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‘Who Are We to Criticize’: Olympics Media Coverage Treats China with Kid Gloves

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Activists protest against the 2022 Winter Olympics, in Jakarta, Indonesia, January 4, 2022. (Willy Kurniawan/Reuters)

Much of the coverage treats the Uyghur genocide as the subject of ‘allegations’ leveled by the U.S. rather than as well-established fact.

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Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we take a look at the media’s failure to strongly reject China’s human-rights abuses, highlight a distasteful Washington Post column, and hit more media misses.

Media Fail to Rise to the Moment on Beijing Olympics

While the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations recently declared that the Beijing Winter Olympics are not “business as usual” because “we know that a genocide has been committed there,” much of the mainstream media seem to have missed the memo.

The media have gone to work peddling their same-old “both sides” journalism, giving undue credibility to China’s denials over its human rights abuses.

On Friday, China selected Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a cross-country skier who China says has Uyghur roots, to deliver the flame to the Olympic cauldron to kick-start the Games at the close of the opening ceremony in Beijing — a move that U.N. ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said was intended to “distract us from the real issue at hand that Uyghurs are being tortured.”

However, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie had a different take on the decision when the network broadcast the ceremony on Friday:

“This moment is quite provocative. It’s a statement from the Chinese president Xi Jinping,” said Guthrie. “It is an in-your-face response to those Western nations, including the U.S., who have called this Chinese treatment of [Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang] genocide and diplomatically boycotted these games.”

NBC broadcasters drew attention to Chinese human-rights abuses during the 2022 Winter Olympics opening ceremony on Friday, but took a both-sides approach, casting the Uyghur genocide and other atrocities as the subject of “allegations” leveled by the U.S. rather than as well-established facts.

Guthrie noted that “some have said there’s a cloud over these Olympics, that China has come under fire globally because of policies and practices.”

She noted the U.S. is undertaking a diplomatic boycott of the Games because of human rights, “in particular China’s treatment of the minority Uyghur population in the Xinjiang region” which she said the U.S. “has come right out” and labeled a “genocide.”

ESPN offered a platform to sports pundit J. A. Adande on Friday who claimed it is hypocritical for Americans to focus on China’s human-rights abuses during the Olympics in light of Republican “assaults on voting rights” and racial injustices in the U.S.

During an appearance on Around The Horn, Adande, a former writer for the network and the director of sports journalism at Northwestern University, said the U.S. should examine its own behavior and treatment of its people before attacking China.

“Who are we to criticize China’s human rights record when we have ongoing attacks by the agents of the state against unarmed citizens and we’ve got assaults on the voting rights of our people of color in various states in this country,” he said. “So in sports, I think it’s possible and it’s necessary more than ever to shut everything out if you are to enjoy the actual games themselves.”

He went on to add that it’s “very hard to find a country that isn’t problematic when it comes to human rights, including here.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times published an article lauding China’s “zero Covid” policy, which has included the implementation of strict lockdowns and other authoritarian measures. The paper pats China on the back for having “almost certainly” done a superb job handling the pandemic, even though it acknowledges that the country’s data on the pandemic — including having one of the lowest Covid-19 death rates in the world — “can be suspect” and is likely “artificially low.”

“China’s success at controlling Covid had turned into a public relations triumph for the regime,” journalists David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick wrote. “President Xi Jinping uses China’s management of the virus to bolster his global campaign for influence, arguing that China’s system of government works better than Western democracies do.”

Despite the failings of other mainstream media outlets, CNN’s Jake Tapper deserves credit for calling out China’s manipulative decision to have Yilamujiang deliver the Olympic flame and for blasting the “embarrassing double standard that the NBA and Hollywood, for example, regularly display when righteously calling out injustices here in the US while self-censoring about Chinese government atrocities.”

He goes on to call it “disgusting” how American corporations “ignore literal genocide and forced labor in the pursuit of Chinese cash.”

Headline Fail of the Week

Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan grossly used the death of her former colleague to slam podcaster Joe Rogan amid controversy over his comments on Covid-19 vaccination: “I’m disgusted by Joe Rogan’s weak apology. My former colleague’s death at 47 makes it worse.”

“Rogan’s non-apology made me furious,” she writes. “Probably because I’ve been spending a lot of time this week thinking about Miguel Rodriguez, a former colleague of mine, who died of covid last week.”

Sullivan writes of Rodriguez, who covered high school sports for the Buffalo News: “He was overweight and asthmatic; in other words, very much at risk. And he was unvaccinated.”

Rogan, it should be said, has repeatedly urged elderly and overweight individuals, and others at especially high risk of a severe outcome, to get vaccinated.

She adds: “I don’t know for sure whether getting vaccination and booster shots would have saved Miggy’s life. And I have no idea whether he had ever listened to Joe Rogan’s podcast, or what his precise reasons were for not being vaccinated.”

She concluded after talking to his co-workers and friends that he and his family hadn’t been convinced that vaccination was “wise or necessary.” Rodriguez’s father told Sullivan the family was “skeptical about the vaccine because it was so new.”

Media Misses

• Fox News tweeted about a comedian who collapsed on stage and fractured her skull “after declaring she’s triple vaxxed” creating the false impression that those two events are related in some way.

• Progressive ice cream brand Ben and Jerry’s once again waded into politics this week when it called on President Biden to “de-escalate tensions and work for peace rather than prepare for war” in regards to the conflict in Ukraine.

• CNN’s Bakari Sellers defended Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams after she was photographed unmasked in a room full of masked students:

• Appearing on Mona Charen’s podcast at the Bulwark, Bill Kristol declared that “the Ilya Shapiro tweet was offensive. It wasn’t just ill-worded,” referring to Ilya Shapiro’s criticism of President Joe Biden’s decision to consider only black women for the Supreme Court seat being vacated by Justice Stephen Breyer. Shapiro, whose tweets were misinterpreted to mean that black women as a whole represented “lesser” candidates, was placed on administrative leave by Georgetown Law after outcry from progressive journalists and groups.

“I don’t care what he says now,” continued Kristol, who added the half-hearted caveat that it “doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get a job.” Shapiro apologized for his wording last week and made his real meaning clear, but Kristol found conservatives’ defense of Shapiro more disturbing than the effort to destroy his reputation. One is left to wonder if a former version of Bill Kristol — one who stridently opposed affirmative action — would be so unforgiving with himself.

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