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NBC's insane tape delay plan
My question for the day concerns television and stupidity: Is there still time for NBC, the network of the 2000 Olympics, to change its insane plan of presenting the Games from Sydney almost exclusively on prime-time tape delay? There's a month and a half to go. Can't someone in charge say, "Hey, wow, what were we thinking about?" I don't care how much NBC paid for the rights to televise the Olympics and I don't care what is the proper business model for recouping that money. All I know is that the Olympics are news, not some heap of raw material to be fashioned into some kind of ER drama. If you are a responsible news organization, you report the news when it happens. Under the NBC formula, if John F. Kennedy were shot in the morning in Dealey Plaza, we wouldn't hear about it until eight o'clock at night, time enough for the network to put together that little bio on Lee Harvey Oswald and the computer drawing of the Texas Schoolbook Depository. Ridiculous. A tape-delayed sports event is no sports event at all. It is a show. There is no reason to root, fidget, cross your fingers, if everything already has happened. It is sad that most of the rest of the world, including the most downtrodden of nations, will watch the Olympic feed, see the Games as they really are. And we, the leaders in so many technological areas, the leader in television, will receive this packaged pap. This is censorship of the first order -- the censorship of the marketplace. Isn't there time to change it? Sports Illustrated senior writer Leigh Montville appears regularly on CNN/Sports Illustrated. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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