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?"

Comments

Let's get some perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

The Olympics aren't some sort of divine event which must only be related in reverent and unambiguously true tones. It's just another big money media event and the broadcasters have every right to try to maximize their dollars by editing it however they want - though if they start to edit it so the winners are different as shown than in the actual event, one would hope they have some sort disclosure statement for the broadcast.

I call BS

[bziman]

I just sat through the four and a half hours of the opening ceremony that was aired last night on NBC here in the States (thank you TiVo), and as far as I can tell, it matched the order listed on Wikipedia pretty well. Even when they cut to commercial (shockingly infrequently), when they came back, the announcers went quickly through the missed countries, to catch back up to real time. Considering the soundtrack playing in the background while the countries were being read over the public address system in three languages, it would be pretty obvious if they skipped around, and the music and crowd noise suddenly changed. Politics aside, that's one of the coolest cultural and artistic displays I've ever seen.

Re:not a real issue

[theshowmecanuck]

Ahem...

If you had RTFA, you would know that's not the issue raised by the submitter. The question isn't how the countries were ordered, it is whether NBC's broadcast actually showed the countries in that order.

you might have missed that part of the post you replied to.