London 2012: The BBC have been Olympic cheerleaders, not unbiased broadcasters:
Cathal Kelly August 11, 2012
LONDON—When the Americans start calling you out on jingoism, you know you have strayed too far.
Average Britons signed on for the Olympics wary of a performance letdown. They’ve been pleasantly surprised on that score.
But rather than focus on that, the BBC has seen fit to present this thing like the Battle of Thermopylae — a few hundred brave Britons holding off the international horde.
Whether a British athlete finishes first or fifteenth, he or she is the sole focus of all coverage. And not just that — there is a queer, open rooting from broadcasters.
Perhaps this has something to do with the intoxicating omnipresence of the Royal Family. Will and Kate do seem pleasantly average when sitting in the stands at field hockey or equestrian. Yet the BBC feels compelled to treat their appearances as if the gods have wandered down from Mt. Olympus.
The Royals are allowed to cheer — they’re here as fans. The professionals don’t have that excuse.
It was fun the first time we saw the BBC’s athletics colour commentary team, Colin Jackson and Denise Lewis, up on their feet roaring someone to the finish line. It got old when we realized they were going to do this each and every time a British athlete hit the track.
It’s gotten so bad that the head of the BBC has issued a late warning to staff to focus on “other great sporting achievements” as well as every step, lap or jump taken by someone in a Union Jack.
That strange fiat was apparently prompted by a gentle chidingfrom Time magazine’s American-born European correspondent, Catherine Mayer. She was altogether too kind. BBC has seemed during these Games less a broadcaster of international repute, and more the sporting Pravda propping up Britain’s fragile ego.
At one point, a BBC reporter sang the national anthem as a British team received its gold. Whatever lip Britain has at the moment, it’s not stiff. It’s trembling hysterically.
The emblematic moment may be the BBC’s John Inverdalewiping tears away after interviewing British rowers Mark Hunter and Zac Purchase.
Had the pair abandoned their Olympic dreams to rescue a small, drowning child, we might get that this was an extraordinary moment.
But they’d just won a silver medal, and couldn’t quite seem to wrap their heads around the fact that they were about the only British rowers not going home with gold.
Inverdale’s tears played for sympathy across Britain. From a mid-Atlantic perspective, they seemed maudlin and self-indulgent. Save your tears for Syria. A silver medal is not a tragedy.
After rowing, Inverdale moved on to host the nightly athletics portion, where it got worse.
Night after night, the BBC crew is more partisan than the Maquis. After Friday night’s remarkable 4x400m men’s relay — wherein the Bahamas unseated the U.S. from the gold medal perch they’d held since 1952 — the crew admitted they weren’t sure who’d won. They were too busy watching the fourth-place British team.
Later, Inverdale seemed affronted when Turkey’s Asli Cakir Alptekin won the 1500m over local favourite, Lisa Dobriskey. Cakir served a two-year drug ban in 2004 as a junior.
“You never want to see something like that, do you, Michael?” Inverdale asked of the only non-Brit on the panel, former American gold medallist Michael Johnson.
At 44, Johnson still looks as if he could make an Olympic final. He is as ramrod straight and imperturbable as an Easter Island statue. But even he was getting visibly annoyed at this point. It’s been a long Olympics.
“Every positive test is different,” Johnson said. “I don’t know the circumstances here, so I can’t judge.”
Not having all the facts to hand didn’t seem to bother his colleagues, who harrumphed annoyedly as Johnson hit the brakes before the bus went over Cakir.
Eventually, they gave up on pestering Johnson, and settled for teasing him about the American loss in the 4x400. At moments, it looked as if Johnson might hit someone. That would have had me up out of my chair cheering.
Later, Dobriskey, the Brit who’d finished 10th in the race, didn’t quite come right out and say it.
“I’ll probably get into trouble for saying this, but I don’t believe I’m competing on a level playing field,” Dobriskey said.
Dobriskey was understandably gut-shot and emotional when she made that accusation. She can’t be faulted too much. The TV crew on the other hand . . .
How does one go from tenth place to feeling cheated? When the atmosphere created by the local broadcaster would have it that every medal here wasn’t just earned, it was richly deserved.
As Canadians, we find it hard to watch NBC’s Olympic coverage. But I can’t ever recall Bob Costas hopping up and down like a man on a pogo or baiting panellists about annoying foreigners who’ve stolen U.S. medals. NBC still treats the Olympics as journalism, though through a narrow national lens.
The BBC on the other hand has handled this thing as patriotic agit-prop on behalf of a nation that feels it must win to prove itself.
The question is not whether the BBC was right to celebrate so many victories here, but how it would have dealt with losses. That’s where real confidence comes in.
Reply With QuoteOriginally Posted by BearcatSA
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