Aren’t Olympics ‘special’?

By Don Richeson
Eagle Editor
Published: August 22, 2008

Everyone sometimes has a beef with what they see and hear in “the media.” But for me, the week before last was exceptionally bizarre. On Friday of the week before last (Aug. 8), I was able to scoot out of the office early enough – as I had eagerly intended — to catch the broadcast of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. I made it home in time to even catch the national news broadcast just before it.

The lead story choice – emphasis on the word lead — for “NBC Nightly News” that evening was a bit unsettling. It was about this year’s Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards admitting that he had a tryst two years ago. I cringed when anchor Brian Williams credited the National Enquirer (a supermarket celebrity gossip tabloid) for earlier breaking the story.

The cringe was seeing that what is sometimes called “the mainstream media” had plunged to such low depths. When I was growing up I recalled watching Walter Cronkite and maybe hearing him credit, say, The New York Times or Washington Post for breaking a big story. Now the “big news” was coming from the National Enquirer.

Things did not get any better for my rising heartburn as I saw the story that followed the “Edwards admits to affair” story. Russian tanks by the hundreds had rolled into the neighboring republic of Georgia and various battles between Russian and Georgian troops raged in what was the Russia’s first large-scale military invasion of a sovereign country since it invaded Afghanistan in 1979 as the old Soviet Union. Some figures on the resulting mostly civilian deaths ran into the hundreds.

Should this world-altering story be viewed as less important than an ex-candidate’s sex life?

I must interject here that in no way do I mean to downplay the seriousness of marital infidelity. This is particularly so in the Edwards’ situation, in which John Edwards’ wife Elizabeth had received word that her cancer had recurred around the time Edwards was engaged in his extramarital activities. But should this be the lead story – especially on the day Russia launches a full-scale military invasion of its tiny neighbor, a Western ally?

Katie Couric presented the two stories in similar fashion that night over on the “CBS Evening News” – ex-candidate’s two-year-old tryst story first, Russia’s full-scale military invasion of its neighbor second. Reception stinks up in my hollow in Syria (I don’t have satellite TV), so I couldn’t pull in ABC to see what it did, but I rather suspect it followed suit with what NBC and CBS had done.

Things didn’t get any better for me when the Olympics opening ceremony came on. Yes, it was absolutely dazzling – surely the best one ever and an absolute feast for the eyes. Better in terms of overall spectacle than what the U.S. did at the Atlanta Olympics opening ceremony? Sure, but there’s a difference here and it’s significant.

The Chinese people had no say whatsoever in how much their government spent on that country’s Olympics. Under the Chinese government’s iron-fisted authoritarian rule, that country can spend as much of its wealth as its rulers want, no matter how many of its peasants fight to survive. (OK, OK I realize the Chinese standard of living is zooming upward, but it is still a fraction of what it is in the U.S.)

The U.S. public would never stand for having its tax dollars spent that way – most of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics was funded privately through corporate sponsorships. (Most published reports of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony put the cost at around a staggering $300 million.)

Subsequent to the Olympics opening, I have caught quite a bit on TV of the various competitions. Not just the big ones like watching American swimmer Michael Phelps win an all-time record-setting eight gold medals, but other ones of interest to me, such as competitive cycling and the men’s and women’s marathons. I enjoyed watching the latter two because it stirred memories of covering those when I lived near Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics and worked as a sports editor for a small weekly community newspaper.

There was no way a tiny paper could get press credentials to get into any events, but with cycling and the marathons you didn’t have to – they went right through neighborhood streets and you could just stand on the sidewalks and watch the competitors race by. It was a good time – even some residents of Atlanta’s upscale Buckhead community let fans pitch tents on their front lawns to help them more easier watch the events.

It was a different vibe watching these events on TV unfold in Beijing. Sure, many of the city’s sites looked spectacular, but it was hard to watch the cyclists pedaling through Tiananmen Square and not remember the widely publicized image of a young man standing in the path of a column of tanks during the bloody pro-democracy demonstrations there in the late 1980s.

Sometimes, like when the commentator made a vacuous observation on, say, the big picture of dictator Mao Tse-Tung in the square I found myself channeling Dana Carvey’s “Saturday Night Live” “Church Lady” character and mockingly saying back, “Well now, isn’t that special.”

I oppose the Jimmy Carter solution of making U.S. athletes boycott Olympics in overly-repressive countries, but that doesn’t mean I have to adoringly accept everything about the situation either. Sure, the Chinese people themselves are wonderful. Sure, with a quarter of the world’s people, it is dumb to exclude them from most world affairs as was done for so many years.

But, as others have observed, we in a sense enable their brutal government to go on being brutal if we pretend to not see too much of what it does. Beijing hungered for the great public relations bonanza the Olympics offered, and came through with incredible pageantry, just as the Nazis did for their 1936 Berlin Olympics.

But hey, I’m happy for NBC — it is reportedly raking in a good big of cash with its high Olympics broadcast ratings. Well now, isn’t that special.

On the day the Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, our president was attending the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. I saw some images of him talking, briefly at least, with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who was also in attendance. He is said to have decried the invasion to Putin and has spoken out strongly against it later.

If you want to round out your view of world events however, to see that everywhere there is not happy pageantry, that there is a darkness beneath the pretty posturing of powerful authoritarian governments, visit the link below that has some images from Russia’s invasion of Georgia at http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/war_in_south_ossetia.html.

It is a good site because it displays the images in large size and gives a warning that lets you skip over the more gruesome shots if you want to.

(Don Richeson is editor of The Madison County Eagle. Call him at [540] 948-5121, fax him at [540] 948-3045 or contact him via e-mail at .)