Posted on 02/27/2006 3:20:39 AM PST by abb
Commentary: Bad luck, bad planning yield disappointment
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- I saw something startling Friday on NBC's "Today" show. It was a segment involving, of all things, the news.
Well, sort of. The piece consisted of co-host Katie Couric interviewing Beth Twitty, the tormented mother of the long-missing teen, Natalee Holloway.
Q: Why was Couric's interview so unexpected? A: Because it occurred during NBC's marathon Olympics coverage from Italy. The network did everything to shine a light on the Games short of sending the entire cast of "Scrubs" to Turin and depicting its trademark Peacock chowing down on pasta and gelato.
NBC, which paid $613 million for the broadcasting rights to the Turin Games, has doggedly blanketed the airwaves, including its array of cable networks, with Olympics-related shows for two solid weeks.
And yet, despite NBC's commitment -- or maybe because of it -- these will no doubt go down in broadcasting history as "NBC's- Can't-Win-for-Losing-Games." This was hardly a case of "Must-See TV," to borrow one of its venerable (if outdated) catchphrases.
Perhaps the most profound broadcasting lesson to come out of Turin was, in the immortal words of the immortal Mike Tyson: Don't believe the hype.
As it turned out, NBC blew it by heavily promoting a core of American athletes who turned out to be either grossly overrated all along or incapable of matching the high-level performances from their counterparts.
Maybe, when all was said, the viewers felt like suckers. "From a coverage standpoint, they, like much of the media, focused attention before the Games on people who ended up not doing as well as hoped," pointed out David Bernknopf, a TV-industry consultant with Atamira in Atlanta. The list of lowlights included performances by "folks like Bode Miller, Michelle Kwan, Chad Hedrick, the U.S. Men's Hockey Team."
Oh, sure, executives from NBC and its parent, General Electric (GE) , will inevitably cluck with satisfaction over how NBC had its share of (scattered) victories. But they'd probably be the only ones.
"There are no long faces here, my friend," Jim Bell, the "Today" executive producer, told Mike Francesa of WFAN's "Mike and the Mad Dog" sports-talk radio show last Thursday.
'Day 812'
Underscoring the impression that it has felt more like 14 years than 14 days with the Games, NBC's own Jay Leno groaned during his monologue on Thursday -- "We're now on day 812 of the Olympics."
Then, needling his bosses' decision to give weight to some of the unwatched, if not unwatchable, events in Turin, Leno helpfully suggested that NBC take a cue from rival Fox and stage a new event called "Curling Idol." Fox's "American Idol" essentially cleaned NBC's clock on Wednesday night, as that white-hot reality show tends to do, anyway, year-round.
If that wasn't discouraging enough, CBS hustled out a press release of its own on Friday afternoon and declared that its "Survivor: Panama -- Exile Island" show came in second, ahead of the Olympics in many key demographics. On the bright side, NBC's men's ice hockey coverage was superb throughout, thanks to the brilliance of the highly motivated players and Mike "Doc" Emrick's riveting play-by-play. Next to Marv Albert, Emrick is the best hockey broadcaster of all. It was thrilling to watch the world's best players desperately trying to win medals for their countries -- too bad NBC's lethargic National Hockey League broadcasts aren't as good as these games.
(I couldn't help but think how Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association would benefit from changing the format of their snoozer all-star games. Instead of showing the tired, old-hat American-vs. National League "Midsummer Classic" (as if) or the Eastern-Western basketball game, the leagues should adopt a daring arrangement pitting American citizens versus the rest of the world. Clearly, the players would care a lot more about winning than they do now -- and the TV viewers would have a blast).
Bad luck/bad planning
Above all, NBC suffered from a mixture of bad planning and bad luck during the Olympics.
Problem was, "the anticipated story lines did not pan out and I felt as a viewer that they had a tough challenge changing directions," Bernknopf said.
NBC -- and all of the media, to be fair about it -- could be accused of acting monumentally hypocritical, too. See, we blather on that the Olympics has lost of a lot of its luster because of the heavy politics and the commercial grossness that inevitably permeate every Olympiad.
But the media never tire of showing the scoreboard detailing how each nation is doing in accumulating gold and other medals. Plus, we built up the useless skier Miller as a renegade, party-boy, who says dumb, provocative things. (It would have been nice if he had lived up to his hype and found the time to win a medal, you know?)
And who isn't REALLY sick of the grossly overhyped Hughes sisters by now? Enough is enough!
Further, NBC, as it did during the Sydney Games, suffered because of the difference in the time zones. By the time a lot of the most eagerly awaited events, such as women's ice skating, were finished, savvy audiences already knew the outcome because of postings on the Internet.
NBC was forced to resort to the anticlimactic device of telling viewers, Turn away from your set, RIGHT NOW, if you don't want to find out who won. Man, talk about an exciting lead-in! It's fair to say sports broadcasters on the CBS, ABC, CNN and Fox evening news shows were smirking as they delivered the medal outcome of events before NBC could show them in primetime.
Oh, it wasn't all grim. NBC roared back on Thursday, thanks to the drama of Sasha Cohen's bid -- ultimately failed -- to win a gold medal in the ice skating competition. Plus, NBCOlympics.com boasted 29.7 million page views on Thursday.
And as Katie Couric noted Friday on "Today," there are only 1,448 more days until the start of the Vancouver Games on NBC in 2010.
MEDIA WEB QUESTION OF THE DAY: How do you think NBC did in covering the Winter Olympics?
MONDAY REPORT CARD: The Washington press corps sure ate their Wheaties last week. They covered the port-sale controversy comprehensively, featuring the Republican and Democratic opposition to the White House's plan. They also gave President Bush's spokespeople plenty of opportunities to defend the heavily criticized project. That's all you can ask for - tough, complete coverage of a serious issue.
A READER RESPONDS to my column about blogger Jeff Jarvis: "It is heartening to see a journalist using the same discretion about blogging that is taken with the MSM. I find Jarvis too eager to make newspapers a collection of readers' preferences. He seems to find the historic role of editors making judgments about what is important passé and essentially recommends that papers cravenly sell their news hole for continued circulation. It amounts to a philosophy of love me at any price." Star A. Decise
(Media Web appears on most Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays)
NBC should be barred (by constitutional amendment if necessary) from televising organized sports. They SUCK.
Hint to NBC: SHOW THE F***ING EVENTS and stuff the "human interest stories" up you collective butt.
Ooooh!! That's gonna leave a mark....
My problem with their coverage was that every event I wanted to see got dragged out with a bunch of touchy-feely interviews and such. So little time given to the actual event until after 10:00 PM. Most of the major events did not get wrapped up until after 11:00.
Agree Bodie Miller was way over hyped ... the guys a loser, no question. However, in the over all medal count, as of yesterday, the U.S. was ranked #2. Not bad ...
NBC is about News?.... had no idea
I refuse to watch personal interest story after personal interest story after etc etc etc.
Put on the athletes and let us watch the action. Get the stupids like jim nance off the air. They offer zero.
Pathetic coverage, rather watch reruns of Andy Griffith then listen to katie couric and crew.
face it - the olympics are an idea who's time is passing. few thought much of them until Hitler made them a source of national machismo in 36.
the last few have been sorta ho-hum. people are losing interest. if the ioc doesn't do something major soon, they will become completely irrelevant.
Two weeks without "The Office." I'm having withdrawals.
I've disliked those human interest clips since they first started them about ten to fifteen years ago.
you are very right. I think there's three problems, none of which is going to change.
First, there was always something appealing about the fact that Olympians were amateur athletes, and this clearly no longer is the case.
Second, we (the USA) used to be the underdogs, because the Communist bloc countries cheated and used professionals (nominally employed in the "army" but really full-time basketball, hockey, etc., players). Now with everyone involved being openly a professional and presumably most of the ones in strength sports being past or present steroid users, its hard to really care who wins.
Third, there's a proliferation of ridiculous non-Olympic sports being included in the games, which destroys the sense of tradition, and inflates the medal counts with meaningless snowboard jumping "sports" more suited to a circus than an Olympic competition.
They really shouldn't let NBC do the games anymore but I realize the Olympics has sold the broadcast rights to NBC up to the 2008 games. NBC is the worst of the worst, I can't stand the politics, Couric is a total loser anyway. And what was with the endless hours of curling? Good grief...I damn near blew off the figure skating some eves because of massing curling marathons. I barely watched any of the two weeks save the figure skating. I remember that Lillehammer and Salt Lake were all about the athletes. What happened, NBC?
In fairness to NBC, they don't make athletes like they used to, either.
If they would just give ESPN a cut, they could use one of their networks to show events real-time whenever that happens to be.
I thought the snowboard half pipe brought more life to these games than most other events. The gold winners were predictable, but that won't always be the case.
"In fairness to NBC, they don't make athletes like they used to, either."
You know, you make a damn good point...LOL! I don't recall those older ones being so classless and graceless and spoiled.
There were many good eggs there. It's just that thanks to NBC, many of the bad ones were given most of the coverage.
Second, we (the USA) used to be the underdogs, because the Communist bloc countries cheated and used professionals (nominally employed in the "army" but really full-time basketball, hockey, etc., players). Now with everyone involved being openly a professional and presumably most of the ones in strength sports being past or present steroid users, its hard to really care who wins.
Third, there's a proliferation of ridiculous non-Olympic sports being included in the games, which destroys the sense of tradition, and inflates the medal counts with meaningless snowboard jumping "sports" more suited to a circus than an Olympic competition.
Bingo, Bingo and Bingo.
This is the first time that I have not watched one second of the Winter games. The fourth reason is because NBC's sappy, endless drama-rama and crappy sports broadcasting is totally unbearable.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.