NBC and the Problematic Portrayal of the Russian Olympic Games

            In light of last week’s discussion of Russian portrayal in the media, I watched this year’s Olympic Opening Ceremony through a remarkably different lens.  Earlier in the day, before NBC’s airing, I heard on the radio that there were technical difficulties in the ceremony (the ring failing to open properly) that Russian television replaced with prerecorded segments of the show.  This news repeated online as well as on TV, as if the media were trying to say that Russian television was doing some grave injustice to the local people by not showing the ceremony in actuality.  This, I thought, was unfair – the show is, after all, on a tape delay for a reason, and if footage existed of the special effect as it was supposed to happen, the television producers were within their rights to air it. 

            This was on my mind as I watched the American coverage of the exact same ceremony.  Given the time difference between Sochi and New York, NBC had plenty of time to alter its footage any way it wanted.  And, apparently, it did – entire numbers and segments of important speeches were cut in totality from the ceremony.  I don’t know enough about Putin’s politics to comment on them in any depth, but it seems that Russia is trying to portray itself in a very particular way through this moment in the world spotlight.  The Los Angeles local news aired post-ceremony a segment that was cut from the broadcast – the Russian police choir singing Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” with great humor and talent.  That brief segment was vastly more interesting than the entirety of the ceremony as it aired on NBC, which made me wonder how else NBC was influencing audience perception of the games through its broadcast. 

            Today, an article surfaced on Huffington Post (here) that outlined some other elements of the original ceremony that were carefully subtracted from American broadcasts by NBC.  While I doubt that the American media actively works to cast Russia in a negative light, the Cold War perspective of the “communist enemy” pervades here as a kind of default.  The media plays on stereotypes that have existed in this country since the end of World War II of a relatively unknown foreign enemy, partly because this is what Americans have come to expect, and partly because journalists and broadcasters themselves expect the same thing.  They see what they want to see. 

As a final note, the Russian athletes themselves are perhaps most able to affect change in this stalemate of American ideology.  A brief interview with the Russian figure skating team is posted below, and while the aggressively patriotic (and pro-Putin) language comes off somewhat false, it serves as a positive moment in NBC’s otherwise problematic coverage of the Russian Olympic games.