The lede from the AP’s story about what happened last night is unbeatable: “The gold medalist said she felt empty. The silver medalist pledged never to skate again. The favorite left in tears without saying a word.”
Congratulations to Russia, which took first, second, and fourth places in women’s figure-skating while turning the competition into a sh*tshow so repellent that sportswriters were using terms like “child abuse” afterward to describe what went down.
“NBC’s primetime coverage of the Beijing Winter Olympics averaged 7.87 million viewers on Monday,” reports Sports Media Watch, “8.70 million on Tuesday and an all-time low 6.93 million on Wednesday[.]”
To put that 6.93 million number into perspective, 7.4 million tuned in to the cable TV show Yellowstone last November. That wasn’t even the season finale. That was the fourth episode of the fourth season.
… Basically, the car and the boy’s apartment — worth millions of dollars — is simply an example of money laundering taking place in the open in Vancouver. It’s such a prevalent tactic, particularly for the ruling governing elite in China, it’s got a name — the “Vancouver Model.”
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan addressed the British Parliament, expressing optimism about the “global campaign for democracy now gathering force.” Less than a decade later, the Soviet Union collapsed. After that, it was widely believed that authoritarianism was in decline and that the community of free nations was bound to grow and prosper.
That belief was incorrect. These days we monitor what political scientist Larry Diamond dubbed the “democratic recession.”
When truckers took over Canada’s capital, Ottawa, and shut down border entry points to America, some called it a “nationwide insurrection.” Mass demonstrations have occurred across the democratic world. People have had enough of two years of mandates and other disease-control measures.
Not so in the world’s most populous state, which maintains the world’s strictest COVID-19 controls. There are no known popular protests in the People’s Republic of China against anti-coronavirus efforts.
Yet China is not stable, and Xi Jinping is facing his “End of Days,” as a recent essay by opposition figures (see below) puts it. The revolt is not in society at large but at the top of the Communist Party. As Gregory Copley, president of the International Strategic Studies Association, told Gatestone, Xi Jinping, China’s mighty-looking leader, has an “enormous array of domestic enemies.”
A recent analysis of YouTube search results found that users looking for videos relating to the Genocide Games are being bombarded with Chinese propaganda videos.
NBC has publicly addressed its low-rated broadcast of the Genocide Games, with a senior network executive describing the situation as “difficult” while blaming the pandemic for the low level of enthusiasm.
Canadian ambivalence over Beijing 2022 seems to be playing out in TV viewership for the Games, with CBC posting initial ratings that are down sharply from previous Winter Olympics and even last summer’s Tokyo Games.
Primetime viewership on CBC for the first six days of events in Beijing is down 22 per cent from Tokyo, and off a whopping 48 per cent from the Pyeongchang Winter Games, according to figures provided Friday to The Globe and Mail by CBC.
… One advertising buyer told The Globe the ratings were about 25-per-cent lower than projections the CBC’s sales department had provided to the industry in advance of the Games, raising the possibility the public broadcaster may have to compensate marketers for failing to reach its expected audience.
Go Incognito
It’s been a tough couple of years for Americans, what with COVID-19, rising crime, record inflation, and a marble-mouthed grifter with dementia wandering about the White House. There certainly hasn’t been much to be happy about.
Even things that used to give us joy, like watching the Olympics and rooting hard for the U.S. of A., no longer do.
Olympics sponsor Coca-Cola has remained silent on the topic of human rights abuses by the Chinese government even as it boosts left-wing political causes in the United States while pursuing business in China.
Coca-Cola, based in Atlanta and a member of the Olympic Partner program, has refused to specifically condemn the Chinese Communist Party’s treatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority group and others, but it has supported the Black Lives Matter movement while attacking Republican-led Georgia’s election laws and anti-abortion proposals. The company has teamed up with the International Olympic Committee and a massive Chinese company to promote the Beijing Winter Games.
Studio slavishness to the CCP was for nothing
Filmmakers often end up as propagandists. Hollywood’s biggest directors went to the front lines, cinematically speaking, during the Second World War. Luminaries like Frank Capra, John Ford and John Huston made Why We Fight films to rally a war-weary nation. The series was so effective that Franklin Roosevelt thought they were “dangerous”. Movies were another way of making war.
NBC’s Tuesday night telecast of the Beijing Winter Olympics drew catastrophic ratings with a -59 percent plunge compared to the 2018 PyeongChang Games, reports Sports Media Watch.
(AP) — NBC’s Mike Tirico began Friday’s Winter Olympics opening ceremony by saying, “just over six months ago in Tokyo, we said we were about to embark on an Olympics unlike any other. Now we’re about to top that.”
In the case of ratings, though, topping that has meant producing record lows.
