NBC drops the ball

So last night I'm watching the 49ers-Bears pre-season game on FOX, with really no plans to watch any Olympics coverage. But thanks to a story and NBC's lack of reporting it in a timely fashion, I watched all 4 1/2 of primetime coverage last night, only to watch NBC fumble hard.

During the football game, FOX kept showing updated scores of the baseball games in-progress. At about 7PM Pacific time last night, the score flashed that the Mets had edged the Braves 5-4, to move 2 1/2 games past Philadelphia. So, I flipped over to ESPN, where Baseball Tonight was just starting and was actually showing the Mets highlights.

But at the bottom of the screen, on the ESPN crawl, something caught my attention. A report surfaced that the International Olympic Committee had asked the governing body of gymnastics to investigate further claims that surfaced on the internet in which the Chinese national team had used underage participants. This was apparently not the first inquiry about this, and I recall the NBC announcers talking about this during the competitions without stating that China was cheating.

So I started flipping around to first NBC, which was in local programming out here in Los Angeles, and then to the various news channels, seeking more info. There was none to be found.

I decided to lock onto NBC at 8PM Pacific, knowing that the primetime coverage was starting, expecting Bob Costas to lead the program with this breaking news. But to my disappointment, they didn't. In fact, it appeared as though we were given the exact same recorded coverage that NBC provided to the east coast some three hours earlier.

I stayed with NBC, waiting for them to announce this major news, but they didn't. By 10:30PM Pacific, which would have been 30 minutes on the east coast feed after the news broke on ESPN and was repeated in a crawl on CNN, still nothing from NBC. At 11PM, coverage of the men's beach volleyball followed for 75 minutes.

Finally, at 12:15AM Pacific time, two hours on the east coast feed after the news broke, and five hours in real time, Costas made brief mention of the investigation and the consequences therein.


So, where do we begin in assailing NBC on this? Assuming I'm correct and that NBC simply ran the programming on a 3-hour delay tape for the west coast audience, it is a black eye to NBC as a news organization for not providing this information in a timely fashion. After all, us sports fans have been led to believe in recent years that the Olympics are for "non-sports fans", which is why sports like gymnastics, track and field, and beach volleyball and swimming/diving get primetime coverage, while actual sports that regular sports fan enjoy such as basketball and baseball/softball and even to a lesser degree soccer don't even get a mention. Meaning, if a non-sports fan watches only the 4 hours of primetime coverage and nothing else, they are totally being denied any information about all of the other sports in play.

But what's worse here is that a major story concerning the integrity of one of those primary sports NBC has showcased in primetime was 'buried' until 4 1/2 hours into the telecast. It wasn't detailed when it happened just 2 hours into their broadcast to the east. What's worse, because they taped it as if it had to fit a pre-determined schedule, instead of coming on the air live at 8PM Pacific and detailing the story one hour after it broke, they made West Coast viewers wait 4 1/2 hours to get info about it.

I have a hard time believing that someone with the journalistic integrity of Bob Costas was provided the option to report the story in real time and decided against it. Which means one of two things, either: (1) NBC was too married to the taped version of their programming to break live with the info, or, (2) as many conspiracy theorists like myself might find more believable, they waited until 12:15 AM to run the story because they were asked to by the IOC and/or China, because of the embarrassment aspect of the story. After all, most people probably shut their TV's off after 11PM.

Overall, I think NBC has done well considering the time difference. The major problem I had with the coverage until now is that their two best play-by-play broadcasters, Al Michaels and Mike Emrick, were nowhere to be found. Maybe they didn't feel they had anything for Emrick to do, but having Michaels on your staff and not utilizing in the Olympics, for which he is best known for, it's incomprehensible. How do you not have a sport that needs covering for the man who asked if we believed in miracles?

Yet, this problem is not nearly as significant as NBC's unwillingness to break the gymnastics news within a reasonable timeframe. Of course, most damming for MSNBC is the fact that they have "24 hour news channel" in MSNBC that they didn't utilize at all. Throughout the period of the breaking story, the channel had a re-run of Keith Olbermann's show, a repeat of a Dateline "Catch a Predator" episode, and three episodes of them behind the scenes at a prison. Um, what? What the hell, MSNBC? Aren't you a cable NEWS channel? Oh, my bad, like many grocery stores back in the day, the "24-hour" label is a misnomer, in that they apparently mean 24 hours, but not all of then consecutive.

Very disappointed in the Peacock network.