Slashdot Mirror
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.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
Excuse me, are you serious? It's television , FFS! They edit, it's normal. Been going on since at least the 1950s.
Caveat Utilitor
Last Post!!!!
If you are not Windows or Mac, there is no web broadcast.
Gets me thinking, how did a Slashdoter view the web broadcast... Is someone using Windows?
to further nationalistic propaganda. All the medals won by Americans in the past were all actually made of tin. All the better to make hats with!
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
This has been a tradition in Olympic broadcasts for years. It's called editing.
Hi:
I thought only America was in the Olympics. When did they start letting other countries participate?
I looked yesterday for where I could watch Olypics videos. Looks like I needed to instal some plugin from Microsoft that only works with "approved" browsers. Silverlight?
I don't even mind if I'm bombarded with ads to see video. I would even pay for certain footage of one person I know competing in Beijing and some of the events. But a Microsoft player? No thanks.
Now I don't know whether to boycott the Olympic Games because of China ignoring human rights or because it was converted to a festival of commerce. If it goes on like this, I may be soon able to boycott each day of Olympics for a different reason.
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.
"make something up" like apply 3000 year old rules, accepted by all for ordering countries in Mandarin?
... 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.
your gay and youe a newb your gay and youe a newb
Translation:
"Translate Server Error."
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
So no, they didn't make anything up.
I just did a quick check of the recording of the live broadcast that I made. In every spot I checked, the order given on the Wikipedia pages matches the one in the broadcast. So, at least in the case of the broadcasted version, the ordering matches up.
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.
Sounds like a Quentin Tarnetino flick.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Oh my, oh my. You mean the TV companies alter reality for marketing purposes? I am shocked.
All those yellow lines that magically appear and disappear on the football fields?
All those "billboards" that are not really there on the stadium wall?
I bet those starlets are even where padded bras. Do you think that they might even have had surgery. Goodness gracious, I wonder if Barbara Walters uses botox?
And those wrestlers. Do you think that they might be using steroids?
I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
Actually, the MSNBC online video let's you pick what you want to see and caries a lot of obscure sports from end to end. Much better than listening to Pierre Salinger babble on about wine tasting in all the French villages while you are waiting to see actual athletes.
Statesman
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
Guess, take a breath. Yes, NBC altered the video. They do the same thing when you see movies. They take your beloved movie and ALTER IT!!!!!! They do this to squish down time and show more things.
Now, before we freak out shit out and panic that they are hiding something from you, realize that this stuff is filmed by more cameras then you can even begin to contemplate AND is filled with people from all around the world to serve as witnesses. What does this mean? It is really frigging unlikely that NBC is hiding "the truth" from you. Far more likely, they are trying to shrink a 4+ hour opening ceremony into something that will better fit their schedule.
Worrying that they some how were altering the live feed is so dumb and inane that I can't even respond. People, take a frigging collective deep breath.
There was some incredible scenes to see but NBC camera people must have been told to zoom every camera and it diminished the quality IMO. The designers didn't create the imagery for moving viewers or moving cameras/lenses.
It really became an annoyance and a disappointment.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Dick Ebersole, who runs NBC Sports, is on record as saying that it is his goal to get better ratings, no matter what. That's why NBC doesn't post the running score of a football game, because they want you to stay and wait for it.
It's why they show all those personal profiles instead of sporting events. It's why they edited the opening games. It's why we can't see live events in the US.
I would have assumed that since French is the official language of the modern olympic games, they would have used that for the alphabetical ordering of the countries...
***We all point at you and shriek like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers***
Caveat Utilitor
They always use the name collating system native to the hosting nation to create an ascending list.
I watched NBC's broadcast on TV of the opening ceremonies and followed along with the Wikipedia list for a bit (at least, the Wikipedia list as it appeared last night) from Great Britain to the United States, and they matched perfectly. I've still got it on my DVR, and if someone can give an actual example of this reordering besides linking to the NBC olympics website (not even the opening ceremony video), I can check it out, but otherwise this objection is ridiculous. A little specificity would be helpful.
Yeah but more entertaining & original.
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).
French is one of the official languages. According to the Olympic Charter, "The official languages of the IOC are French and English." But the convention apparently is to introduce countries in alphabetical order in the language of the host country.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Most Chinese dictionaries actually sort characters first by the radical and then by stoke count within each group of radicals. I'm curious why they used just the stroke count ordering for the Olympics.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I too noted the subtext of the opening ceremonies. We're here, we are powerful, and we are co-ordinated. The fact that the only soldiers were as flag honor guards didn't slow this up one iota. Only the fact that we are trading partners saves us from a US/USSR situation. OK, we buy their stuff, they rip off all of our ideas sent over, and they buy up our bonds. Still, this was a monument to socialist style propaganda, and it worked...very well. Always remember that this is a long lived contiguous society, who regards the west as...savages.
This is how the Commander-in-Chief behaves in front of the world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ_YhM4OGkU
That would just lead to a rash of countries with names like A One Republic and AAA Reliable Nation (well, probably in the French equivalent).
While NBC may well have done what they are accused of (I wouldn't know, the BBC had it all live and unedited), it's not the most insulting thing they've done.
They bribed the Chinese organisers of the Olympics to put certain events early in the morning (local time). The swimming starting soon is an example. Why? So they would be during prime time in America. This sound fair enough, until you realise that prime time in America is THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT IN EUROPE. So we get to miss half the events, just so it's a little more convenient for the Yanks. I mean, it's not like we invented the Olympics or anything...
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
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.
I noticed the IOC threw an absolute fit over the use of Army Rangers for some portions of the opening ceremonies in Atlanta in 1996. (They pleaded for the Rangers to not perform their contribution in uniform. They didn't.)
But I don't think the guys who raised the Olympic flag while GOOSE-STEPPING in China were members of the local Beijing Boy Scout troop.
Fucking IOC Hypocrites.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
Sounds like the did stuff around with the order the teams marched in. They certainly had enough time to do it - it was delayed half a day from when it really happened.
Opening ceremony was at 8pm on the 8th of August 2008 (Chinese like 8 - it's a lucky number :) and Beijing is at GMT+8. Some of the folks here in Melbourne, Australia were watching it that night live (about 10pm onwards local time). Based on the twitter feeds from those in the USA who were tweeting what they saw, it looked like they were watching it around 8pm on the 8th in THEIR time zone. Somewhat impossible, no?
I'm already hearing reports of US swimmers being coached to refer to the time of their race in US broadcast time rather than Beijing time. Ummmmmm - WTF?
So yeah, if you've got HOURS between recording the event and showing it then making any changes you want is a piece of cake.
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
Indeed. I believe the practice started with the 1936 Berlin Olympics when the German newsreels showed only negatives of all of the track and field events, so that a white Jesse Owens could be seen beating the pants off of all the black athletes.
I did, in fact, watch the entire broadcast. The countries were not broadcast in that order.
I watched the entire broadcast (TiVo'd it) and was so impressed, I stayed up until 4am and watched it all over again. While I don't have the countries memorized in the order they appeared, but from what I do remember, it seems about the same as on the Wikipedia article. The US came in about 2/3 of the way down the list in the broadcast and they're #139 of 204 in Wikipedia (or roughly 2/3 of the way down the list).
I did notice that a number of small countries got very short screen times and seemed "clipped", so I guess they edited out some content to shorten up the whole thing.
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.
Yeah, they even beat the West in terms of carrying flags upside down. At least when the Americans carried a flag upside-down, it was a Canadian flag. That little runt of a kid they pulled out of the earthquake was carrying his own country's flag upside-down.
The only part of the ceremony that scared the fuck out of me was that nobody dared mention it on air, nor did anyone in the Chinese parade dare swap the kid's flag for one that was right-side-up.
An upside-down flag is an international signal of distress. In context of a political display, that kid was basically saying "My government hasn't even begun to help rebuild my village after the earthquake".
Precision? Discipline? Someone should have at seen a fuckup like an upside-down flag (your own flag, on the two most visible representatives of your country in the entire stadium) before the kid got into the arena. Comical.
There's a message in there about Chinese culture, too, and I don't think it was the one they wanted to send.
The part where you pay at the cashier must have been edited out to make room for a commercial.
But then he wouldn't have gotten the chance to be a wordy, condescending asshole, and that wouldn't be Slashdot.
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.
Before you all fall over yourself, it's entirely possible to do something of the like in the West too - when it matters enough. The Gemini/Mecury/Apollo programs in the 1960s for example, things got done when you're on the clock and national pride is in the balance. It's just rather hard to get that kind of support going...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Everybody should, it's one of the battlefields for Cold Wars. Countries with nukes can't fight each other directly, but they can use the world stage for cultural fights. They show off their achievements to intimidate and convince people their way is superior.
This year's Olympics are China's version of the moon landing
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
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.
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.
Any country could do that.
They just have to have the money and the will to cut through the red tape.
The difference between China & the USA is that in the USA, one City accepts the honor. In China, the Central Government is in charge.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Most Chinese dictionaries actually sort characters first by the radical and then by stoke count within each group of radicals.
Fool! Look at the government sanctioned sites! There are NO radicals in China!
Probably because that would have been another layer of complexity/confusion for any countries that aren't familiar with the Chinese writing system.
I kind of wished they showed the Chinese characters at the bottom of the screen with the country name so that at least we would have a better understanding of what they meant by counting strokes, but then again since they changed the order of the countries appearing that would explain why they didn't do that.
A more correct example should be:
1. Blue car goes around the road, then parked in a parking spot
2. Red car goes around the road, then parked in a parking spot
3. Yellow car goes around the road, then parked in a parking spot
4. Green car goes around the road, then parked in a parking spot
No matter what order you change them, it doesn't change much of the overall story, as their order is not significant.
No free radicals, you mean. Which is why Chinese always look so healthy and young.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
i watched it live in japan-on NHK.
china was last, the USA somewhere near the middle/end.
i imagine that the entire show was edited...especially the CHEERS that the USA recieved when taking the field. (btw, north korea got cheered too!) the Australians and the British were also recieved well.
awesome show!
China spent $40 billion* over six years getting ready for the Olympics. The US spends less than half of that on the Iraq war every six months. If we had the will we could do the same thing China did.
The Beijing Olympics are a huge matter of national pride in China. As others have mentioned the United States has had its moments of national pride. That's what drove us to the moon over the course of eight years. The moon landings cost us over three times what China spent preparing for the Olympics.
The US, UK, and Canada managed to develop nuclear weapons over the course of five years at a cost of $28 billion in today's dollars. We built the Panama Canal in ten years. We developed a cure for polio in 40 years. It's not so hard to imagine building an airport or even sprucing up an entire city from airport to subway to stadiums if there were a factor driving us to do so.
*China reportedly budgeted $2 billion for the event itself and over $100 million just on fireworks.
I was told by someone from Shanghai that in Traditional Chinese (Mandarin) sorting is done by number of strokes, but the newer Simplified Chinese is sorted by alphabetical/phonetic pinyin.
Although when I asked about it I was inquiring how Windows Explorer sort files using Chinese characters.
An upside-down flag is an international signal of distress.
Indeed, and I found Lin Hao carrying it a wonderful symbol of China's acknowledgement of the distress it experienced after the earthquake and the way in which China has finally become internationally open enough to let others know of its pain and to ask for assistance. The ceremony was full of contrasts, and the upside-down flag was just one more: the proud and powerful China walking next to the fragile and weak China that needs help (who is finally not afraid to ask for it). I found this and the other symbolism of the opening ceremony extremely moving.
In context of a political display, that kid was basically saying "My government hasn't even begun to help rebuild my village after the earthquake".
How did you interpret China parading both its strength and weakness, and the fact that it wants to display both to the world at this, one of its most important international moments, an anti-government message? How could you watch the almost unbelievable near-perfection of the rest of the ceremony (the printing press, the Tai Chi masters...) and think the flag could be an accident? It's really quite a stretch of the imagination.
There's a message in there about Chinese culture, too, and I don't think it was the one they wanted to send.
To me, they sent exactly the message I imagine they wanted to send. Perhaps they did fail at sending their message. But, if so, it was not a matter of the upside-down flag not being planned. Their failure would be that they expected you and the Western world to understand that their asking for help and letting their weakness and tragedy be seen is as important as a show of strength at the games.
Perhaps the government-run media did crop the flag from the images released within China to manage the internal interpretation. Perhaps it was a controversial decision that not everyone important knew about ahead of time, and that someone with power disapproved of after seeing. I'm not saying that this symbolism matches at all how the government operates, even if it seems to be moving in that direction. I'm not saying that it's part of the government's ideology or plan. But for what it is not, it is a powerful message that is hard to believe was not deliberate and planned at some type of government-approved level.
You are correct--I couldn't ever imagine seeing a US flag upside-down in an international ceremony. That's why I was especially touched to see China acknowledge their distress and their need for assistance in a way that my own country never would.
As others have pointed out, all of this is really just a matter of national priority.
As a taxpayer I'd hate to have my national government pay billions of dollars to put on an athletic competition. I can see how providing standard police services and such are within the scope of a government, but throwing a huge party and entertainment show isn't.
Look, humans are humans. There is nothing saying that the Europeans couldn't have landed on the moon if they wanted to spend that kind of money. The Chinese could have as well. Granted, at any given time particular nations have economies that are in various levels of repair - Europe or China probably couldn't have landed on the moon in the 60s even with a massively dedicated effort. However, either could probably do it today just fine.
Ditto for throwing an entertainment event. It isn't like Chinese acrobats are any better than Mexican acrobats. Just look at the Soviet Chess program - it had huge state sponsorship and unsurprisingly they turned out far better chess players than nations in which people played chess for fun almost entirely without compensation. Today the program is a shadow of its former self - and it isn't becuase Russians are being born dumber.
What all of this really demonstrates is the power of authoritarian governments to mobilize their entire nations around goals that are decided upon by a handful of those in power. A country with the economy of North Korea can mobilize more artillery tubes pointed at its rival than any nation in Europe. It isn't like the French don't know how to fashion a rifled cannon (gee, they've only been doing that for a century or so) - they just see the value in having millions of them pointed at Belgium. Likewise, I'm sure Germany could throw a 20 billion euro party if it wanted to, but I suspect the locals would rather see that money going into healthcare or maybe just into their own pockets.
Granted, democratic nations do bread-and-circuses too (aka Iraq), but they at least need to convince their populations to go along with it - without the benefit of highly self-censored media (although clueless media helps with slight self-censorship).
You've got to cut the guy some slack: (1) It was unbelievably hot and uncomfortable in the stadium (2) The parade of nations is unnecessarily long and boring (heck, I tivo'd it and watched it sped up and it still took an hour) (3) President Bush can't look at a watch discreetly -- it takes time to figure out which is the hour hand and which does the minutes, and Mickey's so gosh-darn cute you can't help but stare