Televised Coverage of Beijing Winter Olympics is a Snow-filled Ratings Bust
Despite the blizzard of Chinese PR, CCP officals cannot snow potential viewers and have them forget all the damage that nation has done in the past two years.
This past week has been filled with karmic news (CNN’s Jeff Zucker resigning, Whoopi Goldberg’s suspension, Meta/Facebook shares plummeting).
It’s as if someone baked a schadenfreude cake and is now dishing it out. And the frosting on that confection is this: The televised Winter Olympics games in Beijing, China, are a ratings bust.
Thursday’s primetime coverage of the Beijing Winter Olympics averaged 7.25 million viewers on NBC, marking the smallest primetime Olympic audience ever on the network. The previous low was 8.5 million for the final night of competition at last year’s Tokyo Summer Olympics.
Even including concurrent primetime coverage on USA Network — 512,000 viewers — the average of 7.78 million would still mark an all-time low. An across-all-platforms figure that includes NBC’s various streaming platforms will be provided here when it is available.
…Viewership plunged 55% from NBC’s first night of coverage at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics four years ago (16.00M) and 64% from night one of the Sochi Games in 2014 (20.02M). Keep in mind this is only the third time NBC has aired primetime coverage prior to the Opening Ceremony. The “bonus” night of coverage is typically not factored into NBC’s averages.
There are so many reasons people are opting out of watching, despite the grace of figure skating and the thrills associated with ski competitions.
To begin with, people around the world are still struggling to free themselves from pandemic restrictions caused by a virus that appears to have originated in a Wuhan laboratory and was spread worldwide as a result, at least in part, of the 2019 World Military Games in that city.
The 7th International Military Sports Council Military World Games (MWGs) opened in Wuhan on October 18, 2019. The MWGs in Wuhan drew 9,308 athletes, representing 109 countries, to compete in 329 events across 27 sports. Many of the participating athletes fell ill with various flu-like complaints. Here is a glimpse of the sick athletes and their location in the hospitals…now seeing ill patients.
Evidence from Brazil, Italy, France, and Sweden indicate that the virus circulated in those countries by November and December of 2019, long before China officially admitted they had a significant public health problem. This was likely the global “super-spreader event.” China tried to blame Italy for the virus at one point.
To compound the insult to Americans, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wanted athletes to remain silent about conditions in China, as she was fearful of their safety.
According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the motto of the Beijing Winter Olympics should be “Faster, Higher, Stronger — and Silent.”
The California Democrat reiterated Friday that American athletes should keep any unkind word about China’s repressive Communist government to themselves, repeating an admonition from the previous day.
“As I wish the athletes well, I do not encourage them to speak out against the Chinese government there because I fear for their safety if they do,” Pelosi said Friday, hours after the opening ceremony. “[To] remove all doubt about why I said they shouldn’t speak out, it’s because I fear for their safety.”
The responses to this inanity have been scathing.
Wonder if Nancy Pelosi said the same thing to Jesse Owens when he showed up Hitler in 1936?
— Tony FJB Bruno (@TonyBrunoShow) February 4, 2022
Finally, corporate sponsors are afraid of being connected to a regime that is accused of atrocities on its minority populations and other human rights abuses.
The corporate sponsors that typically go big on the Olympics have kept their distance in the run-up amid global condemnation for the host country’s human-rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in far western Xinjiang – which the US state department has labelled a genocide – in addition to the persecution of Tibetans and the repression of Hong Kong’s freedoms. Those thorny geopolitical implications were only underscored when the US, Australia, Britain and Canada announced a diplomatic boycott of the event last month.
Only two of the 20 official Team USA sponsors had aired spots pegged to the Olympics as of Wednesday, according to Reuters, with both focusing on the athletes while downplaying the host nation. That’s a far cry from the flood-the-zone deluge that’s critical to breaking through and building anticipation for athletes and sports that are largely in the public eye only once every four years. Bottom line: many casual sports fans, perhaps thrown off by an Olympics taking place only seven months after the last one due to the coronavirus postponement, are barely aware a Winter Games is even happening.
Beijing laughably had Uyghur cross-country skier Dinigeer Yilamujiang be the last athlete to carry the flame.
For a country that has been condemned for its treatment of the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, the symbolism was impossible to miss.
The lighting of the Olympic cauldron by the final torchbearer has long been a centerpiece of Olympic opening ceremonies and marks the beginning of the Games. It is considered a great honor to be the last athlete to carry the flame.
Despite the blizzard of Chinese PR, CCP officals cannot snow potential viewers and have them forget all the damage that nation has done in the past two years.
I can only hope this is the last Olympic event hosted by this country. I also pray all our athletes come home safely, and free of lab-grown viruses.
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Comments
Only sport I watch these days is the rodeo. Going tonight. Got a couple PBR events this year, too.
Yippee ki yay, MFer kommies.
F1 racing. Stopped with the Olympics in 1972. NBA & NFL stopped in the mid 90s.
I’m still trying to find coverage for 43-Man Squamish games.
May NBC continue to take a blood bath along with corporate sponsors. And Nancy Pelosi and the DNC this coming Nov.
Did the opening ceremonies presage any further plagues, a la the London Olympics? Asking for a friend.
China is rigging the games by controlling every aspect of the visiting athletes’ lives.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/02/05/report-china-keeping-winter-olympians-in-unreasonable-quarantine-conditions/
Just walk away. Leave. It’s rigged and “our people” seem to be in on it.
Morons didn’t learn this lesson in 2016 and 2020?
Nobody wants to watch the idiot hacks on NBC vapidly fill air time in between events while their idiotic coverage misses half of the events anyway.
People look for specific events, races, and people, and they sure as heck aren’t going to find them at the ‘official’ coverage. And if they can’t find them, they go online where there are INNUMARABLE clips posted of the events they care about.
The era of everybody sitting around and watching the Olympics for days on end is over.
Seriously colleges do this better than NBC, where they have numerous live stream cameras set up to capture every race and event.
That’s the best comment I’ve read on the Olympics. It’s worth a dozen thumbs up.
Yeah, but then you’d miss all those dramatic personal profiles, overcoming all that adversity standing in the way of achieving a life-long dream, fulfilling a tearful promise to a recently-deceased parent … you know, compelling stuff like that.
I can get that on American Ninja Warrior. Which is why I stopped watching that
The fast forward button is your friend if you just want to watch the competitions in ANW. Saves you about 80% of the broadcast time too.
Bonus: you can skip the woke ninjas too
By the way, the actual competition part of ANW blows most olympic competitions out of the water in terms of entertainment value. Give me that over this boring slogging “live coverage” all day long.
It barely blipped on my radar that the olympics were even going on right now.
Let me think,here.
(1) Winter Olympics being held in China.
(2) China is a repressive and corrupt communist country.
(3) There is no natural snow at most of the Olympic sites.
(4) The Olympics are being broadcast on NBC, the fairest 9of the fair.
And I should be watching them, why?
“For a country [Chinese Communist Party] that has been condemned for its treatment of the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim [Islam] ethnic minority”
Just another version of Predator v. Alien, or Alien v. Predator.
I understand what you’re saying. I’m second to none for my contempt for Islam. It’s an evil ideology. But ideologies aren’t human beings. Ideologies don’t have human rights, but human beings do and Muslims are human beings.
And it’s important to remember that it’s precisely because Islam is pure evil that it’s largely the Muslims who are its first victims. It’s basically a gang code. The Hudud (divinely prescribed) punishment for leaving Islam is death. It doesn’t matter if you born to a Muslim father or ignorantly converted to it. Once in, you can’t get out. Note I didn’t mention parents; all that matters is the father is Muslim. A Muslim man can marry a non-Muslim if she is Ahl al Khittab; one of the people of the book, primarily Christians and Jews. Any child born in that marriage is a Muslim by all schools of Shariah law. The child has no choice; neither does the mother.
Do you remember Miriam Ibrahim, the U.S. citizen sentenced to death for apostasy by a Shariah court in Sudan several years ago?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meriam-ibrahim-sentenced-to-die-in-sudan-for-apostasy-reportedly-gives-birth-in-jail/
Read it if you like; I only cite it as a contemporary news source, not because it’s particularly well written or that whoever wrote it understands what was going on. MIriam Ibrahim’s mother was married to a Muslim man who abandoned the family before Miriam was born. Her mother raised Miriam as a Christian and she became very devout. She married a Christian man. However she had business interests in Sudan and travelled there occasionally to supervise the operations. On one of her trips a member of the absent father’s side of the family recognized her and denounced her to the religious courts.*
When she refused to renounce her religion or divorce her husband she was sentenced to death. Shariah law is very clear on this; once a Muslim, always a Muslim, and since her father was Muslim she’s a Muslim. She has no choice in the matter. Her Christian mother who raised her alone after the father absconded had no choice in the matter. And, frankly, the Shariah court had no choice in the matter. Shariah is Allah’s divine law; what’s a Shariah court going to say? Allah is wrong? The Quran is very clear; once Allah or Muhammad have decided a matter it is not for the believing man or woman to question the decision but to accept it with no external or internal resistance. And the judges were Muslims. Whether they liked the outcome or not, and they may not have liked it since they were a Sudanese Shariah court sentencing an American citizen to death and even they could guess what the international reaction was going to be, their hands were tied unless they wanted to become apostates themselves.
Now, eventually this case got sorted out and Miriam was released and allowed to return to the U.S. but here’s the point. Had she been an ordinary Sudanese citizen she would have been executed under the same circumstances. It is axiomatic in Islam that “Only the sword makes people good.” It’s why Muslims and communists get along so well (like the proverbial crocodile, knowledgeable Muslims plan on killing the commies last and vice versa). Muslims have their own version of Lenin’s “revolutionary terror.” That’s why when ISIS gain and control territory one of their first orders of business is to execute Muslims for not being true Muslims. Pour encourager les autres. Muslims live in constant fear of being killed by authorities for hypocrisy, heresy, apostasy, etx. They fear being killed by their own family members in honor killings even in the U.S. That has happened here, in Canada, Europe, etc., when girls in particular start becoming too westernized, stop wearing the hijab, get non-Muslim boyfriends, etc. It happens frequently in the Islamic world and while most Islamic countries punish it the perpetrators just get a slap on the wrist and a big party from the family for restoring their “honor.”
And there’s the threat of hell fire. The Quran is filled with Allah’s lurid descriptions of punishments for sinners. And everyone goes to hell; Allah pulls out the righteous. But you can only get into heaven if your good deeds outweigh your bad deeds. Nobody knows how much a good deed weighs as opposed to a bad deed, or how many of each you’ve accumulated. Is it any wonder they blow themselves up “fighting in the cause of Allah?” That’s the only deed that’s good enough to erase all your bad deeds.
Muslims are the first victims of Islam. That’s why so many immigrate to West. Nobody, not even Muslims, want to live in Islamic hellholes. The problem is the ones who come here to escape those hellholes are followed by people like the Muslim Brotherhood to force them back into the fold. As Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, probably the most influential cleric in the Islamic world given the viewership his al-Jazeera TV show “Shariah and Life,” has gained has said. Without the death penalty for apostasy Islam would be gone tomorrow.
I forgot to address the issue I asterisked.
*To illustrate the degenerate moral code of Islam, the family member who denounced her no doubt did so in order to steal her property. This is very common in Muslim countries. Pakistan has a blasphemy law that’s often if not usually used to settle scores, get out of paying debts, seizing property, etc. All a Muslim has to do is denounce a non-Muslim for blaspheming either Allah or Muhammad although it’s common practice to plant some evidence such as a torn page from a Quran to seal the deal. The testimony of a Muslim woman is, according to the Quran, worth half that of a man. So in disputes between a Muslim man and a woman the man always wins. The testimony of a non-Muslim against a Muslim is basically worthless. If you recall the case of Asia Bibi, a Christian Pakistani who was working in an orchard with 3 or 4 Muslim women, she angered them by drinking from the well with the same cup they were going to drink out of. Non-Muslims are unclean. So they denounced her for blasphemy, and she had no chance. Like Miriam Ibrahim she was sentenced to death. She eventually was released into asylum in Britain due to the international uproar.
And Muslims are allowed to lie, particularly to and about non-Muslims. Pace Bernie Sanders there is no Golden Rule in the Quran. Muslims are only required to be fair and charitable to other Muslims. And as Muhammad said over and over, “All war is deceit.” And Allah requires Muslims to wage war against non-Muslims. I’m not the one who divides the world into Dar al Islam, where Muslims rule and non-Muslims are subjugated, and Dar al Harb, the house of war wear Muslims don’t yet rule and are required to conquer. Allah did.
So the relative who denounced Miriam Ibrahim in order to steal her property achieved his goal with the aid of Shariah. She’s not going to be back to run her operations in Sudan. So the family will claim her property. And the man committed no sin under Islam when he did what he did. After all, per Allah’s divine law she was an apostate so it isn’t as if she has any rights.
I am sure ratings will improve when the the Great Bipartisan Reach Across the Aisle event takes place.
That is the event where Republican Representatives and Senators bend themselves into truly amazing new political positions while abandoning all of their previous ones in order to clasp hands with their Communist BFFs.
Why do their amazing new political positions always appear to be bent over a desk with their pants around their ankles?
If the current NBC producers and “sportscasters” had been covering the 1972 Olympics, they would have complained that the Black September team didn’t get any medals in the shooting competition.
Well, technically Black September didn’t medal in any shooting events, but they made the podium in “grenade toss”.
Then there’s the whole issue that given the time difference you can find out the results before they’re broadcast on time-delay.
I gave a thumbs-up to Olinser’s description of how NBC does a crap job of Olympics coverage. I’d give dozens more if I could.
My family members insist on watching the covid olympics instead of what we usually watch together. I join them because family.
I have been astounded that the NBC anchors have repeatedly drawn attention to the CCP’s various human rights abuses. Really. Not being sarcastic. They’re doing it.
The covid olympics opening ceremony was rather strange. The procession of the nation’s olympic teams was accompanied by a selection of totally western music (e.g. William Tell Overture, Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy). A later artistic offering used Lennon’s Imagine.
Chinese people don’t like Chinese music. Some emperor centuries ago was alarmed by the subversive threat of the beauty of foreign music and so forbade the use of the 8-note scale while decreeing the use of a 5-note scale instead. That is why Chinese music sounds the way it does.
I normally don’t watch, but am forced to this year since I’m vacationing with extended family. They have been mentioning it to give them a small amount of credit.
The commercials are as “diverse and multicultural” as ever. I don’t have TV at home but if its like any stupid internet ad, it’s probably just how all advertising is these days. I look at it and wonder if I can remember to NOT buy their shit for being so insulting.
You mean, the Western Communist Anthem?
If you go as Pixy Misa ( believe me he knows)suggests throw away that phone you took.
Living on the Olympic peninsula, and only having a TV antenna, all of our TV comes from Canada. The only sport I record and ever watch is curling. I first saw it in 197 8 at lake Harrison in Canada. A group was playing it at a local ice rink. And I about pissed myself watching people slap the crap out of the ice with brooms. Beyond the amateurs and 40 years later it has matured and it’s quite fun to watch.
I don’t know if it’s an Olympic event. I wouldn’t watch that. But the stuff that comes out of Canada is pretty good.
Full contact, demolition curling. Can’t beat it.
Curling is an official Olympic event.
Back when the brooms were, well, actual brooms that went whappity-whap I had a relative who kept his in working order (ie. keeping the thing pliable) by sticking it in the toilet tank.
Memo for Pelosi: When even your Democrat good time buddies are putting daylight between themselves and your idiotic comments…you’ve royally f***ed up.
Nancy Pelosi Rents Office Space To Group Designed By Pedophile, Connected To Pedophilia And Child Porn:
https://nationalfile.com/nancy-pelosi-rents-office-space-to-group-designed-by-pedophile-connected-to-pedophilia-and-child-porn/
“It’s as if someone baked a schadenfreude cake and is now dishing it out.”
Best line of the week!
I’ll have my slice brownie-sundae style, with Tooty-Tooty ice cream and GoFundMe Fudge.
Laura Ingraham is pushing #NotOneMinute. So far so good. I won’t even watch that clip in this post. Sorry Leslie.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/laura-ingraham-beijing-olympics-boycott
The WHAT? 😀
I stopped watching the Olympics years ago. The IOC is almost as corrupt, in my opinion, as any nation’s government.
I will never watch this crap on the Nothing But Crap network. I’d like to see worldwide protests during the games at Red Commie embassies worldwide. They deserve it in spades.
No. It was intentionallly spread by the Communist Chinese when they knew they had it, cut Wuhan off from the rest of China but allowed international travel in and out of Wuhan to continue. Not only that, but the despicable chinese commies tried to berate us for placing travel restrictions on china traffic, calling us racists and xenophobes … LOL, coming from China.
The spread of the wuhan virus, no matter how it came to be and came to infect the Chinese population, was an intentional attack by China in an act of war with a biological weapon. Beijing should be nuked to glass, as the most minor sort of retaliation, but, instead, our commies took the opportunity to turn American governance into that of Communist China, following the commies’ playbook on locking up citizens and other governmental tactics.