the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony online at NBC's Olympics website, you can see that the order in which the countries were presented was very different from the actual order of the countries in the ceremony, as listed at Wikipedia. NBC skipped roughly 100 countries ahead, then jumped back and forth, apparently delaying the appearance of the United States in its home market until later in the broadcast. (In fact, the US team was shown on the infield before they were shown marching!) NBC did not acknowledge this in its broadcast. Is NBC altering the reality of the broadcast to boost ratings? Was this true only online, or also in the live broadcast?"
Movie at 11.
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This has been a tradition in Olympic broadcasts for years. It's called editing.
... is that I have to actually subscribe to some local TV provider like AT&T, even if I don't own a TV, just so I could watch the NBC Olympics. There is no option for saying I don't have a TV service and to pay the sum they would receive from the local cable company directly to NBC. That is seriously outrageous.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I did, in fact, watch the entire broadcast. The countries were not broadcast in that order. You can find the order in which they actually marched in the wikipedia page. The issue here is that NBC appears to have altered the order of the events themselves. This is different from editing out bits to fit in commercials. The *story* has changed. Example:
1) You get out of your car and walk into a store.
2) You pull up to the store in your car
3) You leave your house and get into your car
4) You drive to the store
5) You leave the store with your purchase.
The correct order is 3,4,2,1,5, but the story told about what you did gives the impression that something very different happened.
NBC has done an excellent job of insuring that Americans cannot watch the Olympics, the Opening Ceremony and other aspects of what is going on in China. They are the first to bitch and moan about China censorship and just look at what they're doing now! Typical media.
They don't have cable out here so watching anything on the Internet from NBC is just not possible. They have effectively censored millions of Americans from watching the Olympics.
What they do have has been cut up and altered to make room for all that advertising. And, just how many times do I have to hear "Ra Deem Team" from NBC. If I hear it again, I'm going to puke!
Now, there are plenty of NON-AMERICAN web sites with the streams and videos! China has some, Germany has one, and there are others. You get the point... AVOID NBC and you can watch for free!
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Excuse me, are you serious? It's television , FFS! They edit, it's normal. Been going on since at least the 1950s.
This isn't the Dukes of Hazard or even Survivor. This is the Olympics. It's presented as news of the world's supposed ultimate sporting event.
Of course, the cynical among us will note that the psudo-intellectual wrappings of competition and the human condition are just dressing to sell the product. We know this really isn't news but entertainment and that the competition comes a distant third to politics and money. We can all sit around and posture about how we expect this kind of thing. But you don't get an award for being jaded.
Oh really? And for just how many movies do they alter the timeline of events? Maybe the cable companies have the ability to edit for time, but I doubt they get to rearrange the movie because it alters the story. Imagine if we could just alter the timeline of history so that whenever there is a dispute, an international incident, a war, it was shown to be the other guy who started it? Altering the sequence of events is changing the truth.
P.S. Hans shot first.
Except in this case it doesn't give the impression that something very different happened since aside from the first and last countries the order that nations appear in the parade has no significance. Still it's a pretty stupid thing to change.
More important to me is that they put ads over the performances in the opening ceremony so we really did not get to see the full performance how it was intended.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Two questions for you:
Why should the IOC do something that would devalue what it produces? The Olympics are run on a shoestring budget compared to other "profitable" sports.
Why don't you care about the Winter Olympics in 2010?
It's just rather hard to get that kind of support going...
Damn right, especially these days, where the lack of the fear of communism has made driving these massive projects impossible. The problem is that the West requires consensus (or at least something resembling it) to do anything of that scale. China just has to have one guy snap his fingers.
Absolute power, when wielded by someone who knows how to use it, is very, very dangerous for his neighbours.
How in gods name did people get the impression that this was a news? It called the opening ceremony. It is entertainment. News shows do not typically feature fireworks, dance performances, hundreds of syncronized drummers, a man on a cable running through the air to light a giant torch, or any of the rest of the ceremony. Because, it was a ceremony for the purpose of entertaining us.