All the News that's Fit to be Tied

NBC does not want to broadcast the Olympic events when they happen. They save them until prime time, when it will be better for their ratings.

Once upon a very long time ago, perhaps when there was only one channel, we didn't know what happened anywhere except in the neighborhood, until the evening news. That time, like the day when the Tooth Fairy was born, never was, but it was easier to pretend.

NBC pretends that if they don't show us what happened until it gets dark in New York that nobody will know, and that all of us will have held our breath since breakfast in Vancouver.

In other parts of the world, avid sports fans stay up, or get up in the middle of the night, to see how their symbolic selves are doing.

It doesn't have to do with broadcast capability, or with available time. I saw daytime television once! The best program in daytime television is less exciting than watching sweepers during a curling match.

NBC is doing on a grand scale what local broadcasts do on a local scale; things such as: "The Vikings played the Saints in football today. We will have that for you on the 10:00 news, after we have covered the pothole situation."

A pox on the house of NBC, and of all the networks who would have done the same thing, had they paid for the privilege. Maybe they should not be given exclusive coverage. Maybe any news network that wants to report what is going on in the world, even the world of winter sports, should be allowed to show snippets of the Olympic events as they happen; let us say, up to ten minutes a snip, back to back, one after the other, until NBC decides it can show better footage, as it happens.

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