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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?"
In fact, I think you are right. I can probably find a separate reason to boycott each day of the Games even now. Doping, commercialization, the new swimsuit controversy, human rights, Tibet, Avery Brundage reaction to Munich attacks, bribes deciding who will host the games, Moscow and L.A. "half-games"... and of course also the Berlin propaganda games (remember, you broke the law first ;)
What major network television outfit publicly linked the American Antrax attacks falsely to Iraq back in 2001 and waited until 2006 to very quiet acknowledge (but not explain the source of) its deceit?
Can boosting ratings, by feeding the American people false propaganda, be a treasonous offense?
This is more than a bunch of athletes my friend. Go back and watch the opening ceremonies, and tell me that country does not scare the fuck out of you. The level of discipline demonstrated by the performers, the sheer precision of it all... it all far exceeds anything the West could possibly pull off. And that's DAMNED scary.
China is living proof that, if not bound by troublesome concepts like fairness, freedom, and morality, you can achieve great things. That scares the bejesus out of me. The entire Olympic exercise, for China at least, is one of intimidation. Here's them flexing their muscle, showing the world that, at a moment's notice, they can throw away billions, not feel the pinch, mobilize hundreds of thousands of people without any messy bureaucracy, and completely transform the entire city nearly overnight (well, 6 years, that's damned short).
One thing that really hit me was how quickly they were able to expand their airport to accommodate for the Olympics. They now have the world's largest airport terminal, built up in almost no time at all. My home town (Vancouver, Canada) took nearly 20 years to build a single runway, between budget cutbacks, protests by residents, regulatory red tape, etc etc. Meanwhile here's a country that can completely rebuild an airport, make it into the world's largest, and still have time to make it an architectural masterpiece, all in 6 years. It's breathtaking and scary.
who regards the west as...savages.
Not really, they regard the West as hypocrites. The state media likes to play up images like Abu Ghraib and the various things going on at Gitmo. It's not entirely baseless, and that's the sad part.
According to friends in Europe, who watched the ceremonies live NBC totally used FAKE CROWD noise.
Apparently Vladimir Putin from Russia got the biggest crowd applause all night when they showed him on the big screen, and the Iraq athletes were given loud BOO's.
And all we heard all night long were the exact same levels of 'monotone cheering' on the NBC broadcast.
Don't believe ANYTHING you see on TV, especially if they had 12 hours to make changes,edits,lies.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
CBC (Canada's approved Olympic broadcaster) not only showed it live, they also did an encore presentation starting at 6 pm.
They replayed the whole thing--all 4+ hours, no editing that I noticed. The only thing different in the encore were occasional live programming notes, and abbreviated (10-minute) news broadcasts at 6 and 10.
Why did NBC feel the need to so obviously edit their repeat?
This is blatantly obvious to us Canadians when we have the choice of watching CBC or a US station... We watch the CBC live (whenever it happens to be...) and with 'low level editing' - and just sort of laugh at the US version which is in prime time and so altered it is just awful. The CBC primetime event is an exact copy of the live event. (Probably because it's cheaper just to hit play and not to edit...)
Probably; it's a potent and well-known rhetorical device called anthypophora.
Sadly, American sports commentators have been told that "dead air" is absolutely the worst possible thing that could happen during a telecast. I don't really know why this has become the norm in the US. Dead air was obviously anathema to radio, but with television it makes little sense. Other countries' networks seem perfectly happy simply to show the events unfold on screen with an occasional comment from the announcers. I have to assume the American practice shows how little regard the producers have for their viewers, since the producers appear to believe we cannot fathom what we see on screen without the comments of some retired athlete to guide us.
It is not even displayed in correct order when it's hosted in the USA.
In Canada it was displayed in the correct order: Greece first, followed by the countries in the order they would appear in a Chinese dictionary. You can't really talk about alphabetical order since Mandarin use ideograms, not letters, thus the order is based on the rule of strokes.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The fact that almost all comedies have laugh tracks didn't give this away?
When someone says, "Any fool can see