Last month longtime Olympic broadcast anchor Bob Costas appeared on a podcast I co-host with Greg Corombos and laid out a bit what goes into NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. When we asked him whether NBC should cover these games differently, Costas laid out just how gargantuan the network’s investment in the Olympics are.
Jim: You were the face of the Olympics for a lot of years. I assume you’re still on good terms with a lot of folks at NBC Sports–
Costas: I sure hope so!
Jim: A lot of corporate sponsors – should they be covering these games differently? Should they be treating these games differently, than we would a quote-unquote ordinary Olympic games?
Costas: I can tell you this, and I have to preface it, for my own peace of mind, by saying that not only do I have friends and colleagues there, but 95 percent of what they have done over time I deeply respect and admire. They do a wonderful job in covering the basic sports, the competitions, the backstories, and all those things. And I recognize that executives have a number of things to worry about. There’s a diplomatic aspect to being in any country, some more perilous than others.
So, one of the things they face here is we know that the Chinese –even more so under Xi [Jinping] than with his predecessor, he is so absolutist, so hardline — that is impossible to predict how they might respond. So even if they were to simply acknowledge what the issues are, let along take a strong editorial position on those issues, it’s entirely possible that the Chinese could cut the feed.
Every time CNN has talked about this issue [of Peng Shuai], Patrick McEnroe, younger brother of John McEnroe, is a tennis commentator. He was talking about the [World Tennis Association] situation on CNN’s international network—Boom! – the feed went blank.
They took Celtic games off the air when Enes Kantor – who has redubbed himself Enes Freedom upon becoming an American citizen, he’s a Turk by background. When he spoke out against the Chinese regime recently, Celtic games were taken off the air… The NBA in general is very, very popular in China, and it’s a lucrative market.
So, you’re an NBC executive. You’ve invested more than a billion dollars – not just for the rights fee, but beyond that, all the production fees, and travel costs, and everything else. That’s what you have invested in this. The Olympics are going to happen. The Olympics, along with NFL football, are about the only thing that cuts through to a large, diverse audience, demographically, across the United States, because the media landscape has changed so much.
Prime-time programs that are deemed a hit now get ratings that are miniscule alongside prime time hits of a generation ago. Here you’ve got this big property, that you’ve spent a lot for, and it’s a goldmine for you, not just in terms of what the ratings are likely to be, and the advertising rates, but it’s a chance to promote your other programs. This is a business. So, that’s the position in which they find themselves.
I can tell you this – and I’m not trying to make myself any more important than I ever was, but I had a certain position there. I always tried to acknowledge, at least, the elephants in the room. Whether it was the Olympics, or NFL football, or steroids in baseball, I always tried to do that. Sometimes I was able to. Sometimes it wouldn’t afford me those opportunities. But I thought, as best I could, even if it was only parenthetical, I would have to acknowledge those things and put it out there for the audience.
So if I were still hosting the Olympics — and I’m glad I’m not, not just because of the Beijing situation but because I did a dozen of them. I had planned, two Olympics before, that 2016 in Rio would be my last Olympics. It’s only coincidental that a pandemic affected Tokyo and now these political issues are affecting Beijing.
But if I were still there, I would try as best as I could, as skillfully as I could, because you’re not trying to stir the pot. You’ve got friends and colleagues there, and who knows what the Chinese might do to make their lives difficult or uncomfortable. But I would try, as skillfully as I could, that we did not turn a blind eye to that very large elephant in the room.
I concur that in a better world, free countries would refuse to participate in an Olympics games hosted by a government that is committing genocide; they would gather in a country with a non-genocidal government and host the “Free Nations Championship” or whatever they wanted to call it. And in that better world, NBC would choose to broadcast the competition of free nations, instead of bringing the images the Chinese government wants the world to see to American televisions.
But I don’t think we can be surprised that NBC isn’t willing to lose a billion dollar investment in broadcasting this year’s Olympics. And in light of Costas’ comment that “you’ve got friends and colleagues there, and who knows what the Chinese might do to make their lives difficult or uncomfortable,” maybe NBC has concluded it is safer to have as few of their staffers on Chinese soil as possible.